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

At his best he was a master of a clean, fast-moving Dashiell Hammett kind of prose. At his worst he was like an aging Hemingway trying to punch everybody in the nose

always thought heinlein was a much better writer than asimov, at the simple level of the sentence

I agree with this (Asimov's pop-science columns possibly excepted).

i'm not terribly choosy, but i look at asimov books and i think about all the other stuff i could read instead.

Isn't that true of almost anybody compared to Asimov?
(ha xpost)

that's how i feel about most of the heinlein's, scott, i wonder if some day i will be stuck waiting for a train in a distant eastern european town and the only english language books in that town's bookstore will be samuel richardson and 'stranger in a strange land', and then i will know it is time

lamp, how is your box of 80s fantasy &c going, come and tell us about dragons

i just found a box of my books in the back of my store and gene wolfe's torturer series was in there. 4 books, i think? someone here or elsewhere said they were good. so, that might be my fantasy read for the year. though i guess they are partially SF. they look like fantasy. torturer fantasy. hope the torturer tortures a unicorn.

lol at heinlein's letter: 'i am ready to discuss this with your teacher, principal, or school board'

Word, I'd love to see YouTube of RAH enlightening my local school board re libertarian lifeboat engineering/sexual mores, in spaaace

speaking of heinlein juveniles i got a lot of love for "red planet"

where the dragons at u bores

Ha, Don.

Loved Red Planet 40 years ago. Thinking of rereading it.

RAH parody mentioned yesterday is purportedly by one Hitler I.E. Bonner

read Ted Chiang's collection of short stories this weekend thanks to a thread on ilx where someone had posted a link to the lifecycle of software objects. and this book did not disappoint at all, really enjoyed all the different stories. any recommendations for stuff that's a bit like chiang ?

scott, the wolfe books did really well in the sf/f poll lamp ran a while back:
THE ILX ALL-TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL RESULTS THREAD & DISCUSSION

the 'phone book' quality of canopus in argos is now becoming apparent. and it's so mean spirited, so ungenerous! there was a bit earlier on when she was quite otm, in a clear and simple way, about the stupidity of our arms-oriented culture but the endless hammering home of the message that all of humanity is ignorant selfish blinkered brutish moronic forgetful thoughtless, it becomes quite wearying.

any recommendations for stuff that's a bit like chiang

Try EARLY Greg Egan short stories, especially the collections 'Luminous' and 'Axiomatic'

Really? When did he jump shark again?

I think 'Teranesia' was his last truly excellent book. Since then each book has been sadly more indigestible than the last. Still full of boggling ideas, but increasingly drained of readability and character.

I relate Chiang's appeal to Vandana Singh (stories I've come across in anthologies, like Year's Best SF), and Leguin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Le Guin, that is

ok thanks for the recs all of you. now i have to go see if these are available as ebooks cos i live in the future and we don't have decent libraries here

From the newly revived, very educational Eden Ahbez, Jack Parsons, and other LA kooks... ILE thread, a post I'd forgotten (don't know who he's quoting)
"For Heinlein, personal liberation included sexual liberation, and free love was a major subject of his writing starting from the 1939 For Us, The Living. Beyond This Horizon (1942) cleverly subverts traditional gender roles in a scene in which the protagonist demonstrates his archaic gunpowder gun for his friend and discusses how useful it would be in dueling --- after which the discussion turns to the shade of his nail polish. '—All You Zombies—' (1959) is the story of a person who undergoes a sex change operation, goes back in time, has sex with herself, and gives birth to herself..."

― andy --, Monday, 24 October 2005 18:17 (6 years ago) Permalink

i'm not terribly choosy, but i look at asimov books and i think about all the other stuff i could read instead.

prob not an unfair judgment if you're older than 12 but i reread the 'foundation' stories a while back and they're still somehow good; helps that they get crazier and more convoluted as they go on. the one time IA wrote above his own (middling) abilities as a writer and produced something weird and immortal.

I ended up identifying with/feeling compassion from a safe distance for the Mule, when his ID was revealed (if I say how old I was, would be something of a spoiler)

I got the Trilogy when I joined the SF Book Club, whoo hoo! Never read any more of 'em though.

i still think those "fluffily inconsequential kids' books" mentioned slightly upthread are among the best things done in science fiction. i don't know much about him beyond 'starship troopers', though, i get the impression he had a bit of a dave simish life crisis

sounds about right. i read and liked all of the 'future history' stories in HS. never made it all the way through any of the long novels, even 'stranger.'

only heinlein i can recall reading is 'roads must roll'. it sucks.

egan's "dark integers": http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0805/DarkIntegers.shtml

starts really slow, like drawing-room slow, but gets very exciting by the end.

prob not an unfair judgment if you're older than 12 but i reread the 'foundation' stories a while back and they're still somehow good; helps that they get crazier and more convoluted as they go on.

When I read the Foundation trilogy in SF book club we all hated Foundation - clunky plotting, awful characterisation, annoyingly invincible heroes, etc. But it all got a lot more entertaining as the second book went on. In particular, all the mind control stuff in the second and third book is very entertaining, and the bit at the end of the third book where a succession of people advance their contradictory Big Ideas of What Is Going On (in the manner of the climactic scene in an old-school detective novel) is actually funny.

And the Mule is a great character, far more interesting than the usual kind of cackling evil spacelord.

i wasn't actually slamming asimov TOO hard in saying that i'd rather read something else. i'm relatively new to SF and there is SO MUCH i haven't read. and it just always seems like something else catches my eye. plus, his books always look kinda boring. even the robot collections. and i love robots! and basically i've got boxes and boxes of sci-fi at home and at my store that totally doesn't look boring. it looks totally cool. and lots of stuff by writers i already know and like. i mean, i might get to him someday.

oh and i liked that simak book. Ring Around The Sun. Pretty damning indictment of cold war paranoia and fear for 1953. or maybe everyone was writing damning indictments of the cold war in 1953, what do i know? the ending was too rushed and pat though. i know a sci-fi writer is good when i realize that a lesser writer could dine out on the plot of this one novel and create some epic endless 20 book series out of the ideas in it.

i might be off of this thread for awhile though cuz i picked up this book that has two novels by swinburne in it. swinburne! what sold me was the long-ass edmund wilson intro and the fact that they are high society novels filled with swinburne's obsession with flogging(!). the man lived to be whipped and flogged apparently. Eton is the culprit. Anyway, I REALLY kinda wanna know how he ties up (no pun intended) these obsessions with mid-19th century country house life pithiness. totally bizarro. wilson kinda does this BUYER BEWARE thing in his intro. he's like: man, these novels are amazing and way better than the poetry and its too bad he didn't follow the prose path, but, uh, i gotta warn you...

although swinburne's poetry inspired HP Lovecraft. so that's something.

re asimov -- The Gods Themselves is as I recall one of his more interesting and ambitious novels that veers away from his golden age tropes, at least a little.

Yeah, and I wonder if the Mule turns up in any of his later books? Never read the one in which the robots met the Foundation or whatever they met. I did like the short story where the robot got tired of watching his human friends grow up, reach their prime, then gradually get older and fade away or expire suddenly--he decides he wants to and/or needs to die, though he isn't designed or built to. That certainly didn't seem too trope-y, although not big HEY BIG EXPERIMENT in lights, either. How are the ones with his robot dectective? Scott, didn't know Swinburne wrote novels, but you might also like Venus In Furs, by Leopold van Sacher Masoch (supposedly related to Marianne Faithfull. I donno how it is, never read it. Did read some by Ronald Firbank, who didn't seem overtly kinky--though I may have missed the code--but an appealingly quirky sensibility, in his own way/world.

i'm not really into kinky. but these books are so old and they read like modern fiction kinda. plus, they are weird. i might not make it through both of them though. we'll see.

apparently - even though he didn't think he was a great writer - swinburne loooooooved de sade. would quote him or mention him in almost every letter he wrote. with like 19th century version of winkie emoticons ;) (cuz he thought de sade was hilarious and titillating)

I did like the short story where the robot got tired of watching his human friends grow up, reach their prime, then gradually get older and fade away or expire suddenly--he decides he wants to and/or needs to die, though he isn't designed or built to. That certainly didn't seem too trope-y, although not big HEY BIG EXPERIMENT in lights, either.

think this was 'the bicentennial man'? asimov always listed that among his favorites, along with 'the last question.' the early robot stories with susan calvin are good, though i hated that screenplay harlan ellison wrote (HE is maybe the most hit-and-miss SF writer ever).

Hey, Scott, what are the two Swinburne books called?

is heinlein the most hated sf writer on ilx?

I thought it was Orson Scott Card

Don't forget that Heinlein's post-1973 decline is directly attributive to his health, or lack thereof. He had a stroke and some sort of weird stomach ailment - both of which were complicated by being a heavy-duty smoker. His writing never fully recovered from that.

As for Simak, I always liked The Visitors. Pretty good little alien invasion story in which the aliens are mysterious, featureless black boxes.

Oh man I should read more Simak. When I was young I read Highway of Eternity which was a strange, confusing, unsettling book that always stuck with me.

"Hey, Scott, what are the two Swinburne books called?"

Love's Cross Currents and Lesbia Brandon. both written in the 1860's. Love's Cross Currents came out under a pseudonym while Swinburne was alive and Lesbia Brandon didn't get published until long after he was dead.

lesbia brandon is a great name for just about anything

Try Simak's City too.

Speaking of Swinburne, I've always meant to read some fiction by William Morris, one of his Pre-Raphaelite buddies; incl The Well At The World's End, always mentioned as a big influence, esp. on Tolkien--then again, I've never managed to read Tolkien. More likely to get to The House On The Borderline and almost def. The Night Land, both by William Hope Hodgson. The usual take on WHH is that he was one of those guys who had the great ideas, but an awkward style, at least in these books (and most of his).

House on the borderland is awesome and completely nuts, swinging from gritty and wordly attacks by swine-creatures to an amazing hallucinated episode of accelerated perception and the end of the solar system, and back again, with little rhyme or reason. Theres also a bizarre and turgidly romantic episode but at only 100 pages it's an easy read. The Nightland otoh I never managed to finish, too obscure, pointless, protracted and dull.

The House on the Borderlands is a great purple prose fever dream of a novel

And that's a recommendation