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

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"