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

Here's the exact link, lest anyone start at the beginning and never come back to us
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/campbell_john_w_jr

Ahmed Khaled Towfik: Utopia--Egyptian dystopian SF. Really bad, gave up at p50

Enjoyed the Bradbury xpost thanks. Think he mentioned Poe as an early inspiration. Intriguing about Christopher Morley, never read him. Anybody read that James Tiptree Jr. bio?

I own it and flipped through it but, as is so often the case, haven't sat down and actually read it yet. Seems really good though.

hey scott you said you mostly read female authors, is that true for sf too? any recommendations? i <3 <3 <3 le guin and have lessing & butler on my to-do list.

you know, that isn't really true of SF. though i'm always looking for someone i like as much as le guin and wilhelm. i did finally read some andre norton last year and enjoyed what i read. but, as written above, the sheer AMOUNT of what she wrote can make it a flip of the coin as far as WHAT to read. i need more butler in my life! i think there is a thread for her. i'm a relative newby to SF. only really started reading in earnest in the last 5 or 6 years. and there is a ton of stuff i still need to get to. which is why this thread is good.

oh and you can't go wrong with james tiptree. she was the coolest. i'm always trying to track down novels of hers. i mostly read her stories in old anthologies.

i've got a copy of The Female Man by Joanna Russ on my to-read-pile, meant to be THE seminal seventies feminist SF nov

Other female sf auths, tho admittedly not on the level of LeGuin and Butler, but then, who is?

Connie Willis
Nicola Griffith

I'll think of more.

Margaret Atw...nah

nah.

Just tried a Connie Willis, Doomsday. I did like the middle ages part but her future oxford was extremely lacking in prescience, and the most of characters were identikit self-centred monomaniacs, in the service of some kind of 'confederacy of dunces' style farce that really doesn't appeal to me unfortunately.

Like I mentioned xpost, based on a couple of Year's Best stories, would like to check Vandana Singh's collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet. This ain't the cover, it's a Hubble pic from the author's site
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2007/16/images/h/formats/web.jpg

i remember female man being outstanding, but it has been a while

i just finished 'more than human' in that anthology and i am reading frederick pohl's 'gateway' for a second time

surprised to find the latter is from '76: in its ethos it seems earlier than that - a bit of what i think of as the good old space beagle spirit

but i guess the Typographical Experimentating is in some vague way a reaction to the new wave, as is (mb) the 'interiority' of framing the narrative as a guy's set of conversations with his analyst

which is a computer

er

more than human also has an analyst section come to think of it

i had a whole thesis about psychoanalysis and realist narrative earlier while i was sitting on the toilet but i have since forgotten about it

Ever read "The Death of Doctor Island"?

no, actually

w/r/t wolfe i have read new sun and long sun and the fifth head of cerberus, and i think that is it. they have copies of the uggglyyy gollancz fantasy masterworks new sun in the £2 bookstore in the same edition i already bought and read and threw away a decade ago and i am tempted to buy it and reread it because now it is in a slightly smaller format, i don't know why this seems to make sense to me

I haven't come across much of Wolfe's shorter fiction, but this is the best so far. Doctor Island is a therapeutic environment; his/its sessions with a certain poster child are pretty strenuous.

there's a 'definitive retrospective' of his short fiction which seems to draw heavily from 'the island of doctor death and other stories and other stories', which includes 'the death of doctor island' and 'the island of doctor death and other stories' and also 'the doctor of death island' but not 'the death of the island doctor'

He got the idea from being at Hugo or Nebula or Something Awards, and "The Island of Doctor Death" was announced as a winner. By the time Wolfe made it to the stage, the announcer realized his error (should've gotten there faster, Gene). Massive waves of contrition and sympathy; a friend told Wolfe he was a shoo-in next year, even if he wrote "The Death of Doctor Island." Which came true. But good story on its own, though never would have happened otherwise.

Back to female writers: I need to read some more Leigh Brackett, and Margaret St. Clair, also in this issue

http://www.coog.com/mogozuzu/images/Startln3.jpg

What about her husband?

I confess I just thought of Edmond "World-Wrecker" Hamilton as getting trapped in his space opera pioneer persona, not adaptable as Brackett. This goes back to xpost A Century Of Science Fiction, which presents "What's It Like Out There?" as Hamilton's fanboy-rejected move into a more thoughtful mode. The narrator can't tell the folks about on Earth about what it's really, really like out there, because he perceives that they don't really--really want to know and/or would be totally bummed out, like the fanboys. "So I went back to world-wrecking." But Wiki say this is actually (eventually) his most widely anthologized story, and that he did re-establish himself via "unsentimental, realistic" sf. So there's another one I need to catch up with.

pertinent link:

http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/02/books/women-and-science-fiction.html?scp=2&sq=vonda%20n%20mcintyre%20dreamsnake&st=cse&pagewanted=1

THERE is, of course, a certain degree of backlash. Although Ben Bova was the editor who devised the all-female issue of Analog in 1977 before taking over at Omni, he nevertheless issued a strong attack upon woman sf writers in a 1980 speech at a Philadelphia convention: ''Neither as writers nor as readers have you raised the level of science fiction a notch. Women have written a lot of books about dragons and unicorns, but damned few about future worlds in which adult problems are addressed.'' Richard Geis, editor of the small-press magazine SFR, protests that ''there must be a recognition of the emotional needs in fiction of the insecure young male who has made up the bedrock readership of SF for 50 years.''

nice to know i've always been justified in writing off ben bova

that quote by geis is even stranger. won't somebody think of the insecure young males?

well that one's just good business talk

lol, future worlds in which adult problems are addressed.

DON'T TALK TO ME ABOUT YOUR DRAGONS AND UNICORNS, WE HAVE A SERIOUS TASK AT HAND

talking of 'future worlds in which adult problems are addressed' i was going to c/p the cringeworthy section in gateway where the guy has an argument with his robotic shrink about oral sex but i decided against it

Wow seriously. Also no men write books about dragons and unicorns, so that's a fair cop.

but the Futurian Society is to blame.

I wouldn't dismiss a writer because of one blowhard screed, esp if he mainly writes fiction. "Good business talk" indeed, and with quite a ballast of self-perpetuating/arrested development effect. Was trying to google an article I thought was titled "The Women Male Science Fiction Writers Never See," or something like that, by Connnie Willis, I thought. Meanwhile, pretty good encyclopedia-type article on women science fiction writers
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/women_sf_writers

Then there's always Tiptree's "The Women Men Never See"--look out now, here it comes:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080119040143/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/tiptree2/tiptree21.html

Late to the party to make the "blank blank don't see" gag

The thing about that list of women writers is that...hmm...even I would say that some of them aren't very...good? The Warchild trilogy by Lowachee, for instance...I didn't finish it, and you know how I love mass-market sf. I'm very very fond of Sarah Zettel, though, and Nalo Hopkinson although I don't know who she's publishing with these days because it used to be us but not anymore (alas).

Who is us? Think it was meant to be an overview, not a blanket endorsement; lots of links anyway. Maureen f. NcHugh's China Mountain Zhang has made my readling list. Also need to get to Due, Hopkinson, more by M.Rickert, who got to me in Year's Best SF 14

gateway ends in a much weirder place than i had remembered or was expecting it to

Read Maureen McHugh's most recent story collection---really, really good, though the fact that the first story is about zombies may put some off (all the storie sare variations on ideas of the apocalypse)

would read. never heard of her. as you know, i share your apocalypse love.

yeah pretty cool review here
http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2011/12/b5a00076515d868f4a7e6d1daa143e33.jpg

oops I mean here well the picture goes w the review
http://io9.com/5869549/after-the-apocalypse-is-one-of-the-most-powerful-tales-of-the-near-future-youll-read-this-year

gateway ends in a much weirder place than i had remembered or was expecting it to

wth is that picture of?

found it. i guessed right. wow.

er, what is it

james: gateway ends with the narrator's robot analyst telling him how much he envies his being alive. - this is after i guess what is meant to be the triumphant conclusion to his analysis, which doesn't really work. the other odd thing about it is that the narrative in flashback has him being less and less successful and acting less and less under his own agency as he goes on. / and being kind of a spectacular asshole to a degree pohl maybe didn't mean.

us/mexico border fence.

haha, wow

OH oh oh Scott, read China Mountain Zhang!!!

okay. i read the zombie story that starts that collection. the link to the review has links to two stories by her. i liked it. always feel like scifi writers deserve better copyeditors/proofreaders though. even if its a story on an online site. i've learned to ignore it. i've read books by GENIUS SF writers that are loaded with typos and misspellings. not the writer's fault, that's for sure. i've never seen this in crime novels or mysteries or horror. i've never read westerns or naval carrier red october cold war thrillers, so, don't know if it happens there as much. burt it happens a lot in SF. maybe they just make so much SF that they can't afford to hire really good proofreaders.

Anyone read any Lessing? 'Canopus in Argos' has yet to grab my interest. A strange mix of sf, fantasy, mysticism, and vague allegory.

Yeah I think I should have investigated more on wikipedia before starting this. I mean it's always good to read outside of one's comfort zone but A reviewer of the book in the Los Angeles Times said that Shikasta is a "reworking of the Bible", hmm. Well, I'll carry on.

i read the first two. they were so awful. i might have been too young - i am intrigued/repelled by the idea of attempting to read them again. i mean, i only read The Marriages... out of sheer obstinacy, because of how much i hated Shikasta. it was like reading the phone book, but less coherent.

'the making of the representative' - can't remember the whole title, the fourth one - is a really good little book. i think lessing's approach to doing SF is interesting and good, but i think shikasta is kind of a hot mess.

One day Canopus instructs them to build a huge wall, to exact Canopean specifications, right around the girth of the planet. The construction takes the inhabitants years to complete, and when it is finished, Canopus tells the planet's representatives, leaders of each of the planet's main disciplines, to relocate all settlements north of the wall to the south. Canopus informs everyone that unfortunate interstellar "re-alignments" have taken place and that Planet 8 will soon experience an ice age.

these canopus dudes sound like incredible arseholes tbh. or to more helpfully relate it to lessing's religious interests, in the face of the evils of these interstellar re-alignments they must either be malicious arseholes or incompetent arseholes.