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

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