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

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