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

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

i love kate wilhelm! read more books by kate wilhelm!

that's probably not very helpful though...she's just a really interesting writer to me. great ideas. and she's not easy to pin down. she does many things well.

now i wanna find nancy kress books though. i don't think i've read anything by her. i'll have to look for them.

went to the used book store around the corner before i opened today and they had one nancy kress book but it wasn't one mentioned and i didn't feel like spending 6 bucks on it. so instead i got three paperback sturgeon collections. i have a couple already, but what the hell they were only like 2+ bucks apiece. (starshine, case & the dreamer, and visions and venturers)

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327567125l/872308.jpg

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3274/2717268527_67fc7d90b4.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Ynwo7UJJL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

so much simak at the used book store. kinda want it all.i dig that dude. totally missed out on the used book store's half-off sale last week. that's usually my twice a year sci-fi feast. dude has a LOT of science fiction. so many paperbacks.

Great covers! What Kress did he have?

uh....let me check.

i think it was *An Alien Light*. if its worth 6 bucks lemme know. i'm not made of money. and i have 5 zillion sci-fi books at home i still need to read.

I've read An Alien Light a couple of times and I own a cheap secondhand copy. It's not a great book but it is pretty good.

Yeah, but 6 for used? You could prob still buy a new mass market pb for a couple bucks more, I guess, long time since I did that (oh yeah, did buy a new copy of Years Best SF 15 for 7.99). Hold off, maybe ask if he's got any still in storage of the Tom Disch you were looking for.

Only have read Kate Wilhelm's "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang", which was pretty cool (clones, evolution, nuclear war, nice writing). Her page on the SF Encyclopedia lists a bunch of other interesting-looking stuff. (http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wilhelm_kate)

read some more!

ironic that i am still reading after doomsday - which is about people on spaceships fleeing the enemy after the destruction of their planet and how they are the last survivors of their species - cuz i keep putting it down to watch battlestar galactica on netflix. covers through time and space:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61Q4GOQZdWL._AA300_.jpg

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3089/2865131306_bc9b3b74d3.jpg

http://www.sfreviews.com/graphics/Poul%20Anderson_1961_After%20Doomsday.jpg

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1233199833l/1348341.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2bn8bIau7Z4/Ty11fcCD72I/AAAAAAAAIfI/6g8Or7uPqDk/s1600/19.jpg

http://c2.bibtopia.com/h/236/990/286990236.0.m.jpg

http://www.sf-leihbuch.de/covers/Anderson_DerUntergangDerErde.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iSmK7dfnS6c/S_kJWDiU8mI/AAAAAAAAA6c/2P8CSD2CjCc/s1600/hanno+distrutto.jpg

Ah, Dominic Flandry and the Polesotechnic League

Anybody read Thomas Burnett Swann? Today I saw this, it passed the random skim test, but I haven't bought it yet. Should I?
http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1236018124l/6116806.jpg

He grooves w the prehumans, pagans and poets, I got that much.

lol scott it was definitely necessary to show us every edition of 'after doomsday'

i just read a poul anderson story for the first time - for some reason in my head he's down as a triple-decker sword/sorcery guy - but he has the last story in the sf argosy - it's alright but a bit DO YOU SEE

think anderson's work splits between classical fantasy/s+s and 'hard' sf w/ a right-wing/libertarian edge - never really had much time for him, personally, but he sure was prolific!

yeah got a little carried away with the covers. sorry. i should actuallty start a sci-fi cover variation thread. it says a lot about how the future treated old future books!