rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

Wasn't entirely sure about the nomenclature, but oh well.

I'm working my way through this:

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1212/708077557_61f4c0c140.jpg

for the first time in about fifteen years. It's a little too much of that sort of thing at once for me, these days. I mean, there's been a few too many openings like this:

For Jeff Otis, fresh from a hop through space from the extra-bright star that was the other component of the binary system, the heat was enervating. The shorts and light shirt supplied him by the planet coordinator were soaked with perspiration. He mopped his forehead and turned to his host.

'Very nice job, Finchley,' he complimented.

Have that omnibus in its original three volume format, and I must have read them a dozen times each, but I have no idea which story that is from.

I'm reading Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. It's alright.

well, yes. exactly. xpost

Currently reading Roger Zelazny - Chronicles of Amber:

http://images.google.com/url?source=imgres&ct=img&q=http://tirpetz1.fortunecity.com/authorpages/zelazny/amber/1stchroniclesofamber.jpg&sa=X&ei=8jq5TcHxMsKahQfwzdH3Dg&ved=0CAQQ8wc&usg=AFQjCNEdLrIKOyrKVarAuRQotRisarrU0A

I'm on to the third book Sign of the Unicorn. Honestly, it is okay - I will probably stop after 5 which is the first chronicle, as I've heard books 5 - 10 aren't worth it. When I started it I thought it was kind of horrendous, but it found its stride more in the second novella (it is composed of short novellas rather than 1000+ page behemoths which is a plus point imo). Basically pulpy alternate world fantasy that is somewhat reminiscent of Michael Moorcock. Not convinced Zelazny uses the setting to its full potential though.

I'm also reading a lot of short fiction at the moment including the first Interzone Anthology from 1986 (which includes Angela Carter and JG Ballard and a lot of people pretending to be JG Ballard) and Songs of the Dying Earth (edited by Gardner Dozois), which as the title suggests is collection of tribute stories to Jack Vance set in the Dying Earth milieu. It is good but basically exactly what you would expect given the theme and setting.

Next on my list:

Chris Beckett - Holy Machine
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
Theodore Sturgeon - More than Human

I saw that Lauren Beukes won the Arthur C Clarke award for Zoo City - anyone read this? Thoughts?

Also has anyone read Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Cook_%28science_fiction_author%29 ? These sound awesome but are maybe a little hard to come by plus it isn't quite clear to me if they have to be read in order or not.

xp that may be but the collection still pretty much defined my idea of SF as a kid. There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a strong Twilight Zone vibe to a lot of the stories. Here's my top nine, all unfuckwithable imo, the Ballard in particular is my favourite short story ever written, full stop.

Track 12 by J G Ballard
The End of Summer by Algis Budrys
MS Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie by C M Kornbluth
The Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley
Common Time by James Blish
The Tunnel Under the World by Frederik Pohl
The Country of the Kind by Damon Knight
Build Up Logically by Howard Schoenfeld
The Snowball Effect by Katherine MacLean

More and more I think I just don't get Ballard.

I reread those Zelazny books last month. I wrote about them on my lolblog, even — http://timocraticyouth.tumblr.com/post/4398398741/trumps-of-doooooooooooooom — they're still kind of fun, though I think the fun runs out in book five. I think what you say about using the setting to its full potential is pretty apt: apart from the quick run back to Earth there's very little with the various shadows etc. after book two, which you kind of wonder if it's worth it. And the stuff using that in book five is kind of plainly padding.

I also read the second five for the first time: they're not awful, I think, although like a lot of post-70s Zelazny they're kind of careerist, schticky. The first five I think are at least nine-tenths planned in advance; the second five it's more like 40-60%, I think; they just sort of end. Also there's a paucity of imagination in terms of the whole chaos-order thing, i.e. the houses of Chaos turn out to be basically the same as Amber except they have I don't know scales and shit.

I found with the second Amber series that there were some interesting ideas (like the whole way the main character's magic stuff worked), but the plotting was very poor over the whole run of books. I really got the impression that he was basically making it all up as he went along and hoping it came together.

That's certainly the impression I'm getting.

I'm reading Zoo City at the moment, about 1/3 in. It's like a cross between The Amber Spyglass and a Bruce Sterling or somf... very readable, so far not shaking my worldview.

The guy who did the cover won the BSFA art award too, so it's been a good week for Lauren's publishers!

The rejigged best-of Aldiss collection's pretty good--includes stuff from the years since the original publications

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0141188928.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Nice to see it getting respect as a Penguin Modern Classic--these books were pretty formative for a lot of us, I suspect

RIP Joanna Russ...

shit. really?

Fraid so. Series of strokes - she was 74 - she had a DNR in place.

RIP
I have a copy of Female Man I've been meaning to read for awhile now.

Me too. Now must be the time.

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/0e/f3/cddd810ae7a0d4c46c869110.L.jpg

best bathroom book ever (sorry ladies)

Wait, you think ladies don't read short short science fiction? Or Asimov's collections? Or that we don't read in the bathroom? I don't know what I'm supposed to be upset about here.

On second thoughts nvm, I'm not a 'lady'.

I didn't know what that meant either! I kind of am a lady, probably.

(Thomp I had no idea you had a blog! I am delighted at this news.)

I think he means he is going to blow out the bathroom while reading that book

Any rec'd sites with entire sf stories posted? They don't have to be downloads, but they do gotta be free (of charge, at least).

I like Richard Kadrey's micro-stories here
http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shortshorts/kadrey1.html

Loads of stuff here:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/index.htm

Ok so I got myself a copy of Zoo City in the end. If anyone is interested, there is a deal on at the publisher's bookstore:

1. Go to angryrobotstore.com
2. Choose 2+ titles.
3. Stick "clarke11" in as the promotion code et voila 50% off.

Only epub unfortunately, but you can use Calibre to convert it into mobi for your Kindle.

I had a bad experience with Calibre (possibly not Calibre's fault but I have no intention of reinstalling it to find out) - can anyone recommend any other epub->mobi conversion software?

Oops, I thought this was the Kindle thread. I'll ask on the Kindle thread. Sorry for off-topic.

Calibre is garbage tbh, slow and clunky with a horrible interface, but I think it is just about the only game in town at the moment.

Any rec'd sites with entire sf stories posted? They don't have to be downloads, but they do gotta be free (of charge, at least).

― dow, Sunday, May 1, 2011 6:15 PM (Yesterday)

that's the one i was trying to remember.

i also found this a few weeks ago: http://www.manybooks.net/categories/SFC . and judging by the covers on a lot of those i'm guessing there's an Astounding Science Fiction pulp archive out there somewhere.

possibly here: http://www.freesfonline.de/Magazines.html (including 22 from greg egan)

gp i am v flattered but i generally forget it exists all the time so y'know

has anyone else read the new robert v.s. ridick yet

Of course for short fiction dont' forget Strange Horizons (although it is a bit slipstreamey), http://www.strangehorizons.com/

I have finished The Book of the Long Sun, and am done with Gene Wolfe. Although there is still (barely) an itch of curiousity that wants me to read Urth of the New Sun and even the Long Sun series, I will no longer following him down his difficult road; I know his style, and his agenda, and neither are for me. Neil Gaiman says he is of the class of writer who "who see no need to point out how clever they are" - I thoroughly disagree, his text wears its mystery on its face, it fairly taunts you with the idea that it is a puzzle, and therefore there is a solution.

I'm sure it can be appreciated just on the surface level, although it's not a style that I particularly enjoy; I'm sure the puzzles could be fun to solve, if you are that way inclined; I'm sure even the ultimate solution may be a wonder to some, but it is anathema to me.

I suddenly wonder if Richard Kelly is a Gene Wolfe fan... or how many New Sun fans also love Donnie Darko.

Take that Gene Wolfe. I was just about to start The Book of the New Sun too :(

20 pages into Perdido Street Station and I can't face the remaining 800, should I?

Love New Sun, hate Donnie Darko. If you are taking a poll or anything.

Too cold a comparison, huh? Maybe it's cause I was reading a New Sun wiki. A special kind of madness there, naturally, but not one entirely in the minds of its creators, it is born in and sustained by the text.

This is not really a spoiler, but... if someone had told me Wolfe was Catholic - as CS Lewis was Anglican - I probably would never have started.

re: Perdido, I would say it starts as it means to go on.

Yeah i like Perdido but it you're not digging the ambulatory Cacti and so on at this point i'd cut your losses.

Thanks for all the links! I do enjoy the dark profusion of Wolfe's surfaces, although,after the New Sun saga, Soldier In The Mist was where I got off of his (and everybody's) fantasy series bus. Also like freestanding Wolfe, such as Peace and The Death of Doctor Island and Other Stories. If I paid more attention to his agenda, I might not like it. (Liked Donnie Darko alright too.)

That Isaac Asimov edited book of short short stories above is one of the greatest things ever.

SF Masterworks series, classic or dud? I have a few already, and I guess it's good that this stuff is being published, but I just refrained from buying Greg Bear's Eon as I don't want all my bookshelves to look the same.

Rendezvous with Rama, which i've just finished, was an SF Masterworks. was toying with posting the start of chapter 11, about breasts in space, but i will spare you as it's not 1973 anymore.

Great selection, terrible covers. The new designs are slightly better than the first time round but it's sad because they had the chance to do something classy with the design considering these are acknowledged classics.

SF Masterworks: the new sort of yellowy covers are awful. The old ones weren't so bad - at least they retained the original artwork in most cases afaik. I also don't want my bookshelves looking the same, so tend to get alternatives from different publishers wherever possible. A bit lame I guess...

Shame you didn't get on with Book of the New Sun, ledge. I think it is fair to say that if you didn't enjoy that you won't like Book of the Long Sun or the Latro series which are the other fantasy series of his I have read. However, Fifth Head of Cerberus might be worth a look - SF novel, although its really 3 short linked novellas. I've read one of his short story collections as well, Endangered Species. It was pretty good as far as I remember - mix of SF, Fantasy, slipstream, regular fiction.

the gollancz sf masterworks? the core list is probably alright. in the previous cladding they'd reached no. 60- or 70-odd so it was a bit obviously just whatever they had the rights for. i doubt there aren't copies of old paperbacks of any of them available for shipping only on amazon, only, though, and do you really care enough that you have to have a mint copy of flowers for algernon?

i just ordered a tad williams novel, oy.

i did indeed order a second hand copy of Gateway today, again to avoid the masterworks cover.

Yeah I just get whatever is cheapest tbh - normally though for almost everything there are cheaper second-hand versions available from older publishers. It isn't really about getting mint copies of stuff, it is more about not having an entire bookshelf with the same slightly crappy design.

My version of Gateway is this one:

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n0/n2017.jpg

...which is almost identical to the masterworks version but without all the branding stuff.

Actually I guess the artwork is the same, but the font, title etc is different.

I kind of like the text treatment there but it does not go with that artwork at all but oh well.

I've been reading this copy of Thomas M. Disch's 334, which is about life in housing complexes in Manhattan:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5229/5608710985_013d006421.jpg

^now that is a nice cover.

Although yeah it presumably is in no way to do with the contents.

That's the edition of Gateway I have too. One of those rare Boris Vallejo paintings without well-oiled pulchritude.

Think Disch mentions that cover in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of

One of those rare Boris Vallejo paintings without well-oiled pulchritude

I just did a GIS to see what you meant by this and er, really wish I hadn't...

hahaha, sorry if it came as a shock...you're not familiar with his work/rep?

I was definitely aware of the style (probably from one too many D&D sourcebooks) just not familiar with the guy's name.

has anyone else read the new robert v.s. ridick yet

i have it on order but probably wont get it for a few weeks...

the most annoying thing to me atm is that adrian tchiachovosky's 'the sea watch' isnt getting distributed outside of britain. ive gotten p fond of that series.

Great selection, terrible covers. The new designs are slightly better than the first time round

Are you kidding? The new cover all look as though they've been dipped in urine!

free book: Science Made Stupid, which won a Hugo for non-fiction

http://www.chrispennello.com/tweller/

lamp r u still at the same address

currently reading 'emphyrio' by jack vance and absolutely loving it. what else should i read by him plz thx

lamp r u still at the same address

no i moved awhile back. did you ever get that copy of novels in three lines?

currently reading 'emphyrio' by jack vance and absolutely loving it. what else should i read by him plz thx

Tales of the Dying Earth -- collection of novels and stories - wonderful, rich, inventive, crazy stuff; set in the far, far, far future, where the dying human civilisations that are left are surrounded by all this ancient high-tech stuff that seems like, and as used as though it is, magical. The ultimate SF/fantasy hybrid novel.

not novel, book, argh

Tales of the Dying Earth

Seconded.

Has anyone read Lyonesse? Worth checking out?

I finished the first five books of the Chronicles of Amber - sadly it didn't improve after my initial impressions. The plotting just seemed very off the cuff and I never really got a grasp on the motivations of the characters.

Almost finished the first Interzone Anthology (from 1986, so predictably the subject matter in most of the stories is either nuclear war or Ronald Reagan or both) and then I think I'm going to have a go at Zoo City.

Finished Gateway. Three out of five at best. Like a lot of books of the same era, it's very much more concerned with the inside of its characters' heads than with amazing and mysterious alien technologies and the vast wonders of the universe, and that's not really what I want from hard SF. The chapters with the roboshrink were an ok device for moving the story forward, until they really did become horribly freudian. There was virtually no sense of mindbogglingly vast and inhuman distances or timescales, and the alien tech was either so ineffable as to lack any intrigue or ultimately really rather mundane - some shiny metal and some automatic shuttles, big whoop.

Sorry ledge, I prolly should know this, but what would you recommend for a science fiction read? I'm up for something, and if there's some mindbogglingly vast and inhuman distances or timescales to be had, well then, I'm there.

Shame you didn't enjoy Gateway, ledge. It is easily in my top 5, maybe top 3 SF novels. I saw it as an antidote to stuff like Rendezvous with Rama where the dull protagonists who are essentially analogues for the author spend an entire novel masturbating furiously over some supposed "wonder of the universe" and it isn't clear why you should care. In contrast, imo Pohl gives equal weight to the characters and the macguffin, has an interesting twist on the genre (i.e. a hard sf novel where no one in the story actually understands the science and in fact aren't really interested in the science just the loot), and the whole thing is superbly well-paced, plotted, etc. Oh and I like how the little notes and "documents" scattered throughout the novel are a nice way of getting round some of the problems of infodumps. I would agree with you that the "robo-shrink" stuff feels kind of dated these days, but I think it is worth it in terms of pacing of the narrative and as a means of exploring Robinette's character.

I really liked Rama - obviously I'm a robot who care more about things than about people :)

xp to Gamaliel, Alastair Reynolds is my go-to guy for all that: The Revelation Space series (the planetbound Chasm City excepted); Pushing Ice is a good standalone place to start; and the Zima Blue collection has Beyond the Aquila Rift which is an obvious riff on Gateway, and despite its short length, absolutely breathtaking in scope. It also has a couple of his Merlin stories which are great Banks-style new space opera turned up to 11.

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson pushes the 'vast and inhuman distances and timescales' thing to the point of parody, but it's a heck of a ride.

Am always after more recommendations meself, I got The New Space Opera anthology, which was fun enough but didn't really point me in the way of anything new, except Robert Reed, maybe, might give this a go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrow_(novel)

I really liked Rama - obviously I'm a robot who care more about things than about people :)

lol - I really enjoyed Rama as well. I was exaggerating a bit to make my point and Rama was the first hard sf novel with a comparable central macguffin that came to mind. Sorry Arthur!

I can see we are going to disagree a lot though - I think Alastair Reynolds is a total hack lol. Admittedly though I did enjoy both "Zima Blue" and "Beyond the Aquila Rift" (yes, with the latter it was totally because it put me in mind of Gateway), so I think I might have to give him another go.

Tau Zero has been on my list for a while.

Iain M Banks is my go to guy for 'vast and inhuman distances and timescales' but I'm guessing everyone on this thread is pretty familiar with that stuff already.

I recently read Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep, which I didn't love personally, but might tick some of these boxes.

I think you would like Tau Zero, it's hard science and people centred - again in the somewhat quaint pop psychology way so beloved of 60s/70s SF authors.

I have a colossal Fire Upon the Deep/Deepness in the Sky two-in-one volume sitting on my shelves, a huge tome, brooding at me, throwing off waves of discouragement. Fear Me! It seems to toll. I Will Be A Massive Slog!

btw two nitpicks about Gateway - first of all he says 15% of Gateway flights don't come back, then later on they see a ticker saying 2355 launches, 841 returns. So that's more like a 70% failure rate, we've gone from russian roulette to a worse than evens chance of survival.

Then SPOILER the ending SPOILER: presumably for the escape to work one ship has to be pointing into the black hole, and one pointing away? How does it work that everyone crowds into the doomed ship and he gets 'trapped' in the one which survives?

To answer the first point I would guess it is that 2355 launches is all the launches that have been made; 841 returns is the number who have come back; but then there are going to be a % who have launched and not yet come back, but that doesn't mean that they aren't going to come back at some point - they may only just have been launched after all. Don't ask me how they then calculate the 15% thing - presumably there is a cutoff point where they write-off crews.

I would have to read the ending again to answer the second question - I'm guessing that perhaps the orientation of the landers had shifted as they were hustling to get everything across. I remember there is some ambiguity as to whether Robinette pushed the launch button on his lander or the others did or they both did it at the same and maybe the unspecified order of how things happened would have changed the outcome. Or it might have something to do with the properties of black holes in such close proximity. I confess though this isn't the kind of thing I tend to notice as a reader.

Cheers ledge. I must admit I've always been a bit scared of Al Reynolds' stuff. Have been meaning to read some for years (he was on a forum I was on back in the late '90s), but the hard tech plus length is a bit intimidating. Shall give it a go tho. Maybe some summer reading.

just picked up Jack Williamson's "The Legion of Space" from a car boot, looks pretty old and funky. anyone read it?

also Arther C Clarke, "Earthlight". Although not too keen on Clarkes stuff, for 25 pence i couldn't resist.

did you ever get that copy of novels in three lines?

i never did. canada's postal service seems to not work

oh well. email me yr new address, i'll send you the adrian .. tthingmy book

Glad I stuck with Perdido Street Station, there were probably too many ideas jostling around in there but I've never quite read anything like it (maybe because I gave up on Gormenghast after 20 pages).

Other recent reads :
M. John Harrison - The Centauri Device
Barrington J. Bayley - The Grand Wheel

Both crazy existential pulp sf, hampered only slightly by terrible writing. Not that bad writing is usually a problem for me in this genre, but Bayley pushes it a bit sometimes.
Next up is Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside, will it be worth my while?

I know Harrison has pretty much disowned Centauri Device, and complains online whenever it gets reprinted

Dying Inside is fucking awesome. The ultimate Jewish-male-with-fading-potency novel (see P. Roth, S. bellow, etc), but with telepathy as the power, rather than erections.

Anyone read Harrison's Light?

Yes Light is awesome - been a while since I read it though so can't be more specific. Really great writer, who I wish I had read more of - get's a little bit forgotten I think.

I enjoyed Centauri Device myself, but if you didn't don't let it put you off as I think he matured into one of the best prose stylists SF has to offer.

Dying Inside - I enjoyed this as well but I read it like 6 years ago. I remember thinking that some of the drug stuff in it felt dated, perhaps inevitably, and I think it had a bit of that of-its-time psychoanalytical type stuff that ledge complained about in Gateway. That was just my lingering impression and I might be way off beam though.

Silverberg is an interesting writer because he was one of these guys who started out as the pulpiest of pulp writers in the 40s/50s, but then found a new lease of life when New Wave came along.

And then sadly, in the late 1980s and onwards, he became a writer of professional, competent and ultra-dull stuff. But his 60s/0s stuff is full of gems.

Anyone read Harrison's Light?

I didn't like it. Found it cartoonish and dishonest.

i disliked 'nova swing', which was connected in some way; never saw 'light' cheap enough to take a shot at it

not sure i'd want to rep for anything bar the viriconium books: which i need to reread rather badly, i fear.

tad williams is pissing me off.

Anyone read Harrison's Light?

yeah but i like his science-fantasy sword and sorcery stuff a lot better. the pastel city rules

Finished Gateway. Three out of five at best.

I must disagree... reading it recently I thought it heading for being the best thing ever. I liked a lot of the things you did not like - the convincing and fully realised characters for one thing, and the confusing and mysterious nature of the alien technology for another.

In other Dirty Vicar disagreement news, I disagree with everyone who dislikes the design of the Gollancz SF Masterworks books.

Did anyone else read The Wind-Up Girl w/in the last few years? It turned up on our shelves recently and it was...really different, different dystopian/climate-fucked future vision with specific speculative conditions & details that I don't recall anyone else ever tackling. Verrrrrry interesting.

(spam)

8)

(i've just wishlisted it. thanks)

The Wind-Up Girl - yes I read this about 2 months ago. Very, very good debut. Imaginative, great world, convincing speculation, non-cliched take on a potentially overdone subject (climate change). I think what led it down slightly was that some of the central characters were more interesting and fully developed than others (e.g. the US Calorie Man was incredibly underwritten and seemed to act as a cypher to allow the author to explore the setting more than anything) and the plot was a bit meh.

But yeah very excited to see where Bacigalupi goes next.

Agreed, the plotting was off, and certain strands didn't get picked up fully or were written out too quickly when they had to be sacrificed to bring things to a close. I'd say there's room for a sequel except I don't know if Bacigalupi would even be interested, or if he wants to go in a whole new direction.

If you are interested in the world, there are a couple of short stories that pre-dated the novel in the same setting, although I've only read one "The Calorie Man". I think one is about Hock Seng's backstory (he was best character imo).

He released another novel Ship Breaker but it is a YA thing so I think I'll give it a miss and from wiki it looks like there is another novel slated for this year The Alchemist (with J.K. Drummond - who s/he?).

OH MY GOD I'M AN IDIOT SHIP BREAKER IS ONE OF MINE

And it is glorious.

Ok maybe I will check it out then...

Not "mine" rly but "ours". I try to be oblique about that stuff on teh innernets so I can pan a book if I want to w/o being traceable.

I've just started "Foundation and Empire" for SF book club. It seems a bit more thrill powered than Foundation itself, which is nice.

That series just gets worse and worse.

mmm, I had heard otherwise, at least with regards to F&E and 2F.

A bit into F&E, though, I would have to say that it still has the problem that the Foundation people are all really smarmy. I always find myself rooting for the people they defeat.

Sorry that was a bit dismissive, but I just couldn't get on with it. I only read the first three, not all the sequels, prequels, etc. I hated the concept of psychohistory. I hated that Seldon's plan was basically unquestioned and there seemed to be no moral dimension. I hated the idea of elite cadres of technocrats as the only hope for the galaxy etc etc. It just hasn't dated well on the whole.

I read the original trilogy and a couple of the sequels and the prequel when I was younger. I re-read the original series again last year and thought it was mediocre - not well written and pretty dry. From what I remember the prequel is more fun to read but a bit dumb and the sequels just try and shoehorn the Foundation and Robot universes together.

Guardian Review is an SF special today

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/guardianreview <- main page link will probably change
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/13/iain-banks-science-fiction-genre
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-interviews

and this is to tie in with the upcoming British Library Science Fiction exhibition, Out Of This World, which opens on the 20th until Sept

a few details here
http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/outofthisworld/outofthisworld.html

That's added a few to my to-read list. The current list in full:

City by Simak
Light by Harrison ... or maybe not, the blurb did a good job of putting me off.
The Stars My Destination by Bester
The City and The Stars by Clarke
Solaris by Lem
Redemption Ark by Reynolds
... and something by Octavia Butler.

Am curious as to exactly what non-SF SF books Banks thinks he's referring to in his somewhat absurd and condescending piece.

Light has got three storylines, ledge, they alternate chapters, so if you don't like one you might like the other two.

(i have the Bester if you'd like a lend, ledge. also have Redemption Ark but that's too heavy to lug around)

The City And The Stars was my favourite Clarke when I was a kid, if that counts for anything.

Just finished Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside, the self-hatred gets a bit much at times but I suppose that's the point. Can anyone recommend any more SF with a contemporary setting (contemporary to the time it was written anyway) that doesn't involve any world-changing events occurring? SF with an interior slant I guess. Maybe there's some obvious candidates but I'm not thinking of them.

James Tiptree Jr short story anthology is on the way, I'll dip into it next week probably.

tad williams could write a whole other novel about how not to pace a novel

haha

which series are you reading? they all have terrible structure but memory, sorrow & thorn is probably the best

(i have the Bester if you'd like a lend, ledge. also have Redemption Ark but that's too heavy to lug around)

chz, but i've *cough* obtained *cough* ebooks of both of these ;)

lamp it is those! i think they have a lot of merit in various things so far but i kind of lost all hope when i was about 200pp in the second one and realised that the main characters were p much going to spend the entire novel going from point a to point b. so now i am taking a lot longer to read it.

i've always wanted to write a short story about a drug designer living in a future where drugs are legal because it's the only way the entertainment business can make any money anymore. maybe based on peter saville, somebody highly influential, but not really so much part of the mainstream and getting on a bit. has something similar been done before? must have.

problem is, i can't write for shit and my grammar's gone down the pan since uni.

@ thomp yeah its something common to all his series ive read - they build up decent momentum but he really has a hard time creating small but exciting moments in his stories - theres lots of pointless rehashing of old arguments while walking :/

that said theres some stuff in the middle books that love, & he has a lot of str8 up cool ideas, like i read them & tht 'thats really cool'.

also simon taking several hundred pages to realise he is having prophetic dreams

also i am assuming that prester john's sword is the sword that is missing? people are taking a long time to work that out too

-

xpost

see the last chunk of the first book was really well constructed, so i thought he'd got the hang of it? but i guess not. i can but hope the third one is all-action

Write it anyway max, nobody can write for shit without practicing.

enjoyed MS&T but yeah it is a bit 'stuff happens' throughout

what a rubbish criticism but you know

Can anyone recommend any more SF with a contemporary setting (contemporary to the time it was written anyway) that doesn't involve any world-changing events occurring? SF with an interior slant I guess. Maybe there's some obvious candidates but I'm not thinking of them.

John Wyndham's 'Chocky' comes to mind--small kid's mind is invaded by consciousness of friendly, advanced alien; his dad tries to work out wehat's going on and makes contact

I suspect Iain Banks is referring to people like Atwood, Paul Theroux (who wrote an atrocious SF novel called O-Zone) and so forth

Can anyone recommend any more SF with a contemporary setting (contemporary to the time it was written anyway) that doesn't involve any world-changing events occurring? SF with an interior slant I guess. Maybe there's some obvious candidates but I'm not thinking of them.

Theodore Sturgeon, esp. More Than Human.

Pattern Recognition maybe. haven't finished it.

Yeah, that and Spook Country fit. I haven't read the 3rd part of the trilogy yet.

I suspect Iain Banks is referring to people like Atwood, Paul Theroux (who wrote an atrocious SF novel called O-Zone) and so forth

O-Zone does sound pretty bad. Have never read any Atwood but I thought she had more cachet among the SF community (she has won an Arthur C Clarke award after all), although her snobbish claims that she writes speculative not science fiction won her no friends I'm sure.

Banks may also mean Ishiguro and his book about body harvest clone people. I also heard that that guy who wrote Devil In A Blue Dress wrote some dreadful SF book set in San Francisco.

Can anyone recommend any more SF with a contemporary setting (contemporary to the time it was written anyway) that doesn't involve any world-changing events occurring? SF with an interior slant I guess. Maybe there's some obvious candidates but I'm not thinking of them.

Flowers for Algernon?

Lots of Ray Bradbury stuff would fit that model as well.

Aldiss' Report on Probability A, no question.

Thread has convinced me to have a mostly SF summer, mainly to get on with the 25 or so paperbacks I have collected but not gotten round to.

tell us what they are, xyzzzz

i also have made a point of picking up any cheap science fiction, from 'classic' authors i recognise, over the fast few years - and consequently now have towering heaps of unread, possibly never to be read, pbks in the spare room. i love the covers, as much as anything. i went on this splurge after reading The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, which i thought was stunning... but i've not read any SF novel since that's as subtle or clever.

anyway, i have been enjoying this thread, and learning from it.

Have you read other Le Guin?

Her 'The Lathe of Heaven' is also excellent, plus of course 'The Left Hand of Darkness'. And 'The Word for World is Forest' is also pretty clever, if a little dated now

i read A Wizard of Earthsea recently. is this the origin of the "wizard school" trope? everything in the book felt familiar (partly because i'm too old for it).

'Left Hand' is excellent; it's no less subtle than 'Dispossessed' but I found the politics in the latter a little dry, the adventure in the former more gripping. I love every single Earthsea book; the first one is probably more 'for kids' than the rest, I'd at least give 'The Tombs of Atuan' a go as well. I know they're not the most acclaimed, but I love the last two, where after a long break she suddenly returns to Earthsea and examines it under a whole new light.

As for other subtle, clever SF: Stanislaw Lem's 'His Master's Voice' is very philosophical - also scientific, psychological, sociological, political - and with a very mature kind of world-weary pessimism.

In other news, a FEMALE CHARACTER has just appeared in Foundation and Empire.

^oh yeah this was another issue I had with the series...

goddamn female characters. It was going great and then he had to ruin it.

damn right ;)

On the covers of The Dispossessed.

nice - spanish cover is missing though, here it is:

http://www.scyla.com/biblioteca/751.jpg

i've recently finished the stars my destination (pretty hokey plot and character wise, but admirable world-building given its era), and the cyberiad (moderately amusing very inventive fairy tales for adults).

oh, and harrison's pastel city. slight, but not unpleasant, some memorable images, doing the same kind of 'post technological culture = fantasy' thing as the book of the new sun, but without all the arsing about with CLUES to an IMPORTANT TRUTH, or the wilful obscurantism.

Intending to give Wolfe another try myself but I know what ledge means.

Liked this from The Dispossessed link

And, finally, the original cover illustration. Like the first three covers, this cover could shill most Asimov-era science fiction -- it's got the planets, the diagonals, the orange nimbus. Some cover illustrator, somewhere, painted a hell of a lot of orange nimbuses in the '60s and '70s. I hope they sent their kids to college on those nimbuses.

"tell us what they are, xyzzzz"

'The Dispossessed' and 'Left hand of Darkness' are among them!

Finally picked up the Centenary Edition of the Complete Chronicles of Conan with the black cover today.

Now do I plunge straight into this or finish Zoo City first? The latter isn't really what I expected - for some reason I thought it was a cyberpunk thing, but it is more urban fantasy noir, which isn't what I was looking for tbh. Maybe it is a symptom of having to read it in bitesize chunks out of necessity or just because it has a noirish plot, but I have barely any idea what is happening in the story. It just won't stay with me for some reason. Every time I pick it up I can't remember what the hell is supposed to be going on. I am 75%+ of the way through though and I don't like to leave a book unfinished...

I can't count the number of half finished books i have staring at me accusingly from my shelves

Speaking of which - Aegypt by John Crowley. Got two-thirds of the way through and until the realisation hit me that the Giordano Bruno magic theme was being overwhelmed by the tedious divorce theme and that I was bored as hell. Or should I finish?

No spoilers please, for those of us who have a pile of unread John Crowley books, virtual or otherwise.

Oh, sorry - I'll keep mum.

@ GR: No. I finished the first two Aegypt cycle books, and realized I had gotten nothing, nothing at all from them. The plodding, atmospheric, New Yorker story scholastic parts only grow more prominent while the potential for magical-ness recedes into a deeper and deeper shade, and the characters grow more depressed and inert.

Love Crowley, but if it's not working for you after two books, I'd give up - one of those voices that gets to you or, just doesn't. If there was another Aegypt book to come, I'd be waiting for it.

Thanks Soukesian, and yes, that's pretty much what happened to me as well, remy. Still want to read Engine Summer tho.

Little, Big is probably his best. Without getting into spoilers, on finishing Aegypt I felt there were more than a few loose ends, but I was OK about it because, well, life's like that.

Appreciate that must really irritate the fuck out of people. For me, it feels like hanging out with a genial old hippie with a lot of interesting tales to tell. Which, admittedly, may not all entirely match up or reach a clear point. Following a tightly constructed story arc or any of that stuff? Well, maybe, maybe not. As I say, you like his voice or you don't.

Oh, and if you like the Giordano Bruno subplot, you should definitely read Frances Yates' book on him - absolutely fascinating writer.

Yeah she's amazing. I'd read The Art of Memory and her other book on him, and that kind of meant that strand was slightly less powerful than it might otherwise have been I guess. It kept on making me want to go back to her marvellous books. I was all for Dr Dee and the scrying glass, ascension through the spheres stuff. I was punching the air at that opening scene.

Thanks for the Little Big suggestion tho. I can feel a summer reading list coming on.

So I did persevere and finish off Zoo City. I really couldn't get into it unfortunately. It was well-written on a sentence/scene level, but the plot was all over the place and the attempts to capture some sort of youth zeitgeist I found to be incredibly excruciating (e.g. the following sentence: "But it's not rust. It's not rust at all. Perversely, the thought that flashes through my brain is 'I can haz murder weapon?'"). Not my thing at all.

That sounds like the kind of thing that will be amazingly dated in a couple of years time.

I am still thnking of reading Zoo City just so can be in with the young people.

cheezburger network really isn't 'youth zeitgeist' at this point

i am still reading tad williams! the third one is, so far, a lot better than the second

at the end of the first novel the central character has escaped some form of peril and wound up with the eskimo dwarf dudes who inform him "you may leave but your companions will stay FOREVER". they resolve this. they then find out they have to go to The Stone Of Farewell, which is the title of the novel. in another chapter the secondary main character finds out his bunch of people also have to go to the title of the novel. it dawns on the reader that they are going to take 800 pages just to go to point a from point b.

so the main character and companions resolve things with eskimo dwarf types. on the way they burn a hundred pages by finding brief sanctuary with some woman w/r/t which i. tad williams really starts letting his woman-hating creep show through at this point (and he'd been doing okay!) as ii. she starts with the "you are such a pretty thing why don't you stay FOREVER"

anyway blah blah action escape, main character wanders around lost in the woods for a bit, calls for help from elves, is taken to elf city by happening sexy young elves, only to find the elf elders react to this by saying "you are the first human to be allowed into the elf city in aeons and now you will stay FOREVER"

f u tad williams

cheezburger network really isn't 'youth zeitgeist' at this point

Agreed. Which is why a sentence like that has no place in any novel anywhere, particularly when it is used by a character who is supposed to be a trendy meme-wise internet scammer.

That sounds like the kind of thing that will be amazingly dated in a couple of years time.

Yep. There are all these horrible moments when they end up in various nightclubs and listen to made-up musical genres and artists. At another point these kids are playing Grand Theft Auto 5: Zootopia and it is just eugh, shut up, shut up, shut up.

Speculation on short-term pop cultural trends never, ever, works in SF. Ever. (Please recommend me something that proves me wrong though).

pattern recognition wasn't awful iirc

there was a charles stross novel about mmorpgs which had some potential but then wet itself

ok so had the person been killed by an anthropomorphic cat-person or

thomp: Williams' Otherland >>>>>>>>>>>>> his fantasy trilogy; also from what I remember there is a distinct lack of woman-hating in it

reading The R-Master by Gordon R. Dickson. a page-turner! don't know if i've ever actually read one of his novels before.

got some great hardcover SF the other day. and lots of paperbacks too. hardcover stuff i want to get to:

poul anderson - 7 conquests (story collection)

a bunch of terry carr Universe collections

poul anderson - mirkieim

a bunch of damon knight Orbit collections

john brunner - the jagged orbit

c.j. cherryh - the faded sun: kesrith (can't remember if i'm a fan or not of cherryh? kinda thinking what i've read reminded me of le guin and all the characters in her books have names like tsi'mri and shon'ai.)

the best of henry kuttner (don't think i even know who henry kuttner is. old-school dude. intro by bradbury.)

james blish - cities in flight

clifford d. simak - ring around the sun

gordon r. dickson - time storm (think i started this once and never finished it.)

burt cole - the funco file (don't even know if this is strictly SF. looks pynchonian actually. from 1969.)

poul anderson - twilight world

john brunner - total eclipse

poul anderson - the day of their return

burt cole - the funco file

I've never known anyone else who's read that.

is it good? it looks cool.

It's been a long time. It was inconsistent in being lighthearted and funny, with sudden unexpected chunks of emotional intensity and violence. Pynchon or the more whimsical Vonnegut may have been his model, but it was as if a serious-as-your-life James Jones took over the narration at intervals. I also remember that it didn't really end, just stopped. It gave a peculiar sort of pleasure. I filed it away as a curiosity. My suggestion is to read it on summer days.

Apparently the author's real name was Thomas Dixon, and he was born in 1930. I always want to write such people letters if they are still around.

They're making a movie based on Beyond Apollo!

the best of henry kuttner (don't think i even know who henry kuttner is. old-school dude. intro by bradbury.)

Does it have 'Fury' in it? That's the only Kuttner I've read. Surprisingly effective one-track-mind story about a guy determined to wipe out an alien species

I finally got round to reading issue 23 of Apex Magazine yesterday http://www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online/ . Good mixture of dark fantasy, horror, fairy tale, slipstream, magic realism type stuff. I particularly enjoyed "Biba Jibun" by Eugie Foster, a modern fairy tale set in Japan, and "Button Bin" by Mike Allen, a very dark Ligotti-ish horror story.

I've been a subscriber for a few months (12 issues for $10, although I think you can read most if not all of the issues online if you wait a month) and I've enjoyed most of the issues so far, even if it is sometimes a little slight and I'm not really into the speculative poetry. Generally, it's 3 short stories and 2 pieces of speculative poetry.

Online subscription magazines are one of the reasons I got my Kindle and they seem to suit the format pretty well. Does anyone else have any recommendations as far as short fiction magazines go (online or print), particularly ones that are more straight-up science fiction?

Print-wise as I'm in the UK, I'm already very familiar with Interzone (keep meaning to get a subscription), but I would be interested to hear thoughts on the big US ones like Analog (if it is it still called this?), if any are worth reading these days.

As far as online mags go, Lightspeed Magazine has tempted me: anyone read this? Thoughts?

Forgot to add in the link to Lightspeed: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/

IMBanks' Surface Detail is out in paperback. amazon says tomorrow but i saw it in smiths this morning.

I just started reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. I read Rainbow's End a few years ago and loved it, so I'm pretty excited. I'm already fascinated/obsessed with the Tines.

I remember practically nothing about A Fire Upon the Deep other than I read it in college and absolutely loved it.

Evil supercomputer and Medieval dog civilization.

The dogs are the only thing i remember. They were cool though.

It's got dogs in? Damn I'm there.

dan i can't tell if i would like otherland or not, it looks like it could be a fun romp i guess? but if it's as slapdash in construction as ms&t is it will probably annoy me

it seems like he has tried to write a trilogy three times, and each time it has ended up four books. that is not encouraging in terms of whether his others will be less of a mess.

anyway i think i'm done with this sort of thing for a bit maybe? & if not i have steven erikson's 4th & 5th hanging around and i should read them so i can get rid of them before i move house, i think

tbh Otherland is the polar opposite of a "fun romp"; that is part of what makes it so great

i think otherland generally shares the same structural problems that ms&t & his shadow/e series suffer from it has an interesting premise & strong, mostly well drawn characters but meanders a bit too much in the middle stages. i remember feeling like he was stalling w/ a couple of the middle books either because he wasnt quite sure how to end it or he just had too many ideas for worlds he didnt want to throw out but he def ran a couple of the plotlines too long

I don't disagree with that, but I do think he is better working in a SF milieu rather than fantasy; the core idea is much stronger in Otherland and that carried me through the lulls much easier than what was going on in MS&T and Shadow*

yeah otherland feels more prescient the more time passes but its also a p big commitment

I warmed to Foundation and Empire by the time it ended... I liked some of the SFnal touches and found the Mule character interesting, even if the closing twist was something that I could see coming a mile off (partly because Asimov prefigures it heavily).

finished 'to green angel tower: storm' earlier. i think i read about 600 pages of it today. at one point my gf started reading it over my shoulder and went "my god, this is tripe"

"baby you're not here to think"

ew

the sentence that led to that opinion was something like "The Thrithings-woman lay back, her hair a shining black curtain upon the pillow"

was a little sad to note tad's prose go downhill throughout. not massively + not like he had a huge height to fall but. the first volume is free of elegant variation, and mostly avoids melodramatic FEELINGS stuff. they go downhill

the third was pretty well plotted though. a lot of the pieces that fell into place at the end it was obvious that they were going to but obvious in a chunky and satisfying way. not that there wasn't a lot of slack. i mean he somehow thought it was necessary to feature the series' third and fourth chapters of 'someone walks around in the dark'. but it wasn't a whole novel of slack. also i was worried there were going to be ~400 pages of simon and miriamele walking about and being pissy and there weren't; those bits were pretty painful but he got through them quickly enough.

what i remember most about the last book was that simon's climb up the sorceror's tower was in turns genuinely unsettling & the 'color' for a really cool ad&d adventure for characters level 12-15

reading one of those Orbit collections (this one from 1972) and it is waaaaay uneven as far as talent goes and more then half the writers in the book i've never heard of, and so far what this collection has done is make me want to seek out more gene wolfe and more frederik pohl. so that's a good thing. i'm still a relative newbie when it comes to sci-fi and i'm definitely more interested in the 50s/60s/70s roots rock then stuff being written now. but i'll get to now later. i promise.

Yeah, aside from a few quality collections like the Aldiss omnibus, the strike rate of yer basic anthology is very poor.

the novelty of the universe and orbit yearly collections was that nothing was a reprint. all original material.

i've read some really great best of the year collections though. there were some really great years! with other collections it does depend on the editor/compiler. aldiss was good at it.

i read a recent-ish - for me anyway. it probably came out in the 90's. - collection of space opera/adventure yarns that was REALLY good. completely entertaining. and a lot of the writers were new to me. i should try and find it. i can't remember the title. almost every story was a hoot. and the stories were newer too. not old old stuff.

The Gardner Dozois-edited yearly collections are usually pretty good: I find them to be at least half full of great stuff, and if you buy the el-cheapo UK editions that's pretty good value for money

I only have #3 of James Gunn's "Road to Science Fiction" anthology series, but it's so good I'd like to find the others.

Yeah that looks like a decent selection, albeit with a few old perennials on the anthology circuit. Will look out for Gardner Dozois, and for Scott's, if he remembers the name :)

Oh, "The New Space Opera" I got recently, that was Gardner Dozois, and yeah it was prety decent.

The Gardner Dozois-edited yearly collections are usually pretty good: I find them to be at least half full of great stuff, and if you buy the el-cheapo UK editions that's pretty good value for money

Yeah, I've asked for the latest Mammoth Book of Best New SF for the past few birthdays/Christmases and have been fairly pleased with them: always fairly solid at least, and usually a couple of stories that set me tracking down more by the authors.

(And usually at least one story so horrible and unnecessary that I swear off the author for life, but hey, that's a useful service too, and maybe you'll love the ones I hate.)

My only peeve is that I once came close to picking up one I already had in a charity shop because it had a different cover, but I can only find one cover for that volume on the internet, so unless it was a trade edition I'm beginning to think I imagined it.

No, I think you didn't imagine it: a number of them were repackaged with "classic" style artwork (ie bug-eyed monsters, retro rocketships, etc) and given slightly different titles (ie the Mammoth Book of Amazing SF, etc) and flogged off on the overseas remainder market--I've got a few of them, and they don't show up on Amazon, etc.

found it. and it is one of the dozois volumes. there are two volumes. the good old stuff and the good new stuff. i've only read the new one:

http://www.amazon.com/Good-New-Stuff-Adventure-Tradition/dp/0312198906/ref=pd_sim_b_1

did i already talk about how much i loved *four ways to forgiveness* by Le Guin on here? i might have. i still think about that book. i never wanted it to end. gotta read more of her hainish books.

reading steven erikson's fourth novel, 'house of chains'. this one i feel like i can't even risk reading in the same room as the gf to be honest

She struggled, then her head snapped back, eyes suddenly wild.

Karsa laughed, throwing her down on the bed.

Animal sounds came from her mouth, her long-fingered hands snatching up at him as he moved over her.

The female clawed at him, her back arching in desperate need.

She was unconscious before he was done, and when he drew away there was blood between them. She would live, he knew. Blood-oil was impatient with broken flesh.

Jesus Christ.

Referring to women as "females" like that is one of my biggest literary pet peeves.

I had considered spelling out what would count as "horrible and unnecessary" in my previous post about short story collections, but now I don't need to, because that is exactly the sort of thing I meant.

i was confused and thought you were talking about steve erickson the american writer but i googled and i'm okay now. the canadian guy's real name according to wiki is STEVE RUNE LUNDIN and i don't get why he didn't keep that for his books cuz it kinda has an epic flair. and its funny that stephen r. donaldson is such a big fan of the canadian guy cuz i was just looking at some of the old covenant paperbacks the other day and marveling that i actually read them when i was a kid. (i don't read too much fantasy stuff)

Jesus Christ.

Referring to women as "females" like that is one of my biggest literary pet peeves.

anyway, i'm reading this now. did you know that me and rich corben share a birthday?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zNw9VE7Y3Hc/TBFIxXBT1MI/AAAAAAAADW4/X4PJp77QOIw/s1600/fredricBrown.jpg

Aw! Huggggggzzzzzzz xoxoxoxox

I'd like to point out, not as a defense but as a clarification, that the tone of the 3rd party narrator in Erikson's books shifts to match the point of view character, so it's not like the entire book is all "ungh ungh rape the females" 24/7, nor is that (IMO) necessarily intended to be a value-neutral presentation of what is happening in that scene. Karsa is kind of a heroic figure, but he's also a massively brutal caveman asshole.

i thought about trying to be fair about the context but then i didn't bother

really enjoying the brown book. do i need to read ben bova? got something called the exiles trilogy in paperback at the store. 3booksinone. maybe i'll just read it. how bad could it be?

so that brown story "arena". star trek ripped that off for that famous lizard-man episode, no?

okay yeah of course it was. just checked wiki.

Yep.

I don't have much time for "Arena". Ok it's not quite the kind of story that could be set in any time or place, nevertheless it's basically an unilluminating tale of mano-a-mano combat, with a non-thrilling attempt to up the stakes and the sci-fi element provided by some blue sand, the least inspired alien ever, and a highly evolved ultra-intelligent ineffable non-corporeal entity, who is a bit of a dick.

A propos of nothing but I am so over sex scenes involving A Magic Penis. Even in books and stories that otherwise give every indication of being written for women, the sex is always always just a lead-up to penetration leading to orgasm for both participants, always.

its funny that until i started reading sci-fi 3 or 4 years ago i never really read books with much sex in them at all. and sci-fi can certainly contain some weirdness about sex/the sexes. to put it mildly. nerds are kinda weird about sex in general. hey, speaking of rich corben, i've been a fan since i was a kid, but i can't even begin to explain his obsessions.

i don't read sword/sorcery/fantasy stuff and i'd imagine that's where a lot of the worst offenders are in the realm of magic wand lit.

Fredric Brown is pretty great. Have you read' What Mad Universe', about a guy trapped in a parallel universe which runs according to all the 'rules' of pulp SF? I have a feeling we might have talked about it elsewhere on ILB, but I'm too tired to find it

Yeah, we are always talking about WMU. What about his detective stuff? The Fabulous Clipjoint, The Screaming Mimi, etc.I keep meaning to read it but never have.

I've read a couple of Fredric Brown pulp crime novels, had no idea he wrote sf too! The Screaming Mimi is pretty great as I recall it, not quite in Charles Willeford territory but worth a read for sure.

there used to be a bar called screaming mimi's in new york. there may still be. it's where all the just-off-the-boat college grads would gather for frenzied flirting.

wait a minute i'm getting confused now. screaming mimi's is apparently a fashion boutique. what am i think of?? gah, old.

A propos of nothing but I am so over sex scenes involving A Magic Penis. Even in books and stories that otherwise give every indication of being written for women, the sex is always always just a lead-up to penetration leading to orgasm for both participants, always.

So OTM. Looking at you, Charlaine Harris...

yeah i really liked what mad universe. and we have talked about it on here. i would definitely like to read some of his crime novels. never see them.

The Fabulous Clipjoint is pretty cool.

Just finished two SF novels:

Dan Abnett - Embedded - British author more famous for comics and licensed 40k fiction. This came out recently. Part of my ongoing quest to find some military SF that is at all comparable to Forever War. This isn't it unfortunately. An action-packed plot about a war correspondent whose conciousness literally gets embedded remotely into the brain of a frontline soldier. If anything it is a little too frantic - characters are developed and then inexplicably jettisoned; the narrative relies on a hackneyed Cold War paradigm; and the big reveal at the end is a bit meh and probably entirely predictable if you were paying more attention than I was. Not awful, fine if you want an easy read, but far from great.

Chris Beckett - Holy Machine - another British author. This came out in 2003 and I have had it hanging around for a while. I hated it at first. It has all the hallmarks of a debut novelist fnding his feet - cliched and barely credible speculation, simplistic philosophical concepts, bland description and characterisation. And yet, despite all that, somehow by the end it had grown on me. The matter of fact tone of the narrative, whether intended or not, actually succeeds in conveying a horrific, dreamlike quality that works well with the subject matter. Fair to say overall this is fairly average, but I will probably check out more of his writing in the future.

Currently I'm alternating between the Complete Chronicles of Conan and Songs of the Dying Earth, a mammoth collection of stories set in Jack Vance's Dying Earth milieu. The former is fantastic pulp writing (but I'm sure you knew that), provided you can look past Robert E. Howard's dodgy views on race, women etc; the latter, I've been reading since about February on and off and it ranges from excellent to decent, but basically if you have any interest in the Dying Earth stories at all, then there will be something for you here.

Finished Redemption Ark. Found it a little bit... silly, or annoying, or something. Hope I haven't burned out on teh new space opera. Think my major bones of contention were a) messages from THE FUTURE; and ii) typical Reynolds characters - everyone's a hard-boiled arsehole, and all the intrigue and plotting and power struggles are just office politics writ large.

It was not all bad though, got enough of a kick out of it to want to see the series to the end.

Read the first 10 pages or so of Rendezvous With Rama today, but I just can't deal with Clarke's flaccid writing style any more. Pedantic, flat and frankly boring, which is a shame as he was my favourite writer when I was a kid.

yeah, ppl had bigged up rama on ilx before so i gave it a go a little while ago and it was SO BORING - page after page of tedious description, some of the most cardboard characters/dialogue you'll ever read, and just a huge sense of anticlimax throughout - scientists explore empty spaceship thing for 300 pages YAWN. i do remember enjoying childhood's end many years ago, but i'm in no hurry to revisit that now.

am abt 100 pages into frank herbert's dune, which i've never read before. funnily enough, my copy has a powerblurb from clarke on the back, comparing it to lord of the rings (which had always put me off, before.) anyway, dune is great fun so far, the writing is kind of an odd mixture of the terrible and the strange, the poetic and the clunkily expository - i don't think i'[d realised before just how pulply this book is, with its boohiss baddies who 'mince' across mock medieval interiors while plotting against archrivals. the combination of 'hard' science fiction and standard fantasy tropes seems quite clever and herbert is v good on texture and detail - he's an impressive world builder, if nothing else.

i liked rama. was very science-led though - cylindrical spaceship's gonna need some gravity which means spinning. which means any water in it will for a toroidal mass. but wait, it'll be in deep space so that'll be frozen... etc.

> empty spaceship

it wasn't empty

read Rama recently, agree about Clarke but I half enjoyed this one.
Also Earthlight, again liked this one too

picked up Peter Hamiltons Dreaming Void and Bank's Algebraist from car boot recently, a steal but am dubious about Void (too much mind sci fi for my liking). Will give it a go though, quite enjoyed Hamiltons commonwealth saga.

but just started reading Naked Sun. It's the only robot book from asimov I've yet to read.

do i need to read ben bova? got something called the exiles trilogy in paperback at the store. 3booksinone. maybe i'll just read it. how bad could it be?

possibly one of the first sci fi books i read when i was a kid. a cool art teacher (who was amazingly good at sci fi art) died near where we lived. a friend of the family and somehow we got hold of all his old books. This was the one I managed to pick up.

Although being as young as i was i could never pick up the book without giggling at the authors name everytime.

i may have mentioned before how much i despise hamilton...

I had a quick snoop at the British Library SF exhibition yesterday... it looks very inspirational. I think the exhibition guide would make a good overview of the form.

some friends of mine in town have started a sci-fi book club! i'm not much of a joiner, but i might join in for this. first book is a canticle for leibowitz - which i still have never read - with discussion and drinks at a local watering hole in july.

i definitely enjoy the drinks part. every book club should include drinks.

and i think i am gonna read that ben bova trilogy. looks entertaining.

'BEND' 'OVER'
HAHAHAHA

"I had a quick snoop at the British Library SF exhibition yesterday"

I thought this was fantastic. So many great covers.

some friends of mine in town have started a sci-fi book club!

Our SF book club (run by Dublin Public Libraries) is total awesomeness. Our current book is "I Am Legend", and we have been promised "The Man In The High Castle", "A Scanner Darkly", and "The Island of Doctor Moreau" to follow.

every book club should include drinks.

wise words.

Off topic but i see you were quoted in the Entertainment Weekly piece on fan reaction to the last Game of Thrones episode, Dirty Vicar. Internet famous!

surely not, Number None? I don't think I have ever said anything anywhere about the Game of Thrones. Or have I?

I am looking at Entertainment Weekly now... do they just summarise every episode in an over-literal manner?

Guess you're not the Dirty Vicar on twitter then?

nope, have not yet been assimilated to Twitter. A bit annoying to hear that the Dirty Vicar name has been nabbed already, as I bet has my real name and every possible other name I might want to pick.

Xpost: oh wait, this is their recap rather than review I am looking at.

Well, a tweet by whoever stole your name was quoted in a piece about negative fan reaction to the latest episode. I just assume every moniker on the internet is unique

James Tiptree Jr aka Alice Sheldon is my new favourite sf writer, although supposedly her novels weren't great. But the short story collection I've been reading (Her Smoke Rose Up Forever) contains some astonishing pieces. Don't think there's too many sf writers who write in the present tense much either, it creates a pretty strange atmosphere.

That book is terrific, especially the Arkham House edition with Klimt cover and Clute intro. Bought the bio but haven't read it yet

started on Algebraist and just couldn't get into it so for now decided to read hitchhikers guide, need some comic relief sci fi.

I have just started I AM LEGEND. I was particularly creeped out by all the vampire zombie ladies trying to lure the hero out of his house for sexy time.

Yes, the power of his masculine appeal is so strong, even undead wimmenz can feel it.

I just finished Theodore Sturgeon's 'More than Human' - I really enjoyed it, just what I was looking for after a run of very mediocre SF novels. Surprised to find out afterwards that it was published in 1953. Definitely a precursor to New Wave. The story revolves around the emergence of a new type of human, a 'gestalt' symbiotically linked organism, consisting of several ordinary humans with different psychic abilities. It's a fixup novel I believe and the first two stories are the best - it loses steam in the concluding section, but generally very well-written, very unusual take on the 'next-stage-of-evolution' type story (probably hackneyed implausible concept now, but the execution is good enough to get round it - I can imagine it must have felt extremely radical for SF in 1953).

Yeah, I remember liking the story a lot better than the novel version.

i have almost finished that steven erickson novel. oy.

i almost bought a copy of 'rogue moon' this morning, decided to wait until the next time the bookstall guy was at the market, now regret this decision

rogue moon is ridiculous.

I can't think of any Sturgeon I wouldn't recommend 100%.

i read rogue moon as alastair reynolds mentioned it in an interview. there is a good story in there (split personalities, exploration of alien artefact), but there's a lot of guff around it, yes.

I can't think of any Sturgeon I wouldn't recommend 100%.

― Mr. Patrick Batman (WmC), Thursday, June 23, 2011 12:44 PM (33 minutes ago)

Just reread Rendezvous With Rama for the first time in probably 25 years (after first giving up on it last week). The plot & scenario are really compelling, but Clarke really couldn't create an interesting human character, eh. I suppose you don't need to when you have THE CYLINDRICAL SEA and BIOTS etc but it'd be nice if they were a little less dull. I'm guessing the sequels are unreadable tosh?

Idk, I read the sequels so they can't be literally unreadable, on the other paw I don't remember anything about them.

Aw, come on, I really liked Rogue Moon!

Reynolds probably talked about it because he basically ripped it off (admitting as much in the story itself) in 'Diamond Dogs'

None other than M. John Harrison put Rogue Moon on his list of favorites so I imagine it can't be that bad. Can't even remember if I ever read it, been intending to (re)read it for a year

'Diamond Dogs' I remember being really great up until the total lack of an ending.

Looking forward to the new Reynolds actually (although i haven't read his latest yet). More optimistic apparently

just started reading the man who folded himself and the introduction suggests rama's non-characters were an intentional throwback to an earlier era of sf (it comes up because rama won the nebula/hugo awards over gerrold's book)

My problem with Rogue Moon is all the cod psychologising. I've no problem in theory with examining the detailed internal lives of characters - I love Henry James after all - but when your characters are all one dimensional caricature arseholes(*) and everything's viewed through a kind of bogus freudian filter, then no thanks. Honestly there were not a few points in it when people's motivations and actions made literally no sense to me.

(*) Connington is amoral and manipulative, openly testing Hawks and anyone else he meets for weaknesses. He takes Hawks to see Al Barker, an adventurer and thrill-seeker. Hawks also meets Claire Pack, a sociopath of a different kind. Where Connington covets power, and Barker seems to love death, Claire enjoys using sex, or the prospect of sex, to manipulate men.

i don't think diamond dogs is the only thing that AR's written that rogue moon has influenced. am thinking of the other alien structures with traps in them (the mazey sphere, the repeated paths thing in pushing ice). but these may be sf tropes, i don't think burgis invented them.

latest AR, Terminal World, disappointed me. reminded me of Dark Tower or Mad Max with balloons. needed (many) more spaceships.

next one is the first part of the 11 parter iirc.

not quite? according to you know who

In June 2009 Reynolds signed a new deal, worth £1 million, with his British publishers for ten books to be published over the next ten years.[5]
He is presently working on the first novel in a trilogy called Poseidon's Children (Previously know by Reynolds working title, the 11k series), a hard sf trilogy dealing with the expansion of the human species into the solar system and beyond, and the emergence of Africa as a spacefaring, technological super-state several centuries down the line over the next 11,000 years.[6] The first book will be titled Blue Remembered Earth, book 1 of Poseidon's Children.[7]

ah, there's the confusion right there:

"Previously know by Reynolds working title, the 11k series"

thank fuck though, no-one should ever have to read an 11-part series.

i'm hoping they're all going to be revelation space length 8)

and that i live long enough to read them all.

(only other decalogy i can think of was l ron hubbard)

i liked that ben bova book! the three book trilogy thing. properly epic and all. and sad. i definitely felt like i was on that damn ship with them for centuries. i like books like that. where you kinda can't believe where it ended up given where it started.

sounds like my kinda thing, will look out for it.

i just started this book. had to start somewhere with her! she's only written 34734837442424 books.

http://www.andre-norton.org/coverart_gallery/android_at_arms_1.jpg

http://www.andre-norton.org/coverart_gallery/android_at_arms_2.jpg

i love pictures of andre norton.

http://cdn3.iofferphoto.com/img/item/172/736/495/X24XBq8dGE5osKS.jpg

http://i3.squidoocdn.com/resize/squidoo_images/-1/draft_lens2152220module11280018photo_1220293661AndreNorton-lady04.jpg

huh, i think she taught me second grade

I read "I Am Legend" (or "I AM TEH LEGEND") by Richard Matheson over the weekend. It is really gripping. Some may say, of course, that it is not SF.

in other news, loving the Andre Norton pictures. I would have enjoyed her books even more if I had known what she and her cats look like.

I also love the Andre Norton pics.

More AH than SF, but I finished Kingsley Amis' The Alteration recently and enjoyed it greatly. I'm wondering if I should seek out The Anti-Death League or even New Maps of Hell or the Spectrum anthologies he edited (probably out of print at this stage)?

New Maps is very interesting, but obviously about 60 years out of date. His fantasy novel, 'The Green Man', is bloody good, too. Haven't read The Anti-Death League. He did another SF novel, Russian Hide and Seek, about a USSR-invaded UK, which I also haven't read, but is meant to be good.

i liked 'new maps', but remember not a lot about it: its fannishness, its enthusiasm. not sure what its actual arguments were.

I'm finding "The Snail On The Slope" bu Boris & Arkady Strugatsky slightly hard going, it's written in this pedantic kind of style that just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe because it's in translation? I get the same feeling from Stanislaw Lem sometimes. Could be that translators aren't really writers themselves so don't know how to make it flow.

Speaking of which, are there popular SF or fantasy writers from non-English speaking countries? Not counting Murakami, Kafka etc who only edge onto the genre occasionally. Pretty much all the major names I can think of are native English speakers, it seems weird there aren't more global names.

Been reading Lem's 'Memoirs Found in a Bathtub' and you could say it is his own reading of Kafka. Brill!

Many translators are writers, or if they are not they are steeped in literature, or seem v 'literary' (yes those quotes again)

The latest Big Thing is the chap who wrote The Quantum Thief, who is Finnish, but he writes in English

The Anti-Death League is not at all science-fiction iirc but very good. (Has an amazing threatening poem from God written in the style of an omnipotent and illiterate schoolyard sadist or bully). The Green Man is, as JM says, marvellous. Russian Hide-and-Seek is risible. I'm not sure whether it's as bad as many say, because I remember thinking some parts were quite good - savoured of It Happened Here slightly I think, but it's all a bit weird and not really in a good way, in a way that sails close to very bad in fact.

I thought there had been a thread on foreign language sci-fi, but I must have been thinking of this, which is fairly brief:
Is there a German analogue to Jules Verne & H.G. Wells?

I also ordered the Franz Rottensteiner-edited anthology of mainland European SF, "View From Another Shore", after reading James Redd's post on that thread, but have not read it yet. Also unread on my translations of foreign SF pile: "The Invention of Morel" by Adolfo Bioy Casares. I have no excuse for not having read this yet, it's only 100 pages long, if that! Comes with a glowing foreword by Borges too, which is as far as I've got.

Maybe someone who actually reads books instead of just buying them can recommend something.

I finished A Fire Upon the Deep and it was amazing. I've got A Deepness in the Sky queued up but first:

Connie Willis - To Say Nothing About the Dog. I'm about 3/4 through and I love it but I am a sucker for time travel stories set in Victorian England and that particular brand of madcap, everything goes hilariously wrong plot. I will surely circle back to read her other time travel books.

Then I'm taking a turn into spec fic land and reading the new Sookie book and then the new Gail Carriger. I should probably be a little ashamed of my love of those series but I am too thrilled at the prospect of spending a disgustingly hot three-day weekend in a dim, air conditioned apartment and wallowing in genre fiction to feel shame.

Also, Racialicious.com is doing an Octavia Butler bookclub, starting in July with Seed to Harvest - http://www.racialicious.com/2011/06/29/introducing-the-octavia-butler-book-club/. I think I'll use that as an excuse to read the OB books I haven't read yet.

Haha I have all the Carriger books and eagerly await them. Bite me, genre purists.

Connie Willis was one of my votes in the "all-time" poll for Doomsday Book, so full steam ahead there too!

I was hoping you would pipe up with some Carriger love! <3

They're getting a little stale, though, I think. The romance part was over with far too early, and the last book felt like hardly anything happened in it. Higher hopes for the next.

I liked the last one. Hot lesbian spy, rogue vampires, Alexia scorned by polite society. Good stuff. Plus they take about 6 hours to read so if there isn't a huge payoff, I don't feel like I've wasted too much time.

non-English sf: this thing looks cool but I haven't read it, either: http://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Latinos-Anthology-Science-Classics/dp/0819566349/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309531313&sr=1-1

i just got a paperback of soviet sci-fi short stories. bought 10 or 12 boxes of sci-fi/fantasy books for the store today.

Does that paperback have anything by Sever Gansovsky in it?

it does. a story called *a day of wrath*.

the best thing about these boxes of books, actually, is that they included the original screenplay for the movie CHUD and an early screenplay by Beth B. for the movie that would become Salvation starring Exene Cervanka under its original title The Manipulator.

also got a book that frederik pohl put out in 1986 called tales from the planet earth which is a novel in 19 interlocking stories by writers from different countries. don't know how good it is. writers:

u.s. - frederik pohl

china - ye yonglie

canada - spider robinson

brazil - andre carneiro

thailand - somtow sucharitkul

italy - lino aldani

czechoslovakia - joseph nesvadba

ireland - harry harrison

australia - a. bertram chandler

norway - jon bing

bulgaria - ljuben dilov

england - brian w. aldiss

uruguay - carlos m. federici

poland - janusz a. zajdel

sweden - sam j. lundwall

china - tong enzheng

west germany - karl michael armer

japan - tetsu yano

maybe emailing frederik pohl would be the way to go if you want good tips on international sci-fi. i'd email him pretty fast though...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Frederik_Pohl_Eaton_2008-05-17.png

"hey, you kids, get off my space lawn!"

http://www.locusmag.com/2009/Issue01_Pohl_260x337.jpg

sorry, that wasn't nice. he deserves a good space cat shot.

http://www.nndb.com/people/728/000023659/pohl-1.jpg

scott, is that soviet scifi one the edited by Theodore Sturgeon one? because that's pretty good, from memory

Think that one is called Path into the Unknown and is not the Sturgeon one

Sturgeon one seems to have been New Soviet Science Fiction. But I guess we'd better wait for Scott

"Think that one is called Path into the Unknown and is not the Sturgeon one"

yes. this. is the one i have. looks cool. i'm gonna read it.

i really liked that andre norton book i just finished. what a trip. i really just want to take a trip. i don't travel much. don't know what i'll read next. thought i might go on a van vogt spree cuz i got a ton of his paperbacks. was looking at frank herbert's the white plague. might read that. got a couple of PDKs i haven't read. eye in the sky and the crack in space. um, what else? chocky by john wyndham. still want to read that. oh and i'm gonna read the drought by ballard. i've hardly read any of this books. the universe is my oyster when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy. so much i haven't read. its fun!

'the loving dead' is maybe a little less literary than i had been led to believe

first sentence:

"The Sun had set by the time kate left the belly dance class."

eye in the sky and the crack in space both pretty terrible as I remember.
I have a Pohl / Kornbluth novel on the way from ebay, think I'll read that and give up on Lanark for the time being.

thought i might go on a van vogt spree cuz i got a ton of his paperbacks.

the one book of his I read was perhaps the worst novel I have ever encountered, but maybe one of us was having an off day.

was looking at frank herbert's the white plague.

I gather this is one of those things that is entertainingly awful, though it's full depths are only appreciated if you have any actual familiarity with Ireland.

i love the van vogt wiki page cuz its filled with quotes from people who loved him and people who hated him. i mean he was obviously very influential to a lot of young writers (like PDK) cuz he was one of the pioneers who let his ideas run rampant instead of just following the script, but critics tend to cringe mightily at how sloppy he could be. i dunno, i can handle sloppy if the ideas are cool. and i want to give all the old dudes their due.

At the same time, in his fiction, van Vogt was consistently sympathetic to absolute monarchy as a form of government.[8] This was the case, for instance, in the Weapon Shop series

ORLY?

lol dv we'll never make a critic of you with that forgiving an outlook

Every once in a while try to read van Vogt, but still can't get past the bad writing- Lovecraft he ain't. But if luminaries such as Philip K. Dick, M. John Harrison and Tracer Hand all like him, maybe I need to keep trying. In the introduction to The World of Null-A, van Vogt claims that his work was originally met with universal acclaim, except for one lone hatchet-wielder with a reputation to make, Damon Knight.

its kinda like reading a crazy person sometimes. van vogt. in a good way.

Eye in the Sky feels like a short story idea extended into a novel that he couldn't be arsed to complete. entertaining enough tho.

Just finished reading Karen Miller's follow-ups to the Innocent Mage books, The Prodigal Mage and The Reluctant Mage; she is kind of a sadistic writer!

just had the first two patrick rothfuss books delivered to my kindle by my lil bro, something to look fwd to.

Re-reading of the wheel of time has progressed to bk 11, but that's another thread.

Dan, you slogged through those?? Christ, well done.

i liked rothfuss but on reflection they may not be very good

xp No, wait, that series is a bit trying but the GODSPEAKER trilogy is the truly sadistic material.

i liked rothfuss but on reflection they may not be very good

― remy bean, Monday, 11 July 2011 16:10 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah this is sort of how i felt about it

you can remotely gift people kindle books? i hadn't realised that + it is kind of exciting

how long do i have before i find myself inevitably reading george r.r. martin again

She (Miller) is possibly the most annoying dialog writer I've ever encountered and the ending of The Reluctant Mage was a little pat given the hell the characters went through to get there, but they were a diverting enough read. I kind of wish she could reliably find that third dimension on her characters, though.

enjoyable but not v good

vs

v good but not enjoyable

let's be honest here, in a sf reader's poll the former slays

re: kindle, i just got an email with a link to confirm acceptance. AWES

how long do i have before i find myself inevitably reading george r.r. martin again

i. i somewhat reluctantly preordered the new book last week

ii. i feel like you can sympathize with this but i HATE the fact that were getting another cover design revamp in whats only a 5 book series!

iii. i still havent got around to reading the final robert v.s. reddick book have you?

ii. i feel like you can sympathize with this but i HATE the fact that were getting another cover design revamp in whats only a 5 book series!

It's okay with me though because the covers have been ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE so far?

yeah but the newest cover design is THE WORST YET at least the stupid gradient background ones looked ok shelved next to each other!

otoh watching the covers progress from like 'cheesy fantasy art of knights' to 'design-by-committee' to 'now its a tv show' to 'jamespatterson_template.ai' has been p lol

xp

english hardback matches the current paperbacks. in fact i'm not sure they ever changed them, here. they're kind of shitty, though. oh, there's a new paperback of the first one, obviously. with sean bean on it, sitting on the throne. which seems odd, actually, when you think about it. i guess he couldn't be doing something that wasn't throne-related. for the tv viewers who aren't smart enough to be reading george r.r. martin already.

oh god it comes out tomorrow

errr i thought i had posted about the redick on here already! but it appears i have not. hum

Even more lollerskates, do you have any idea how often JPatt series get redesigned??? The MAXIMUM RIDE series is on at least cover concept #3 and it's just a trilogy (or a series of trilogies, or something I just don't even know anymore).

is the uk version the dark green gradient w/ a stylized dragon? #trueconfessions i checked both amazon.co.uk and amazon.com to see if their covers were the old versions just to avoid having to buy the new one (faintly marbled background w/'ancient' looking dragon coin/brooch/misc. relic thing & james patterson-style font)

anyway it's .. pretty good? i thought the second was really good because it made this sort of sudden shift to a wider view in the series' concerns whilst keeping the action even more confined to the boat than it was in the first book. whereas in the third there's no big surprises in scale, its a bigger book, they do a lot of adventure-y things

i still liked it a lot but the pacing is wonkier, it has some typical-seeming third-book fatigue things -- prose getting sloppier, Here Is The Continent I Thought About Least syndrome. and it does some things with the adolescents acting like adolescents i think are clever and some things i think are actually kind of dumb

xposts --

nah it's the coin-relic thing but the paperbacks are variations on that theme so whatever. i mean i'm going to sell it five minutes after i finish reading it i guess

just finished 'more than human' by theodore sturgeon...wow

it's great, isn't it? one of the few SF books I've managed to persuade another person in the real world to read

Cyril M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl - Critical Mass. Short story collection put together by Pohl after Kornbluth's death, not really great but anyway it gives me the chance to post this from his wikipedia page :

Frederik Pohl, in his autobiography The Way the Future Was, Damon Knight, in his memoir The Futurians, and Isaac Asimov, in his memoirs In Memory Yet Green and I. Asimov: A Memoir, all give vivid descriptions of Kornbluth as a man of odd personal habits and vivid eccentricities. Among the traits which they describe:

Kornbluth decided to educate himself by reading his way through an entire encyclopedia from A to Z; in the course of this effort, he acquired a great deal of esoteric knowledge that found its way into his stories...in alphabetical order by subject. When Kornbluth wrote a story that mentioned the ancient Roman weapon ballista, Pohl knew that Kornbluth had finished the "A" volume and had started the "B".

According to Frederik Pohl, Kornbluth never brushed his teeth, and they were literally green. Deeply embarrassed by this, Kornbluth developed the habit of holding his hand in front of his mouth when speaking.

Kornbluth disliked black coffee, but felt obliged to acquire a taste for it because he believed that professional authors were "supposed to" drink black coffee. He trained himself by putting gradually less cream into each cup of coffee he drank, until he eventually "weaned himself" (Knight's description) and switched to black coffee.

http://www.sci-fi-london.com/news/books/2011/07/gollancz-set-launch-sf-gateway

Read Solaris in one sitting. Lem really is a magnificently miserablist bastard. Don't know if I have appetite for either of the movies given that they allegedly barely bother with his central theme but will prob watch the Tarkovsky one out of curiousity. Also have Stalker kicking around on my hard drive but fancy reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roadside_Picnic first.

I would watch the movie first if I were you, ledge.

ok, why not. i have it to hand already after all.

(have just watched it. was less good than i was expecting.)

reading Wind Up Girl. not really enjoying it though. could do with being 50% shorter tbh.

i read rogue moon recently, which i think i posted the cover of the edition i bought, upthread; i am glad i bought it, because of the cover; it was not a very good book. otoh it was probably not helped by my inability to picture the leads as anything other than brock samson & dr venture of 'the venture brothers'. absolutely choice Vintage SF Descriptive Prose sentence:

"Barker had long arms and a flat, hairy stomach, and was wearing knitted navy-blue, European-style swimming trunks without an athletic supporter."

Haha, I recall raising an eyebrow at that when I read it. There is a germ of a good story in there but the characters and the cod psychologising are awful. As I've probably opined many times before.

yeahh the above-it-all psychology ends up being about the author and not the characters: i was hoping for a Big Dumb Object story, and read it with 3-4x as much pleasure whenever it turned into one of those for a page or three

i am now rereading the first glen cook, having ordered the next two. still good! however i still don't understand the end to the first chapter so obviously i am too dumb for them

My stubborn persistance with Banks The Algebraist almost paid off, it's proved to be an okayish read. I restricted it to train journey reading.

I've just picked up House Of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds. Pretty sure this is only my second Reynolds read (Pushing Ice was great)

Also posted in current reading thread...

Gardner Dozois' 'When the Great Days Come', a best-of story collection, which, again, was perfectly OK, but I was expecting AMAZING things from the reviews and things I've read about his work from other SF writers over the years. I'm guessing now that the fact that he has edited pretty much every SF writer in existence, and collected their work in numerous anthologies, meant that their gratefulness perhaps caused them to overhype his own work. Ah well.

Watched Stalker and read Roadside Picnic. You were right to suggest the film first, JR, the connection between the two is skeletal but the film only suggests what the book spells out. Actually I think the film tells too much, in all the Stalker's exhortations to stay on the path or else, without showing enough. The book otoh shows too much. Wasn't really down with the idea in the film of the Zone as alive, aware, capricious, but Tarkovsky's treatment of the wish granter is much more interesting than the book, and the actor playing the Stalker is incredible, with his strong reactions to the Zone from yearning and near infatuation to fear and oppression.

Just read the new Harry Dresden novel in essentially one day. Work is going to be painful.

Q. Honestly, do you believe that the fantasy genre will ever come to be recognized as veritable literature? Truth be told, in my opinion there has never been this many good books/series as we have right now, and yet there is still very little respect (not to say none) associated with the genre.

A. For me this is a great steaming shovel full of I don’t care. Good stuff will stick around. Not so good won’t. Some professor pulling his intellectual pud over it isn’t relevant. Jack London and Charles Dickens, Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, were all hacks. And they’re all in print today. And, for the most part, still scorned by the mutual masturbators of the literati.
From my seat high on the mountainside I think too many people associated with fantasy take the whole thing far too seriously. A failing of Americans in general. We all seem to be able to find a thing or two that we will insist on taking too seriously.

is there anywhere on ilx people talked about wolfe's book of the new sun?

i am on my second read through, so immense.

I love the fantasy genre, lots, and I want it to stop sucking (OR: recommend me fantasy stuff that does not suck) and ▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪ ILX ALL TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION VOTING THREAD & MARGINALIA ▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■ a little bit

also i bitched about it here:
THE ILX ALL-TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL RESULTS THREAD & DISCUSSION

pash is all over many fantasy threads repping hard for it iirc, must pick it up tbh

i don't like to look at "all time" lists on message boards, it always makes me froth at the mouth.

ours was pretty good, though i ended up kicking myself for not nomming "engine summer"

NPRs top 100 came out recently and it was fucking atrocious ... david eddings beat wolfe by like thirty spots (new sun placed somewhere around xanth!!)

i am reading new sun for the first time now. for some reason i decided i wanted to hate it before i started but it is blowing me away. i am realizing that this is the book i always wanted to write, and some asshole has already written it approx 10^28 better than i could ever have hoped to. so i do hate it, but differently than i intended.

ok, next purchase.

I've had it sitting on my shelf for a couple of months now. There is a bit of a queue though

after the first read i'd recommend the lexicon urthus. maybe not for the first read, though - big spoilers in it.

feel like last line of tedious glen cook rant I pasted in would make a good epitaph for gene wolfe

?

gene wolfe sux deal w/ it

lol lamp sux

one thing i appreciate about the book on the second reading is that it's actually very funny. i think some of what people might be mistaking for portentous mystery is the sort of humor that gets detective novels labeled "deconstructive" ... severian stumbles through a lot of the book, and makes a lot of stupid mistakes. he doesn't understand magic or technology, at all. he is really selfish and childish at points. the lectures he gets from his spiritual guides are hilarious to me in the way the master-student scenes in "kill bill" are hilarious. a perfect, loving send-up.

it's actually very funny (at times)

anyway i picked this up and re-read it on my recent trip to lake superior ... i had forgotten how charmingly sarah palin it is

never seen this cover before ... kind of weird if you ask me?

the boys are super-literal from the text, the martians and landscape are not, and willis looks hella faded

http://people.uncw.edu/smithms/Ace%20singles/s5N-series/71140.jpg

i never wouldve thought that of it as being a 'send-up' its a p tedious, faux-knowing 'deconstruction' if i read it that way tho, a self-awareness so oblique as to be pointless imo

the book's empty mysticism isnt really my problem tho its just wolfe's general sloppiness and the way he seems to cop a pose of aloof disinterest in genre conventions as a way of excusing his inability to execute

i'm confused. he seems to follow genre conventions pretty rigorously? it's not like reading "house of leaves", is it?

also "inability to execute" what? how? sloppiness? compared to?

wellll sloppy in that: i thought the book was plagued by a kind of vagueness. the characterization was so thin and protean, i cant really think of any characters that were memorable, that seemed to really live independent of the narrative. and even for a picaresque i thought there was a lot of slack in the plot, with threads that didnt seem to serve much purpose or to drive the story or develop characters or w/e.

i mean even thinking about it now in response to you i can see how what im thinking of as vagueness/sloppiness is likeable, there is a fairy tale quality to severian's journeys, the lack of context and detail makes them seem almost archetypical? but in comparison to a 'traditional' quest narrative i just found the books directionless and didnt think wolfe's world was all that interesting on its own.

um. malrubius? triskele? baldanders? dr talos? jonas?

father inire has more presence than 90% of sci fi aliens and he doesn't even appear in the book!

i... i... dont remember any of those characters

did you read the book?

is there some way to spoiler-proof a post? can i post in highlight-only text or something?

i mean, how is a book about the nature of memory not memorable when one of the main plot devices is that __________ has to _____ his ex-girlfriend's ________ in a magic ritual so that he _______ her ____________?

reading book of the new sun again theres a lot of words in it

looks like you skipped some words, son!!!

well they were boring

i have to admit, i don't know much about the psychology of the "close reading" and "figuring out" requirement. sometimes it works for me (pynchon, dune, jerry cornelius) and it doesn't work for others. other times it doesn't work for me (lord of the rings, george martin, etc)

tbf i am a sucker for any sort of intricate "puzzle" crap in media (to the point where i find schlock like "inception" engaging)

tbh that was the stuff that i liked the best about book of the new sun as well & i think he does a good job of making things familiar enough to hint at deeper meaning w/o giving the game away too easily and that, in part, a vaugeness or lack of context helps establish and maintain a genuine sense of stangeness about much of the book. certainly the incomprehensibility of the house absolute or the world (underneath?) the citadel is something i admire about the book

but oftentimes that not knowing instead of creating distance just fostered disinterest, the duel in the first book seems so inexplicable and rushed, the battle in the lake in the (third?) book as well. the entire war segement was lol dumm too imo. & honestly the female characters are just... dorcas and tesco are so thinly developed and the less said about the pneumatic actress the better imo

idk i think i can see why ppl rate it so highly, its stylish and clever in a way i can admire, & i was p impressed w/ it when i first read it but on rereading it i just kept rmde at everything

yeah the females are the weak point but hey if that's not a genre convention ...

^^ SEE WHAT I DID THERE

well maybe it helped that i had the lexicon urthus and OED on hand ... being able to quickly place references helped me stay grounded in what i was reading.

also, my *first read* was actually my third attempt, and my second reading. i gave up halfway through once, skimmed the first two books the next time, and finally came back to it and CONQUERED IT when my summer vacation started (took about three weeks of solid evenings IIRC). it is getting better the more slowly i read but i don't know if i can keep this up when works starts again. maybe this is why i can never manage proust?

what i actually like *least* about the book are the many fairy tales he reads and the plays. i really don't like being taken out of the flow of the book for so long, especially when the style of storytelling is so different from what i signed up for! i like when frank herbert does a fake paragraph out of a fake reference book, but 10-12 pages of a fake greek fairy tale in the middle of vampire hunter d the new urth is too much.

come to think of it, the metadiegetic parts are my least favorite part of stanislaw lem.

i really like "end of time" science fiction

always had a soft spot for vampire hunter d and moorcock's "dancers at the end of time"

Here Mongrove kept his collection of bacteria; his viruses, his cancers - all magnified by screens, some of which measured an eighth of a mile across. Mongrove seemed to have an affinity with plagues.

'Some of these illnesses are more than a million years old,' he said proudly. 'Brought by time-travelers, mostly. Others come from all over the universe. We have missed a lot, you know, my friends, by not having diseases of our own.'

He paused before one of the larger screens. Here were examples of how the bacteria infected the creatures from which they had originally been taken.

A bearlike alien writhed in agony as his flesh bubbled and burst.

A reptilian space traveler sat and watched with bleary eyes as his webbed hands and feet grew small tentacles which gradually wrapped themselves around the rest of his body and strangled him.

'I sometimes wonder if we, most imaginative of creature, lack a certain kind of imagination,' murmured Lord Jagged to Jherek as they paused to look at the poor reptile.

Elsewhere a floral intelligence was attacked by a fungus which gradually ate at its beautiful blossoms and turned its stems to dry twigs.

which one is 'red planet' again, all of the scribners sort of ran together in my head

um. two boys live in a bubble dome on mars. one boy has a pet furball that has eyestalks. pet furball speaks english though everyone insists it is barely smarter than a dog. the boys get sent to a military academy.

the military academy is taken over by tyrannical headmaster from earth. he and his effete rich elite buddies threaten the boys and pooh pooh their rustic frontier existence. the boys escape on ice skates through the canals of mars and make contact with the martians. when they get home, their parents take up arms and make speeches against politicians.

it gets pretty "kooky libertarian" toward the end.

there's an omni novel out there for kids that mashes up the academy and lovable furball plot of "red planet" with the time dilation from "time enough for the stars"

i mean, how is a book about the nature of memory not memorable when one of the main plot devices is that __________ has to _____ his ex-girlfriend's ________ in a magic ritual so that he _______ her ____________?

fnarrrrr

honestly though i have no idea what yr on about here so i guess that didn't resonate with me. [checks wpedia] o i get it now. idk maybe it's just hard to emotionally connect with the book when you think the narrator is a douche and his voice is both portentous and naive, not to mention the wilful obscurity that everything is clouded in.

and even for a picaresque i thought there was a lot of slack in the plot, with threads that didnt seem to serve much purpose or to drive the story or develop characters or w/e.

^ This, and also some of the threads you are lead to believe are u+k end up going nowhere - specifically ... yeah we really could do with a spoiler tag. Gonna rot13 this: gur pynj naq gur cryrevarf, gur ynggre bs juvpu ur arire zrrgf naq gur sbezre raqf hc rkcyvpvgyl erirnyrq nf n znpthssva.

So many wtf moments too - the whole section with the two-headed guy.

ok so regarding your rot13

arire zrrgf gur cryrevarf? jung nobhg plevnpn naq gur cryrevar grag ng gur nezl pnzc?

nobhg gur pynj, gur zntvp srngure cneg va "qhzob" jbexf sbe zr fgvyy. nyfb gur pynj vf abg ragveryl n erq ureevat, vg unf fbzrguvat gb qb jvgu gvzr geniry naq frirevna'f qrfgval nf pbapvyvngbe gung v'z fgvyy jbexvat ba.

i get what you guys are saying. it's a lot of fucking effort to keep up on. this is the first time in a while that i dragged out the reference books (OED first and lexicon urthus later) to help me figure out the plot of a book. but i should also say that it's the first time in a while that intense reading and re-reading has been paid off so much.

naive = but it's a bildungsroman! of course he's naive!

portentous = well, the whole thing is his autobiography of "how my destiny was to save the throne", so of course it's portentous! it's literally about the nature of *signs* and *portents*. he spends the first chapter talking about how a coin he received as a boy symbolizes his entire life!

no, no, i'm sorry, i should shut up, i realize it's not your cup of tea

Bx V sbetrg gur qrgnvyf. Qbrf ur bssre bar bs gur cryrevarf va gur pnzc pynj naq gurl fnl 'jungrire, yby'? Rvgure jnl vg whfg frrzf gb crgre bhg. Rira vs n dhrfg qbrfa'g ghea bhg yvxr gur ureb cynaarq gung fubhyq or na vzcbegnag guvat, n erfbyhgvba, va vgfrys, vafgrnq vg srryf yvxr Jbysr vf onfvpnyyl fnlvat gb gur ernqre 'gung guernq lbh'ir orra sbyybjvat sbe gur jubyr obbx? lrnu vg qvqa'g znggre'. V fnl vg srryf gung jnl, V xabj gur pbapvyvngbe fgvyy nyyrtrqyl unf znwbe vzcbeg vs lbh qryir vagb gur uvqqra gurzrf bs gur obbx - ohg nf sbe gubfr, lrrrrrrnu v ernyyl qba'g tvir n fuvg nobhg nal bs gung. N znwbe cneg bs guvf vf PUEVFGVNA NTRAQN, abguvat vf yvxryl gb ghea zr bss n obbx zber. Juvpu, fher, vf zl ceboyrz, ohg vg frrzf gb zr guvf obbx pna'g or rawblrq ba gur fhesnpr yriry nybar, gurer ner fvzcyl gbb znal dhrfgvbaf naq chmmyrf naq bofphevgvrf.

lol, i feel like i'm in my own crappy sf/f novel, speaking like this.

yeah basically we're just expecting and getting different things out of this; it's not for me but i can see what you could get out of it.

has anyone else been to the British Library exhibition on SF?

No! Maybe i'll try and fit it in tomorrow.

o damn, i made plans to that fell through and forgot to do anything about it. i am annoyed that i missed george clinton and nona hendryx talking there, too.

Hey, has anyone else read Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series? To my surprise, it is as engaging as his Harry Dresden novels (if a little heavy-handed at times)

Are the Harry Dresden novels worth it if I have a low tolerance for sexism? I know nothing about them other than they are popular and a friend whose opinion I semi-distrust (due to his high tolerance for sexism) keeps telling me I should read them.

I don't think they're sexist, or perhaps more accurately I don't think they're problematically sexist.

There are a lot of gender archetype things going on that definitely can scan as sexist, but one thing Butcher does with a good chunk of his cast is to flesh them out and have characters grow across books. It is actually very rare for a book to end without some major change impacting the lives of the main characters.

Really, his biggest weakness is the near-infallibility of Harry and his crew; after about six or seven books it starts to strain credibility a little bit that Harry and his crew can consistently own whatever mystical threat rolls through Chicago. However, Butcher is very smart about he deals with that in how he both adds allies to bolster the "good guys" (note: not all the good guys are actually good guys, which is another interesting thing) and in how the cost paid for each victory escalates. In fact, the most recent books up the scale significantly and really puts the entire cast through the wringer, only to set the stage for a wholly new, semi-terrifying status quo rife with story potential.

Harry as a character is chivalrous to a fault but he also tends to surround himself with awesome, extremely competent allies, both male and female. I think if you go in knowing that some noir stylings are going to occur, you'll be fine.

Awesome. That is a really helpful response. Thank you!

has anyone else been to the British Library exhibition on SF?

I went! I didn't have enough time to really get into it. Exhibitions of books aren't very skimmable.

I had to go to it three times to get it all.

oh ffs i was up near the euston rd on sat, heading for regents park when it started raining, and i was thinking "what can i do nearby that's indoors?"

I just downloaded a bunch of free epub books, jumped into one already and wish I were reading it right now:

Blindsight by Peter Watts, which I'm about 2/3 through and there's quite a lot about neurology and math and topics that I don't even know enough about to know what to call them, but I feel like I'm learning shit? Also it's exciting and mysterious. I'm a sucker for plot.

Mars Girl by Jeff Garrity

My Own Kind of Freedom, Steven Brust

Star Dragon, Mike Brotherton

Wikipedia says Blindsight is about "the nature of identity and consciousness." Also it involves explanations of the Chinese Room scenario and other smarty-pants turing/AI stuff.

That could either be right up my street, or the kind of thing I would end up throwing across the room in disgust.

Where did you get it from? Going on 3 week hol soon, need to gather reading material.

I don't know where it's from, I use the Aldiko reader for droid phones and when I search for things it just sends me to a "store"? But I only download free books from that "store."

http://www.manybooks.net/titles/wattspother06Blindsight.html

great, thanks. think that site might be hidden in my delicious bookmarks somewhere.

That could either be right up my street, or the kind of thing I would end up throwing across the room in disgust.
--ledge

if i hate it, you'll buy it? ;)

my ultimate reaction will probably be "meh, s'ok"

Um, no:)

Blindsight is great, second time round was rewarding too, His Rifters trilogy also available free online is pretty astounding too. He's my favourite modern SF writer.

Yeah, BLindsight is fantastic. All his novels and almost all of his short stories are downloadable from his website: http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

If you read Blindsight, the multimedia presentation he did about the vampire science is great fun: http://www.rifters.com/real/progress.htm

Hey, has anyone else read Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series?

Read the first and have the second queued up. These were recommended to me before I came across the Dresden stuff (which I quickly devoured), but something in the first chapters of the first book put me off them initially (can't remember what, possibly the slave girl schtick)

http://greatsfandf.com/apologia.php

what a peculiar website.

peculiar = unreadable?

90% finished with book of the new sun, get ready for the reading club thread

i would recommend reading that, it is pretty smart

the sf and f website or new sun?

i think it is definitely unreadable in the sense that it wasn't designed to be read on any monitor that wasn't 4:3 and at most 800x600

yeah i meant unreadable in that sense i didnt even try to look @ the words

sf and f website

i particularly enjoyed his thoughts on setting

bacigalupi's windup girl definitely fits that SF-and-F paradigm we were talking about upstairs a little, where you're all impressed with the author's plotting and world-building, and then some deeply gratuitous and unpleasant sexual thing happens, that makes you distrust everything you had previously thought about the author

I know. I was the most let down by the parts involving the otherwise-nice engineer guy who is clearly Our Hero. Maybe it was supposed to make him "complex" and "flawed" or something but fuck that.

And then the rapey angle that is all the other "sex" in that book. Vom.

I probably should have taken the title as a warning instead of skipping over it p much.

Read the first and have the second queued up. These were recommended to me before I came across the Dresden stuff (which I quickly devoured), but something in the first chapters of the first book put me off them initially (can't remember what, possibly the slave girl schtick)

I was about to say "what are you talking about...?" but then I remembered the whole infiltration ruse

although the way that whole situation played out and what happened with that character subsequently pretty much erases that entire gambit IMO

the liveship trilogy ftw, nasty nasty nasty

ha yes, those books were some evil shit

too bad Hobb's Forest Mage trilogy was too fucking gross for me to finish, seems like it was being set up for a similar level of heartbreak

although the way that whole situation played out and what happened with that character subsequently pretty much erases that entire gambit IMO

Yes, agreed! I finished the second one on the weekend. Taking a short break with some steampunk Civil-War-never-ended with zombies Cherie Priest (Dreadnaught), then queuing up the 3rd codex alera.

will always rep for the farseer trilogy though

lol I just blasted through all of the Codex Alera books, am currently on #6

I should really go back and finish off the Black Company books someday

also agree re: Farseer Trilogy

what sort of nastiness are you guys talking about?

eh

No, i'm gonna decline to answer that tbh.

I really recommend reading the trilogy, explaining it spoils the impact a little (actually even hinting at it probably spoils it a little but hey) It's not like super gory or anything like that, more tied into human behavior.

The Forest Mage stuff is gross food porn tho, I don't mind spoiling that at all because it was just nasty.

Is anyone else anticipating the new Vernor Vinge (Childern of the Sky, sequel to A Fire Upon Deep)?

oh shit

I am now

I know! Have pre-ordered, can't wait

taking a sidestep i wanted to recommend sean russell's set of entide sea duologies 'moontide & magic rise' and 'the river into darkness' the first of which im rereading for the first time in a long time. theyre so much less 'dark' than a similar fantasy series would be today but i think theyre much better written and executed than many contemp series and he does some of the best world-building ive ever read. partly because unlike a lot of writers he barely reveals anything abt his world but still manages to make it feel deep and cohesive

the characterization is a little thin and he spends too much time showing off his knowledge of 17th century sailing but i think anyone who likes the political gamesmanship and maneuvering and quasi-historical stuff in a song of ice and fire wld be really into this

'duology' isn't as bad as 'quadrilogy', but it's pretty bad

firefox didnt like it much either tbh

I read Cherie Priest's first in that series, Boneshaker, but wasn't that impressed. Or rather, I was more impressed at the design of the book (pleasingly brown ink!) than the writing, which is not a good sign...

I know I have World Without End and Sea Without a Shore in a box in here somewhere but I can't remember them. Will re-read when I unpack.

Boneshaker, but wasn't that impressed.

She's local (to me), so I don't mind giving her a chance or three. I thought Boneshaker was just okay. This one is more disjointed and action-packed (plus, the undead! and...and...trains!). The main protagonist is fairly plausible, though how she manages all this climbing around up and down train car exteriors in a skirt when she's barely able to get across the platform between cars is starting to annoy me.

she had a ladder in her tights?

oh you and your foreign turns of phrase

mea culpa

That pair of books (duology my ass) lamp mentioned sound good, but i've so much recommended stuff unread right now it's ridiculous

Is anyone else anticipating the new Vernor Vinge (Childern of the Sky, sequel to A Fire Upon Deep)?

Eeeeeeee!

I had mixed feelings about Boneshaker. I think the gas mask focus was borderline fetishy, and I found it difficult to really get into the book because reading about everybody's breathing difficulties made me feel short of breath. But strong female lead kicking ass made me forgive a lot of the book's shortcomings.

I've just finished, and thoroughly enjoyed, Gareth Powell's The Recollection. I don't usually post about books written by mates because it makes me uncomfortable, but I was surprised by how much I liked this. Silly space opera, action packed, nicely written and with some original ideas which are a bit spoiler-y so I shan't say more. Fun.

not heard this yet but there was a radio4 show (part 1 of 2) last weekend(?) about sex in science fiction that sounded interesting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013q20k#synopsis

"Cat Women of the Moon was a 1950s film that followed a popular motif in science fiction; an all women society surviving without men. Charlotte Perkins Gilman explored the idea as early as 1915 in the classic novel 'Herland'. In part one of a two part programme we look at how science fiction has been used to examine relationships between the sexes - and in some cases, more than two sexes. In many novels the exploration of sexuality is unconventional and experimental. Some societies have more than one sex, in others people can change sex at will. In certain imagined worlds people form relationships with aliens or don't have sex with flesh and blood beings at all - but with artificial life forms instead. The programme includes contributions from some of Britain's leading science fiction writers including Iain Banks, China Mieville and Nicola Griffith. The programme is presented by the writer Sarah Hall, author of 'The Carhullan Army' and 'The Electric Michelangelo' which was short listed for the Booker Prize."

should be iplayerable.

Oh oh I LIKE Nicola Griffith! The other guys too obv but never heard her speak before. Thx, koogs.

I read this thing called DUST by Charles Pellegrino: I finished it because a book about the end of the world has to be pretty bad to kill my interest, and this one had some nifty ideas--basically the trigger for catastrophe is the disappearance of insects, cutting the legs off the global ecology/food chain--but LAWKS was the writing awful. And the hero was an obvious stand-in for the author, too.

I'm not sure if I have mentioned it already, but I enjoyed reading "Ancestor" by Scott Sigler. It is trash, but enjoyable trash, about a biotech company trying to retro-develop ur-mammal creatures as organ donors, only they turn out to be savage killing machines. And it is set on an island from which there is no escape. And there is a brave little dog in it.

i finished windup girl

i don't know if i have anything to add to what i said upthread

oh, it definitely made me more curious about the ramifications of the loss of genetic diversity in human-cultivated crops, there is that

(i also finished Wind Up Girl recently and didn't really enjoy it. he kept dropping in thai, chinese and japanese words in to describe things. or, because i don't speak thai, chinese or japanese, to not describe things. sex club scenes made me wince too. liked the elephants and, yes, the GM food warnings)

Almost at the end of "House of Suns" by Reynolds, who I'm quickly becoming a big fan of.

Can't wait to finish it, mainly because i've just found the first five books in the "Magician" series by Raymond Feist at a car boot sale. I hear they are quite decent.

... well they start out quite decent

hahaha i loved those when i was a kid.

i tried to adapt them into a movie

I took that book Ancestor from the work shelf as light reading on a trip, and since the author is from Michigan and I was flying to there, I ended up sitting right by some people who WENT TO COLLEGE WITH HIM and told me how excited they were to see someone reading his book.

Maybe they went to high school with him, I can't remember, but they were friends, anyway.

Also really enjoyable and way less trashy: Fragment by Warren Fahy. Undiscovered, uncharted island, an entire ecosystem that evolved independently from everything else in the world, secret twists & turns as the exploratory team/reality TV crew discovers what the island's inhabitants are, and are capable of.

DUH DUH DUUUUH!!!

lost?

Are you asking me if it's like the show Lost? It's not.

yeah i was. that's good to hear.

i tried to adapt them into a movie

i want to hear more?

Intrigued now by Fragment.

You know what I've realised I hate? The way second-rate SF writers have their characters use really clunky similes and metaphors that try (and fail) to inject "alien" colour into their speech: things like...
"He struck as fast as an Arcturan lightning fox!"
"She moved like a Xanek lava snake."

That sort of thing

has anyone else been to the science fiction at the british library? it was fun, i thought

I was there. I liked it. And I bought the book of the exhibition too as a guide to future reading.

My single favourite bit, though, was probably the short clip from the 1950s TV version of 1984, with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith and Donald Pleasance as Syme.

i just went around writing a bunch of stuff in a notebook. based on the evidence of the two things i've been to see -- the other one was brothers grimm iirc? -- a lot of the populist exhibitions at the british library seem to exist as excuses to let their design/art staff let rip a little. that tripod could have stood to be a little more menancing, i thought.

i just went around writing a bunch of stuff in a notebook.

when I was there, there were a lot of people writing stuff in notebooks.

NERDS!

I read Blindsight, I was not too impressed I'm afraid. His treatment of The Chinese Room was worse than cursory and betrayed a typical scientist's disdain for philosophical problems. The lead character was pretty awful, a hard-boiled functioning autist devoid of charm and apt to say things like:

I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.

To this day, I still don't know what went wrong.

smdh, rmde.

also, vampires. wtf.

well, yes, but impressively rationalised vampires. ah well, can't win them all...

3/4ths of the way through THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. CLAW seemed to alternate between damn good and lugubrious, but the third book in the series was quite nice - I liked the ultra-clever sentence where Wolfe kinda aped Nabokov, obv. ALSO: the oblique invocation of FRANKENSTEIN and the implication that the aliens encountered in the castle are journeying backwards in time or something.

Swell.

Argh! Have been looking at the free 'beta version' of the SF encyclopedia (http://sf-encyclopedia.com/), and it's full of cool-looking books, and they have links to by ebooks of some of them, and I don't have enough money and time and argh

I was reading Neuromancer by William Gibson for SF book club. Then I stopped reading it because it is rubbish. I am amazed that such a badly written book ever found a publisher, let alone acquired a reputation as some kind of SF classic.

i'm amazed that such a badly formed opinion ever found an outlet, let alone acquired a suggest ban

Eh I thought it was pretty overrated, main character a corneliusan hangover from the nwosf, second half riven with incomprehensible situations, locations, motivations. too much punk, not enough cyber.

i liked it. and re-read it every couple of years.

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth - Wolfbane. This book is batshit crazy, must investigate The Space Merchants next.

I'm really itching to start a collection of Penguin Science Fiction editions, thus catapulting myself into years of hurt, expense and frustration as I try to complete it. Someone talk me out of it, please.

collecting things gives life real meaning

The Space Merchants is better than Wolfsbane. Very funny, still pretty relevant. The bit where the hero is living inside a giant headless GM chicken is pretty memorable.

icky, too.

penguin SF editions = mainly terrible hippy line drawings right? then bad color-tint photo jobs? i'm not sure i see the appeal -- there were a few in orange covers in the general line, i guess - ?

i forgot i pre-ordered the richard morgan novel six months ago and now it is arriving and i just do not have time. also that colson whitehead zombie novel. bahhh

There was some really good stuff in Penguin SF: see gallery here --> http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/19/2022242/flowchart-guides-readers-through-the-100-best-sf-books

Slashdot! Who goes there anymore? Good link though. Read a lot on the SF side already, might add some Niven & Pournelle to my to-do list.

i went through the flowchart a couple of times. was fun.

also, of the list of 100 books the top 3 that i a) hadn't read and b) weren't fantasy wank were all robert heinlein, who i've read nothing by. oh, and the handmaiden's tale.

(and where do people go that's not slashdot?)

I'm just finishing up Sunshine because it was one of the few books in that flow chart that I wanted to read but hadn't yet.

I'm very fond of Sunshine. I love the author and I'd like to bro down with all the main characters.

What else do you recommend by her? Sunshine was super fun to read.

What whaaaahhhh huh? HER CANONICAL BOOKS The Hero and the Crown, which is the 1985 Newbery winner, and The Blue Sword, of course. In that order. ASAP.

A Knot in the Grain has lovely short stories but of her full-length more recent books I think I pick Deerskin. It has some major trigger situations though so ymmv. But it's mystical in exactly the open-ended liminal way that I like.

okay, re: penguin sf then -- the full list of 'penguin science fiction' covers is here: http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/app.html --

i'd thought they only started keeping a seperate 'science fiction' list when they switched to these covers in 1966

http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/images/2452_FREDERIK_POHL_Alternating_Currents_1966.jpg

which quickly turned to these covers, in 1967

http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/images/2620_ALFRED_BESTER_Tiger_Tiger_1967.jpg

which are the ones i meant earlier. and the 70s are full of similarly terrible stuff, like the series whence comes the reissue of the aldiss omnibus pictured at the top of the thread

http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/images/3416_JAMES_BLISH_Black_Easter_or_Faust_Aleph_Null_1972.jpg

i'd forgotten that '63-'66 they had a bunch of covers in the then-current variations on the Marber grid with a 'Penguin Science Fiction' tag added. which is kind of lax, considering i own like a third of them.

http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/images/1875_OLAF_STAPLEDON_Last_and_First_Men_1963.jpg

apparently this was a separate line edited by Brian Aldiss. I don't know, though; the numbering is consistent with the main Penguin series -- it seems a fairly quixotic thing to collect, given that they never really set up a consistent (visual or otherwise) identity for their SF