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

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.

yeah that's the point! it's about the eradication of an entire race in the face of a bureaucratic snafu

but done better and differently than a lot of SF writers would do it, but without the annoying poetaster attitude to SF that a lot of slumming would-be nobel laureates would adopt

i've looked at the massive combined volumes before and there is no way in hell i could read that thing. it looks like punishment.

i don't know why i've never been interested in lessing. i've looked at many of her books over the years and i never want to read any of them. as far as sf/fantasy/mysticism goes give me le guin or give me death. as a present i gave my mother-in-law one of le guin's most hippie new age earth mother books and the cool thing about it was that the book came with a tape of original sf new age songs related to the people in the book!

lol which one? is it 'always coming home' bcz that i have a copy of that i pick up once a year and go 'maybe next year'

i STILL think about Four Ways to Forgiveness by le guin. all the time! i never wanted those stories to end. i need to read all the hainish books.

x-post - i'll have to look up the title.

Filk has been defined as folk music, usually with a science fiction or fantasy theme, but this definition is not exact. Filkers have been known to write filk songs about a variety of topics, including but not limited to tangentially related topics such as computers and cats.

yes, that's the one. always coming home. i've never read it either!

"A box set edition of the book (ISBN 0-06-015456-X), comes with an audiocassette entitled Music and Poetry of the Kesh, featuring 10 musical pieces and 3 poetry performances by Todd Barton. The book contains 100 original illustrations by Margaret Chodos."

"The book weaves around the story of a Kesh woman called Stone Telling, who lived for years with her father's people—the Dayao or Condor people, whose society is rigid, patriarchal, hierarchical and militarily expansionist. The story fills less than a third of the book, with the rest being a mixture of Kesh cultural lore (including poetry, prose of various kinds, mythos, rituals, and recipes), essays on Kesh culture, and the musings of the narrator, "Pandora". Some editions of the book were accompanied by a tape of Kesh music and poetry."

xp - yeah it sort of makes sense in that ACH's back half is a faux-anthropological dossier abt the kesh, so why not

wouldn't want to offer odds on whether the m. and p. of the k. is any good though

i mean it is very heavy metal. Stone Telling! stoner metal. i admire the effort. even if i've never felt like reading it.

i STILL think about Four Ways to Forgiveness by le guin. all the time! i never wanted those stories to end.

u know there is another story in the series in the 'birthday of the world' collection?

yeah that's the point! it's about the eradication of an entire race in the face of a bureaucratic snafu

thing is i think lessing's interpretation of 'bureaucratic snafu' is a lot less generous than mine.