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

Ha, didn't Christopher Priest write a book about why the last Dangerous Visions would never come out?

Yeah -- I have a copy around here somewhere. Ellison threatened to sue him but never followed through.

I think it is not readily available because of that threat.

Huh...I wonder if existing copies go for big bucks.

Twenty-five bucks at the low end although somebody wants one seventy

Considering it's just a cranky rant of the sort that was perfected later by Everyone On The Internet, I'd gladly give mine up for $35-40.

HA

"..about why it would never come out.Ellison threatend to sue but never followed through." Zing! Truth is the best punchline. He wrote a whole book about it? Wotta Priest!

But I wasn't thinking of Ellison re passively publishing any ol' thing with a big name attached, more like the last Dozois-edited Best of I read, from two-three years back, put me any subsequent volumes. About half of it was up to his usual (slightly damp) standards, then suddenly veered, even Robert Reed with an endless story about watching his doggie waste away--could possible have been good, but it was all sniffle sniffle sniffle sniffle sniffle. I like DG Hartwell's anthologies when he's on his own, but the Year's Best SF series co-edited with Cramer aren't so dependable.

Also, what's some good New Wave science fiction?

philip jose farmer's short stories

j.g. ballard

Never seen a collection of Farmer's short stories, rarely see the novels anymore (The Lovers was his early noteworthy, right?) Ballard's Of The Sun was vivid but somehow made less impact than I'd expected, maybe too autobiographical for his usual conceptual momentum? Not that I've read much else, which of his should I look for?

Empire of The Sun, sorry.

i think the awesome PJF is an early short story collection called "strange relations"

Also, what's some good New Wave science fiction?

Start at ground zero...

http://www.sfsite.com/gra/0502/nwlg.jpg

octavia butler's xenogenesis series is fantastic

Farmer's full bibliography doesn't really fit neatly in the New Wave, but he was prolific enough that a lot of his stuff was New Wave-esque, especially the work that dealt with sexual themes. "Riders of the Purple Wage" was very NewWaveish, but it's kind of a choppy mess -- it was so long and had to be cut so severely for Dangerous Visions that the outtakes were assembled into another story, "The Oogenesis of Bird City." One of my favorites of his is "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod," a dumb/hilarious answer to the question "what if William Burroughs, not Edgar Rice Burroughs, wrote the Tarzan stories?"

Selling my Farmer collection (nearly complete when I sold it in 1986) is one of the most boneheaded things I ever did.

Another vote for "The Jungle Rot Kid."
A litle while back I overheard a guy in a bar saying Vonnegut wrote Venus on the Half Shell. When I corrected him he looked at me like I was nuts

"The Jungle Rot Kid On The Nod" sounds very promising, thanks. Somebody should do it as a song. Shifting gears, any other Stephen Baxter worth checking out? How are his collaborations w Arthur C. Clarke?

what is actually in that new worlds anthology?

new wave stuff i think of as vaguely canonic: pamela zoline's stories 'the heat death of the universe' and 'a holland of the mind'; jerry cornelius stuff, but don't ask which; thomas disch, 'camp concentration' and '334'

brian aldiss's 'report and probability a' and 'barefoot in the head' worth looking at in a bookshop to see what kind of responses people were having who were trying to keep up? not really v good though

j.g. ballard, i guess 'the drowned world' & those other early novels? & the story 'the assassination of john fitzgerald kennedy considered as a downhill motor race'

ha, that anthology samples most all of that

Yeah, a lot of stuff was in that mag. Here's Gollancz crowing about and linking their titles on recent Locus Rec Reading List
http://www.gollancz.co.uk/2012/02/gollancz-titles-on-the-locus-recommended-reading-list/

they sure have a whole bunch of sequels

i can NEVER find disch stuff in used book stores anymore. used to see it everywhere, and now that i want it all....nada.

I apparently told yall wrong about Lindner's book study of psychopaths: he's foregrounding one person, and though I could swear I've seen it as the original work titled Rebel Without A Cause, pre-dating the movie, I found it this afternoon as Without A Cause. Also Theodore Sturgeon's collection, Sturgeon is Alive And Well, from 1971. I'd heard he had writer's blcok, and he confirms this right away in the prologue. Living way under a rock til a redheaded woman got his mojo rising (sorry, I was just reading about Greil Marcus' Doors book on the What Are You Reading thread). So he wrote all these stories (and a novel) in the previous year, 1970, not one of the more springs-eternal years otherwise. All but one, the first story, a novelette from the early 50s, perfect lead-off, re agents of the muse, in this case seeking out a blocked painter who may also be a blocked knight of olde. Easy to see where this is going, but appropriate novelties keep appearing at just the right moments, spinning around the throughline. A little too neat (yet not quite adding up) toward end, but not too much considering the requirements even for hipper magazine SF in early 50s, or later. On the way home, I sat down in the park and read this long and sometimes dense (forsooth, that knight) yarn from beginning to end. This never happens. When I raised my head, still plenty of dark green cool daytime, at 7 p.m.

http://covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/6705129-L.jpg

at home for easter weekend i have turned up copies of two collections: 'the dreaming jewels' and the more troublingly titled 'e pluribus unicorn'

Ha. Think I owned one or both of those back in the day but I remember nothing but the titles

Yeah, I've got reservations about unicorns, but at least it's not angels or elves, in the book's title anyway. James, cover of The Dreaming Jewels is posted a little ways upthread, may jog yr memory.

that title approaching piers anthony level of awfulness

http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6619835-L.jpg

yeah, that's the one i have

reading After Doomsday by Poul Anderson right now. meat & potatoes early 60's sci-fi. like going to a diner you like that is totally predicatable in all the right ways. the coffee and pie and burgers are always fine. sometimes i do feel like the old people who just want to read the same agatha christies and crime and mystery plots over and over again.

hey if you are gonna have unicorn in your title you could do worse than that cover. its pretty rad.

The others are dismally predictable, but this so-called match is kinda cool

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_hVOW2U7K4-M/SR-RiT8_y3I/AAAAAAAArtY/sR_xVsTjEG8/4356yurtutyjgh.jpg

Old interview with Chris Priest with some funny stuff about Ellison book http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/cpriest.html Also lots of stuff about The Prestige which I avoided since I haven't read that one yet

despite the title 'e pluribus unicorn' is an absolutely killer collection. it has a story involving an evil teddy bear that scared the hell out of me when i read it (and i suspect still would).

sturgeon's a little too lurid and purple and pulpy for my tastes. as for new wave sf, i got all the original new worlds anthologies a little while ago, and new wave sf can fuck off and die imo.

it was, you know, of its moment

all that's left are echoes of a scene furiously celebrating itself.

i love 'report on probability a' that you mentioned upthread but that's a lot more considered than most of the stuff in those new worlds.

Then play on!
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/eng.jpg

lots more by same artist, k*ll*an Eng
http://www.behance.net/gallery/Various-work-05/1134721

k*ll*an Eng, that is.

eh? oh well you'll see.

fwiw - the anthologies, if you mean the sphere books things, were after even moorcock was running out of patience with the whole thing, and various lines about what 'new wave sf' was or could be had basically been decided on. that is, if you were reading these:

http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/8/83/NWWRTRLYBC1971.jpg

they were being published by sphere as a paperback after the money ran out for the magazine after (i think) they lost their arts council funding and were dropped from w.h. smith (biggest booksellers and newsagents in the country then and possibly still) (haha wait are you british? hang on). etc etc etc. anyway the reason the whole thing was meant to be exciting was that moorcock had taken over a magazine that looked like this

http://www.sfcovers.net/Magazines/NW/NW_0146.jpg

and turned it into one that looked like this

http://www.sfcovers.net/Magazines/NW/NW_0179.jpg

(xposts, oops - but, yeah, 'echoes of a scene furiously celebrating itself' does kind of sum up the state things were in by the sphere books stuff. but! moorcock had been editor on and off for like seven years then, so what the hey)

Looks very tasty, that last cover--what do you think of the New Worlds anthology rec'd to me upthread? Read part of a story from it on Amazon's Look Inside, pretty entertaining so far

it sort of does the job -- there's no anthology that gives a real sense of it as a publication, i think, but that gives as good a sense of it as a received idea as any other does. the langdon jones 'the new sf' (amazon copies from £0.01, i'm sure) from 70-ish is maybe a touch better

i think the high-60s covers have dated horribly in some respects tbh

http://www.sfcovers.net/Magazines/NW/NW_0188.jpg