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

Am reading Joe Haldeman's lastest trilogy, Marsbound/Starbound/Earthbound (halfway through book 2)--not bad. As long as it doesn't have the awful, AWFUL copout-style ending of Forever Peace, I'll be happy.

Could someone remind me what that legit paid-for ebook site for classic SF was? Thanks!

(sorry, my search-fu is weak tonight)

This one? http://sfgateway.com/

That one looks like I remember, yes! Thanks very much. And within 2 minutes of me asking, too.

25% of way thru AlReynolds book and it feels more like gibson than his usual space opera stuff. this is probably due to language, setting and the big macguffin.

enjoyed a reynolds novella I just read, 'Troika', about cosmonauts investigating Big Dumb Object

re-read Viriconium Nights and In Viriconium recently. then i stumbled across this essay which is great:

http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/viriconium/

i found an 80s collection of those two a while ago (i read all of them in the gollancz fantasy masterworks collection, including the two earlier ones, a somewhat longer while ago) and they've now been, in that book, in a reread pile for what. four years? oy

those gollancz masterworks have included 'the female man' and 'dhalgren' this year, incidentally. which is awesome. to a very small group of people, including me.

Ted Chiang? Ted Chiang!

OMG. Ted. Chiang.

http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/fall-2010/fiction-the-lifecycle-of-software-objects-by-ted-chiang/

Such a good story!

I wish he was more prolific, but at least when he does put something out, it kicks 17 varieties of arse.

finally wrapped up "urth of the new sun"

would anyone like to do a "shadow and claw" reading club?

wow, thanks s.clover for that story. really great, possibly gonna ruin my day since i stayed up far later than i should reading it. i am now on my way to look for more ted chiang stuff !

The Merchant and The Alchemist's Gate is the one I know from a couple of anthologies. Only awards nominee I've ever heard of to turn down nomination, here's his bio in brief from goodreads:
Ted Chiang (born 1967) is an American speculative fiction writer. He was born in Port Jefferson, New York and graduated from Brown University with a Computer Science degree. He currently works as a technical writer in the software industry and resides in Bellevue, near Seattle, Washington. He is a graduate of the noted Clarion Writers Workshop (1989).
Although not a prolific author, having published only eleven short stories as of 2009, Chiang has to date won a string of prestigious speculative fiction awards for his works: a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990), the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992, a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for "Story of Your Life" (1998), a Sidewise Award for "Seventy-Two Letters" (2000), a Nebula Award, Locus Award and Hugo Award for his novelette "Hell Is the Absence of God" (2002), a Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007), and a British Science Fiction Association Award, a Locus Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Exhalation" (2009).
Chiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story "Liking What You See: A Documentary" in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted. [1]
Chiang's first eight stories are collected in Stories of Your Life, and Others (1st US hardcover ed: ISBN 0-7653-0418-X; 1st US paperback ed.: ISBN 0-7653-0419-8). His novelette The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate was also published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

I have just finished "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Attwood, an enjoyable piece of apocalyptic-dystopian SF.

Not SF! /attwood

"Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that"

see also Jeanette Winterson, who wrote a book about androids and clones and other planets set in the far future, but it wasn't sci-fi, you see, it was a FABLE

You gonna read the sequel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Flood

o canada

so much to answer for

tbf, we just write the stuff, you're the ones that buy it

morelike year of the butt amirite???

currently reading kameron hurley's 'god's war'/'infidel' which are p good but not great, i guess. there arent very many ideas but lots of exciting things happen

atwood is OK with the term speculative fiction. seems like a silly distinction to me.

finished this yesterday

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/130/317774979_a9a7abd30f_z.jpg?zz=1

What did you make of it? I thought it a bit... arbitrary. I suppose the second section could be an attempt to portray a form of life completely alien to ourselves, but it doesn't touch Lem in that regard.

thought it was a really fun read, i like how the second third takes so long to get back to electron/positron pump from the alien marital drama stuff but when it does it's so perfect

i read that when i was ... immediately preadolescent? it seemed very peculiar

what wouldn't

found used a copy of m. john harrison's 'the pastel city' and read it in the break between papers. better than i remember! under less pressure to be Importantly About The Genre to me than it was when i was 17

had one or two moments that bugged me like when grrm called something 'stygian', there was something 'cochineal' and i thought what do they make food dye out of insect-bugs in fantasyland

turns out the poems tegeus-Cromis writes are a riff on pound's cathay; this was unexpected

Glad you've finally got that sorted

You gonna read the sequel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Flood

Yes. Probably.

I liked Oryx and Crake while I was reading it, but my SF book club pals mostly did not - so now I am wondering if it is actually not that great.

was a semi-decent slashdot sci-fi reading thread recently...

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/03/07/0056225/ask-slashdot-good-forgotten-fantasy-science-fiction-novels

what do ppl think of theodore sturgeon

he had the worst story in dangerous visions; otherwise i have not read him

I love almost everything I've read by him. (Godbody was an exception.)

working my way through david louis edelman's jump 225 trilogy. basically imagines a 5-6 century jump forward into a world where constantly connected nanomachines inside the body enhance every aspect of human life, and apps can make any change imaginable. into this world comes a paradigm-shifting technology called "multireal" that allows people to choose the reality they want to live in.

the first book "infoquake" is kinda neuromancer by way of the boardroom, the second book "multireal" is looking more like high politics. interested to see where it's gonna go and what the third one will look like.

re Sturgeon, More Than Human is great

not heard of edelman--sounds interesting

i'm pretty sure i've read 'more than human' but ages ago. i always get him confused with a.e. van vogt, which is not really right. i'm reading 'venus plus x' which is ... something

Herb picks up the can of liquid detergent and looks at it, pursing his lips. 'We never get this any more.'
'Whuffo?'
'Plays hell with your hands, Lano-Love, that's what we get now. Costs a little more but,' Herb says, ending his sentence with 'but'.
'"Two extra lovely hands for two extra little pennies,"' says Smith, quoting a television commercial.

This is a pretty great introduction to Sturgeon...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51N6QF5FP2L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

I'll have to get that. I know I've read several, but the only one I really remember is "The [Widget] The [Wadget] and Boff"--may not have done that right, but pretty close. ETs doing secret experiment on Earthling inhabitants of boarding house. The ETs don't understand all of what they're doing 'til the end. Their subjects are variously messed-up products of America, like Depression WWII Cold War standards of normal, incl sexual. One of them is a toddler, though, and his perspective keeps some sweetness (for perhaps otherwise-nervous editor?) between the neurotic adults' POVs, and those of the aliens, who are increasingly irritable (concealed, all in each others grill etc.) I read this when I was like 11, and got it all (I think). May well have been the best age to read it, like a lot of Cold War SF magazine fiction-- a lot of SF and fantasy overall, I suspect.

he is one of the leading candidate in the 'science-fiction writer who looks like a dan clowes character' contest

http://www.theodoresturgeontrust.com/Images/TedANQ.jpg

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldv7p6ZlYa1qbl8c9o1_400.jpg

p sure i have that, but i never get around to reading single-author short-story collections. rn i am working my way thro d knight's mammoth 'a science fiction argosy' which concludes w/ 'more than human' so i may have more thoughts after that. what i thought was weird with the bit from 'venus + x' upthread was that for a second it seemed like it was being written by tao lin

This was the Damon Knight paperback revelation for me, in '63
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41syPcSuwnL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

The blurb is playing it safe: we also get flashbacks to Sir Francis Bacon etc., thence to the 1860s, incl. Fitzjames O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens" (I think).

i feel like i should know more about knight but i also feel like he's probably a p boring writer

the argosy is weird bcz there's a lot of stuff which is only by rather broad terms sf. -- there's also like three versions of 'faust - but IN SPACE'

He ran and/or appeared at writer's workshops w wife Kate Wilhelm, also had a rep as challenging editor, even of the biggies. Silverberg said he knew he could go pick up his chump change plus from so-and-so, just cos he was Silverberg (I'm paraphrasing a little), but dammit he wanted it from Knight. Haven't read Argosy, but just started a collection of Knight's own yarns, Rule Golden and Other Stories Re three versions of 'faust--but IN SPACE,' the first and title story has equally generic high concept: hard-boiled newsman meets alien who brings salvation for Cold War Earth. But the salvation is radical empathy: "Be Done By As You Do." If you kill another human, you'll die; plus, mass breakdowns among slaughterhouse workers, resignations from penal system, the "war in Indochina" (1957) goes even further off the rails. Mainly what's effective is the hardboiled newsman (editor!) is the expertly modulated narrator, experiencing his own increasingly anguished, though always prefesssionally second-minded, two steps ahead version of extreme empathy--manipulated by the alien, who himself doesn't entirely--well, there are twists in empathy, a certain slipperiness even as things get resolved (kind of), Shit that don't quite add up adheres fairly pleasingly to Uncertainty Principle and genre plotting potholes, keeps it a bit rough. Second story, abut an actor from the "realies" sent forth to to trade techno-trinkets to the Muckfeet hordes, so they will empathize w besieged New Yorkers, not eat them etc, pretty cool so far, already better than the first.