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

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

i've got the 8 panther anthologies -
http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=Best_SF_Stories_from_New_Worlds

fairly contemporaneous with the mag, all but one with intros from moorcock, and yes there are signs he's running out of steam by the end - vol 6 intro says he hasn't included 'time considered as a helix of semi precious stones' because it's been in other collections already, but then it shows up in vol 7. And vol 8 has no intro and a full four stories by a distinctly non experimental non new wave barrington bayley (and which just so happen to be great).

i two pretty good collections of sci fi from new wave times but they're packed away and i can't find pics of them. the colors are garish fluorescent colors and have big text on them, wish i could remember the titles, would recommend those.

i have a couple of the panther anthologies. i think moorcock's selections for them (and looking at them: yeah) are based on 'what can i excerpt from the magazine to enforce its 'experimental' bona fides' rather than 'what gives a sense of why this is a magazine people enjoyed'. - they were publishing bayley all along, f'r'example. if you look through the digest format years before the covers went all lol 60s it's interesting to see how the new wave usual suspects are slowly taking over a bunch of more normal british sf stuff. bob shaw. that period also featured terry pratchett's second published story & godhelpus harry harrison's 'bill, the galactic hero'

Ha. The last Harry Harrison I forced myself to read was a hhhwhhaaiff (sp?) about a transatlantic tunnel between England and it's colony in the southern half of North America

ok what is good harry harrison? cause the men from pig and robot is great young adult sf imo.

Dunno. I used to like the Stainless Steel Rat stuff when I was a nipper. Make Room, Make Room! is Soylent Green without the trick ending or cool into montage

Just read a few paragraphs of Barrington Bayley. Guess the appeal must be the crazy plots and ideas cuz as a stylist he makes Asimov look like Nabokov.

There's an image. Thomp you were right about the affordable Langdon Jones New SF--Amazon has it for like 33 cents from UK and US! So I ordered it from the Motor City, also the New Worlds anthology, the one w cover posted upthread April 6, for 50 cents. You guys better be right about those!

A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! is fun Harrison, if not mind-blowing. Proto steampunk from before steampunk became annoying.

Am currently reading this:http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1616960655.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg, which is a time-travel/detective/global apocalypse novel getting rave reviews, and I'm enjoying it but not as much as the trave reviews made me think I would. A solid B+ (partly good because it's only 200 pages, whereas most writers would have pushed it out to a swollen and unnecessary 500p)

Her biggest thing was the novella "Beggars in Spain," I think, some kind of Childhood's End evolutionary leap, which I haven't gotten around to yet.

On the colonial side that book was called Tunnel Through The Deeps

The Beggars in Spain novella was great. I know she expanded it into a novel, but haven't read that version

Her 80s/early 90s recklessness got me back into SF, not her alone, but she sure helped. Esp short stories and novellas, but this novel too (couldn't find a bigger image, sorry)
http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1232324863l/1400457.jpg

Kress expanded Beggars in Spain into the Sleepless trilogy: Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers, and Beggars Ride. I enjoyed them all.

Just picked up Tim Powers' latest, but it's a little down the queue at the moment.

Just read a few paragraphs of Barrington Bayley. Guess the appeal must be the crazy plots and ideas cuz as a stylist he makes Asimov look like Nabokov.

pretty harsh imo. obv one doesn't read most of this stuff for the prose but it doesn't strike me as particularly bad.

Sorry, it was Bob Shaw I meant

c/p ledge's reaction for my reaction for that

No actually it was Barrington Bayley. Maybe if it was particularly bad I would have liked it more

Maybe there should be a Barrington Bayley vs. Bob Shaw poll, so skeptic septics know which one to try first

I actually like a lot of Bob Shaw!

i like the three i've read, though i don't remember one of them, and another had a rather bad middle-aged-sf-writer-tries-to-get-women's-lib character

does anyone know anything about kate wilhelm? for some reason i had her down as tiresome enviromentalist but her 'somerset dreams' has been the most interesting surprise in that damon knight anthology so far - v effectively creepy and nicely underexplained