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

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how bad is david brin?

Only read Sundiver. Can't remember anything about the prose and the wikipedia summary makes it sound ridiculous, but the uplift and client/patron thing is a good idea imo, makes for a slightly different spin on the 'humanity in galactic peril' tale, subtler and deeper than the usual attack by aggressive hegemonising swarm.

btw iirc i enjoyed it.

Is that a takeoff on that Goya painting of Saturn and his offspring a few posts up?

yeah, the composition is ... not identical, but v much there

my copy of 'blindsight' arrived today! i am quite excited about it, particularly about how it comes with this whole readymade fiona wilco cody apple chestnutt narrative to help me process how i am to feel about its aesthetic worth

Yes. please keep us posted on that (keywords: "fiona," "apple"). So, now that we've reamed out two of the Big Three, Heinlein and Asimov, what do yall think of Clarke? I'll resist spoiling the only story I can recall (one abt nova/Star of Bethlehem oops). Please incl any opinions of collabs w Stephen Baxter.

thus far it is the best book about space vampires i have ever read. there are bits of heinlein and asimov i love, i feel possibly i have not said that loud enough. clarke i can take or leave. i had no idea they were the Big Three, though, i suppose that's a Thing.

thing I used to see in zines. They were the ones who made the most money, known beyond genre-heads etc.

Clarke definitely the best of the three. His "collabs" with Baxter are pretty much entirely written by Baxter.

Am reading Frank Herbert's 'Hellstrom;s Hive', which is mad and quite fun but also full of horrible attitudes to women

i just got something called hellstrom's hive from netflix, is that the same thing?

Would think so, weren't there other Hellstrom books/movies? Hellstrom Chronicles at least. Also, hellstromism, a form of "mindreading" via "musclereading," I guess means body language (or "body language"), practiced by stage/club magicians, named for one of them, dunno if Herbert lifted anything beyond the name, if that much. Don't remember reading Herbert, even Dune, though I did--def remember David Lynch's loon Dune, with magnificently punping sandworms--maybe the first surround-sound movies I experienced. So quirky it's kind of an anti-blockbuster in some ways (Ebert loved how the characters went all though this extravagant set, into a tiny plain room for a key cnnference). But also feasting on the big resources.

oh wait hellstrom's hive is the one where the dudes show up to investigate a creepy commune, right? i've totally read that.

The book (Hive) is a sort of spin-off of the movie (Chronicles)--the movie was freaky semi-documentary about insects, the book is about how the fake host of the movie (Nils Hellstrom) is actually part of an evolving human hive based on insect life

has anyone read peter watt's other books

yes. but not me.

thanks for that, v helpful

just trying to keep thread alive until one of them arrives

Only read Sundiver. Can't remember anything about the prose and the wikipedia summary makes it sound ridiculous, but the uplift and client/patron thing is a good idea imo, makes for a slightly different spin on the 'humanity in galactic peril' tale, subtler and deeper than the usual attack by aggressive hegemonising swarm.

― Touché Gödel (ledge), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 8:17 AM (2 days ago)

Brin's Uplift stories were always what I wanted Star Trek's Prime Directive-centered stories to be - messy and with the altruism executing at a tactical-level rather than strategic. The Wikipedia article mentions Tikkun Olam as a thematic influence, and I wouldn't disagree with that. Kiln People is a great golem story.

Come to think of it, I like Brin's non-Uplift books far more.

what do yall think of Clarke?

There's a thread: Arthur C Clarke RIP

I also wrote this and still stand by it: http://www.quartzcity.net/2008/03/20/the-enigma-of-arthur-c-clarke/

Since Clarke and Brin have been invoked, are there any other Kim Stanley Robinson fans out there?

I'm a big fan of the Mars Trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt. I bought the climate change trilogy, managed about 100 pages and gave up. Haven't read anything by him since.

Years Of Rice and Salt is amazing. Read Mars Trilogy, the first climate change one (not bad, nothing special though) and his Galileo book which was good, not great.

Still an author I look forward to, and I need to go back to the climate change novels and give them another go.

Oh, and the Orange County trilogy is fucking amazing! I think I'd recommend those above all his other books.

so i was at the hepcat record store a little while back to see some hep music and i bought a couple of old copies of Forced Exposure - appropriately enough old man coley was manning the cash register - and in one issue there was this loooooong interview - conducted by old man coley - with writer Rudy Rucker. who i had never heard of. apparently he's also a genius science writer as well as a beatnik sci-fi writer. really made me want to find some of his books. most of which are probably out of print? he cranked out a bunch of ace paperbacks. Rucker liked to call his stuff "transrealism" or "slipstream" as opposed to cyberpunk, though i guess the cyberpunk guys considered him one of them.

other authors i've never read mentioned in the Rucker interview:

Lewis Shiner
Lucius Shepard
Michael Blumlein
Marc Laidlaw
Richard Kadrey
Norman Spinrad
Robert Sheckley
Ian Watson

I have to go back to those OC books. Don't think I've even seen them in a store or library.

xpost

although now i think i must have read spinrad and sheckley in short story collections. their names look really familiar...

Meant to post this the other day: I just read Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man for the first time. I'm sure I read some Bester as a teen, but I was incredibly unimpressed with this one. Maybe it's aged poorly but I have no idea why this is such a classic.

There's a Spinrad story that has stuck with me -- all except the title, unfortunately -- about the US govt turning San Francisco into a big internment camp for people with HIV/AIDS. A cure is found and turns out to be sexually transmitted as well, and the main carrier of the cure is in the city so there are people trying to sneak in to where she lives, having sex with people all day every day to spread the cure. Govt troops killing anybody trying to get in as well as get out, iirc.

now i want to read kim stanley robinson after looking at his books on his wiki page...man, too much to read. i should have started earlier...

has anyone read peter watt's other books

Yes. His first 3 books are a trilogy of interesting ideas and pretty nihilistic attitudes--not as good as Blindsight, but still very good

He also has written a video game tie-in which is not good.

Rudy Rucker. who i had never heard of. apparently he's also a genius science writer as well as a beatnik sci-fi writer. really made me want to find some of his books. most of which are probably out of print? he cranked out a bunch of ace paperbacks.

I've read his 'Ware' trilogy--Hardware, Software and Wetware. They're interesting, but not brilliantly written. Like 1980s IT-aware version of 1950s magazine SF.

I was a big fan of Terry Carr's 3rd series of Ace SF Specials -- there was a lot of talent bubbling up from seemingly nowhere in 84-85. I came to them at a weird angle: I was a big fan of Carter Scholz' criticism in The Comics Journal and he cowrote one of the Ace novels, so I followed up with others in the imprint, which is how I discovered William Gibson, K.S. Robinson, Shepard, Swanwick, Kadrey, etc.

Jesus, where to start with Rucker?

His writing style is OK at best, but Great Cthulhu his stories are completely off-the-channel insane. There's nothing out there to compare them to except a theoretical mashup of Syd Barrett, Mondo 2000 Magazine, and Douglas Hofstadter. Consensual reality is at best slippery and probably just a product of mathematics anyway, so let's just go out to where things go asymtotic and see what happens. The four *ware books (Software, Wetware, etc.) are the most well-known/canonical, but the high bonkers level is pretty consistent throughout all of his work. White Light is my favorite, even if it does read like a couple of existential stoner mathematicians trying to out-weird each other. Spacetime Donuts is seriously my favorite book title ever. Hegel is Rucker's great-great-great grandfather and, well, it shows.

Scott - have you read <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storming_the_Reality_Studio";>Storming The Reality Studio</a>? It's a post-modern SF anthology that functions as an ersatz cyberpunk Dangerous Visions and includes many of the authors you mentioned.

There's a Spinrad story that has stuck with me -- all except the title, unfortunately -- about the US govt turning San Francisco into a big internment camp for people with HIV/AIDS.

That would be Journals Of The Plague Years.

Lewis Shiner

I heart his stuff a lot (Slam is the best skate-punk crypto-anarchist novel about Texas ever) and recommend everything, though I haven't been keeping up with the short stories. All of his work is downloadable for free at http://www.fictionliberationfront.net/

Lucius Shepard

Magical-realist. Never got into his stuff all that much except for his film crit essays, which I don't believe he's doing anymore. Might still be online.

Marc Laidlaw

I went to elementary school with him, but he was a couple years ahead of me. Only read Dad's Nuke (which is great, worth tracking down), but AFAIK he works in games now. I think he's the main guy behind Half-Life.

Fuck, I can't work and post to ILX at the same time. Can't switch between HTML and BBCode reliably enough.

ha, i just ordered a copy of dad's nuke after flicking through the half-life 2 production book

Yeah, Terry Carr was a good editor, also picked Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness for the Ace series. the Universe anthology series is worth checking out too. He wrote some fiction, but don't think I've read it. Robinson's The Wild Shore is post climate/civilization change, influenced by Twain and maybe Dickens (resourceful/vulnerable waifs), which is prtty hard to do right, but I got into it, lots of windswept etc. I completely concur w Elvis re Rudy Rucker. The math part of my brane got kicked in by a mule, but no prob at all tripping on RR's extrapolations (which are very low key or underplayed flamboyance, somehow--veteran teacher Rucker's congenially deadpan presentation, so as not to gild the lily--a crucial aspect of PKD's best stuff as well). One of his best non 'ware novels, is The Hollow Earth, about a young mountaineer who traipses downstream to Baltimore and gets recruited by Poe for an expedition into the Earth (Congress actually authorized funding of such, though not for Poe's use, far as I know)

And I know several people who aren't genre fans overall, but really enjoy Rucker in particular
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about 3/4 of the way through hellstrom's hive, trying to imagine the spy stuff as bourne identity instead of super clunky x-files precursor - that one amish alien orgy episode clearly ripped from the peruge subplot

this would make a good hollywood film, could be like a cross between bourne identity and thx 1138, maybe get some sort of visual look like i robot except w tons of heaving nude bodies and lots of dripping water

also these dudes are clearly the inspiration for the bene tleilax in general and the security dudes are a lot like mentats, there's a lot of ways in which janvert mirrors miles teg (all that clunky "think, miles think! what is going on here?" expository inner dialogue) and fancy mirrors the honored matres, swarming vs scattering vs jihad, vats vs stills, hive life and sietch life

it's fun to see the same obsessions that would pop up all throughout dune rendered in deadpan philip k dick

procreative stumps vs tleilaxu vats

a sympathetic hellstrom could be one of the great sci-fi film not-villians of all time

speaking of Lewis Shiner, I thought "Jeff Beck" should def be in a rock x sf anthology--maybe it is? Must be at least one such collection. It's in Shiner's own collection, which I haven't read, also posted xpost and sev other places.
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Ok afaik I've only read one Lewis Shiner story, 'Sticks', about a session drummer who falls for some young hip new rock chick. Had passages like

Stan himself liked to keep it simple. He was wearing a new pair of Lee Riders and a long-sleeved white shirt. The shirt set off the dark skin and straight black hair he'd inherited from his half-breed Comanche father. He had two new pairs of Regal Tip 5Bs in his back pocket and Converse All-Stars on his feet, the better to grip the pedals.

and although it was in an SF collection there was absolutely zero SF about it. So, meh.

stan sounds hawt

amazon is trying to sell me something called 'the mongoliad'

"the genesis of the project was in Stephenson's dissatisfaction with the authenticity of the medieval sword fighting scenes he had written into his Baroque cycle of novels"

what i really want is authenticity in my sword fighting scenes

"Jeff Beck" was be-careful-what-you-wish-for, no "You're a malted," but still pretty good of its kind.
what the hell, turn it up yall
credit: Perihelio
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