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

or instead of slicing through them with a knife. see, i even become powerless to describe his concentrated...indescribable...shadow vibrations!

see, the trick is to picture an alien typing up a pulp sci-fi novel. cuz the construction and language can be quite demented. and out of this world.

which reminds me, i was gonna start a harry keeler thread, but i've never actually read any of his books. just read that neil gaiman thing in the NYT and then went to the harry keeler society website and got lost there for a an hour or more:

http://site.xavier.edu/polt/keeler/

the paragraph that gaiman quoted was enough to hook me:

“For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter’s ‘Barr-Bag,’ which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2,163 pearl buttons; nor of — in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel — or Suing Sophie!”

NYT thing here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/neil-gaiman-shares-his-reading-habits.html?pagewanted=all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Stephen_Keeler

the guy who puts out the keeler reprints has the most incredible catalog:

http://www.ramblehouse.com/alphabeticalauthor.htm

i love the disclaimer on this massive keeler:

THE MATILDA HUNTER MURDER

It all began with a mysterious black satchel stitched closed with silver wire. Mrs. Matilda Hunter, Jerry Evans’ landlady, finds the satchel and leaves it in his room—and then is heinously murdered. Before long, Jerry finds out about the contents of the satchel—a device known as the Michaux Death Ray—and he’s off on an odyssey that in the first Ramble House edition was in three volumes. An odyssey that only a died-in-the-wool Keelerite could handle. If you have what it takes to follow the webwork master’s labyrinthine plot, this is the 1.5 pound book for you. Otherwise you might want to try an easier Keeler before tackling this one.

This 589-page trade paperback contains the complete text of the novel written in 1931.

THE SKULL IN THE BOX

A man is standing on a street corner holding a crimson hatbox. An archbishop walks up to him and asks, “What’s in the box, my son?” The man replies, “Wah Lee’s skull. I cracked Vann’s pete.”

From this unlikely scenario, Harry Stephen Keeler has fashioned a four-volume courtroom saga that is unique in American literature. Originally published in the 30s as four books:

THE MAN WITH THE MAGIC EARDRUMS

THE MAN WITH THE CRIMSON BOX

THE MAN WITH THE WOODEN SPECTACLES

THE CASE OF THE LAVENDER GRIPSACK

it is now, for the first time, published in one trade pa-perback or hardback volume. Some people consider the SKULL IN THE BOX series Harry Stephen Keeler’s masterpiece.

There are 350,000 words on the 436 pages in this book. Read them and you’ll know why Bill Pronzini called Keeler “the first great alternative writer.” $25

he kinda makes gertrude stein and sam beckett look like pikers. first chapter of The Man With The Magic Eardrums:

http://www.ramblehouse.com/magiceardrumschapter.htm

man so many things i want to read from this thread! i'm still reading wild seed (but nearing the end) and i am thoroughly in love with octavia butler.

picked up three pamela sargent-edited Women Of Wonder paperback collections. excited to read them. first in the series has a long excellent intro/essay by sargent on the history of women writers of sci-fi and also women IN sci-fi through the decades. very interesting/illuminating. first collection has stories by: judith merril, katherine maclean, marion zimmer bradley, anne mccaffrey, sonya dorman, kit reed, kate wilhelm, carol ernshwiller, ursula k. le guin, chelsea quinn yarbro, joanna russ, and vonda n. mcintyre. the stories are from the 40's to the 70's. anyway, that's what i'm gonna read next.

I'm going to have to just break down and order The Female Man from Amazon or something. 35 years of going to bookstores and I've never seen any Joanna Russ in any store around here. Fucken boonies.

i want her novels too. i might just check the store around the corner from me. hey, he had some rudy rucker books, so you never know. he's got andre norton up the butt though. man oh man i have never seen so many norton paperbacks in one place. maybe a hundred.
at one of my pal's used record stores i picked up: jack vance - future tense (4 story collection) and alfred bester - the computer connection. i was tempted to get the three volume PKD story collections they had but i didn't go for it. i have so many of his books that i haven't even read yet. plus they were ten bucks apiece and i didn't feel like spending the 30 bucks. wouldn't have been any fun buying just one. they had some nice hardcover dick originals too but they were priced fancy.

I started reading a Kate Wilhelm last night -- the Clewiston Test -- and my wife got all excited at the idea that there was such a thing as feminist SF (apropos of Russ). I forget how sealed off SF is to normal people.

Finished LLaurent Binet's HHhH, which was pretty gripping. THe actual prose is nothing special (though that could be the translator, who is a bad writer of English novels), but the story and the telling of it are really amazing.

That last bit is in the wrong thread.

adding all these feminist sci-fi writers to my list!

you have to remember, the first sci-fi novel was written by a feminist woman.

Olaf Stapledon?

there is a good harlan ellison quote in the intro of women of wonder where he says that women writers (of the 60's and early 70's) are responsible for freeing sci-fi of some of the old hoary cliches and tenets (kind of no duh). that people like russ and le guin and wilhelm felt no compulsion to play by the pulp sci-fi rules and this inspired all kinds of writers - young and old - to toss the old handbooks away. that was the gist of his quote anyway. i'm paraphrasing.

although being relatively new to sf i kinda can't resist some ancient 40s and 50s cliches. i go back and forth from decade to decade becaause i am from the future. but in the 60's and 70's i can imagine it was quite liberating to read these wild new ideas. i know i'm inspired by the ideas right now!

(in the quote he also mentions *doris piserchia* and i don't think i know her at all. someone else to check out.)

no silly frankenstein.

Ha, of course. Also, forgot about this thread: frankinstien

can't stop buying paperbacks. picked up The Time Hoppers by Robert Silverberg, The Two Of Them by Joanna Russ (the only Russ they had around the corner), The Exile Waiting by Vonda McIntyre, AND to continue the theme, a feminist sci-fi collection edited by vonda mcintyre and susan janice anderson called *Aurora:beyond Equality* ("amazing tales of the ultimate sexual revolution"!) from 1976 featuring raccoona sheldon, james tiptree jr, dave skal, mildred downey broxon, ursula k. le guin, joanna russ p.j. plauger, craig strete, and marge piercy.

i actually did read a sci-fi book about a robot by marge piercy years ago. she of the famous 70's feminist poetry.

rest in peace, big man. your imagination is an inspiration to me.

http://lovecraft1890.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/raybradbury.jpg

the powers that be did not choose the correct nonagenarian to go this week, dammit

Who would have been the correct choice? I did read xpost Triton before I read Dhalgren, dug both. Scott, have you read The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination? Both commonly said to be much better than the Computer Connection, though I have'nt read it. Van Vogt might be like Mencken (and my sister) said about Dreiser: " He's a genius who can't write." A reaction to An American Tragedy, I think; haven't read that, but no prob with Sister Carrie. Some said the same of Eugene O'Neill--maybe George Lucas too? His actors hated having to wrestle with his dialogue in the orig Star Wars movies.

oh yeah i know demolished and stars are the famous/better ones i just buy everything i see by him. never seen that one.

yeah dreiser was famously america's best bad writer. culmulative effect of his books more important/powerful than his clumsy sentences and lumpy structures.

i'm bumming because i left my octavia butler book at my sister's place in boston :( i was halfway through "mind of my mind".

Get her to mail it, you gotta finish that! Kim Stanley Robinson's latest, the HuffPo commentator/interviewer may not quite get it
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-cope/2312-an-extraordinary-vision_b_1550548.html
reminds me of JM Keynes reply to "But in the long run--": "We'll all be dead."

My favourite of Delaneys, based on only reading a few, is Babel-17. Fizzing with cool ideas, really vibrant, exciting, clever use of sexual "perversity", and not 900 pages long.

Finally read A Visit From The Goon Squad, past present and future days like xpost The Four Gated City in that regard (there's some jumping back and firth, but also mostly going forward). It pulled me along much more quickly than most, and I need to re-read, a few bits a bit off, but mostly very fine, kind like early DeLillo, but without the tendency to turn into a set of monologues. Chapters which could stand on thier own as short stories, and at least in some cases have, but not too loose, also she leads us toward implications and fecund gaps (one of the characters, a "slightly autistic" child, is a connoisseur of pauses in songs, "Foxey Lady," etc)Several characters look fwd in part in oroder to look back, bending light to gain perspective, but def not always thinking "This will all seem funny." Lot of humor though, quite a spectrum of viewpoints, insights. emotions evoked.

http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2012/06/18/le-guin-s-hypothesis/

well, yes, but also no

"If critics and teachers gave up insisting that one kind of literature is the only one worth reading, it would free up a lot of time for them to think about the different things novels do and how they do it, and above all, to consider why certain individual books in every genre are, have been for centuries, and will continue to be more worth reading than most of the others."

I'm not really certain that (at any level but the most middlebrow) (though 'middlebrow' is kind of strawmannish and I feel like I should avoid it) anyone is insisting that; in my experience 'critics' as a body are either i. decidedly catholic in their taste ii. persnickety in ways that don't map onto high-lit-vs-lowbrow-lit or iii. of the belief that the only things really worth reading are early modern religious narratives or the best bits of ezra pound or whatever

i feel like 'it's all literature' is just a reduction too far. -- that we need a genuine awareness of what the codes of the particular kind of lit. we're reading happen to be. (delany more helpful than le guin on this.) ('paraliterature'.)

Because there is the real mystery. Why is one book entertaining, another disappointing, another a revelation and a lasting joy? What is quality? What makes a good book good and a bad book bad?

Not its subject. Not its genre. What, then? That’s what good book-talk has always been about.

well, yes but also no -- we're not going to get very far trying to read books without some kind of idea of the contextual factors. knowing what the 'genre' and 'subject' of hogg vs babel-17 vs in the valley of the next of spiders are is a pretty important first step in being able to come to a fair judgement of them. -- tbf i don't think le guin is really as un-nuanced as all that, but i think when she has to respond to not-very-interesting articles like the new yorker one she doesn't really bring her a game to it. but much of her work seems to rely pretty heavily on the reader approaching them as a reader of a genre and using that awareness to understand what she's doing.

& i think the bit i quote there pretty much directly contradicts the previous bit, which i mostly agree with, bar one line:

Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc…. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies.

Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral.

Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.

This makes the Puritan snobbery of “higher” and “lower” pleasures irrelevant, and very hard to defend.

Of course every reader will prefer certain genres and be bored or repelled by others. But anybody who claims that one genre is categorically superior to all others must be ready and able to defend their prejudice. And that involves knowing what the “inferior” genres actually consist of, their nature and their forms of excellence. It involves reading them.

I'm not really certain that (at any level but the most middlebrow) (though 'middlebrow' is kind of strawmannish and I feel like I should avoid it) anyone is insisting

you can call it 'middlebrow' or call it '1-1' but ime (yes yes) this is the level that most critics and 'teachers' are @.

i think the real problem w/that newyorker article is that the dude writing it has wrong ideas about books and books-as-art that make it impossible for him to think well about genre and has him intelligent designing around his prejudices...

much of her work seems to rely pretty heavily on the reader approaching them as a reader of a genre and using that awareness to understand what she's doing

Really? Inasmuch as I even know what that means I would say that doesn't apply to her. She writes about people, and societies, and how we can or should behave towards one another. That the societies aren't earth's and the people aren't always human seems almost incidental.

question:

can anyone tell me what the food service is called in harry harrison's 'stainless steel rat' books? i have vivid memories of the contraption or conveyance or whatever that produced the food in, like, diners or whatever—i thought they were just called automats in the book but a quick google search doesn't turn up anything—as being more or less human-free.

MacSwineys?

chapter 12 here: http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80093/Harrison_-_A_Stainless_Steel_Rat_Is_Born.html

huh, i remember it as less satirically anti-late-capitalism-dystopian. maybe it was just the charm, to an adolescent, of living in a mcdonalds where robots make you cheeseburgers.

Plenty of sf is still robots making you cheeseburgers, don't worry. Re Van Vogt xpost getting the Dreiser pass (" A genius who can't write," Mencken said of D.; "Often great and never good"-Xgau on Crazy Horse), most of us and certainly most sf writers must rely on talent and skills. Too many sf writers have the concept and/or the spirit, but drop the ball too often. Thomp, nevermind the essay, read those stories! In the same issue! And tell us what you think!

So I read The City And ytiC ehT, which seemed like an annoyingly complicated police procedural at first, but I guess I got schooled like visitors and citizens must, in these intersecting/interspersed/separated/conjoined city-states. The frequently mentioned crosshatching is also of thriller and science fiction, if social conditioning and urban math can provide a plausible, sufficiently s.f. answer to "How can you be in two places at once (while unseeing one of the places you're so not in)?" Plus, the emotional subtext gradually heats the skin of the social organism, at the same time as action rises to balance and carry fwd all the dialogue and plotting yadda-yadda--takes a while, though. At first I was sure it would have worked better as a novelette, novella, short novel, one of them things, but by the end, maybe not.

Checking Path Into The Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction, from the mid-60s. No ed or translator credits, though intro by Judith Merrill. She's frustrated by some of the translations, but so far so good, with no text in/ knowledge of Russian for comparison anyway (had more trouble w The City..., which maybe was supposed to seem "translated" from tough-guy East Eurosky)Translation may have added to the effect of a key passage in one of the Russian stories, Ilya Varshavsky's "The Conflict": a robot housekeeper reduces the lady of the house to tears, and hubbie requires an explanation. Cybella the robotess recounts:
"I caught a glimpse (of "two essential errors"or in the wife's thesis). It would have been stupid of me not to tell Martha about it. I simply wanted to help her. "
"And what happened?"
"She started crying and said she was a live human being, and that to have a machine lecturing her all the time was just as repulsive to her as kissing a 'fridge.' "
"You, of course, answered back?"
"Yes, I said, that if she could gratify her progenitive instinct with the help of a fridge, she would probably see nothing reprehensible in kissing it." O snap! But she just means in the most helpful fashion, "Pray wake up and smell the coffee, Mistress, you got your hard drive too/ " But if that weren't bad enough, Martha might be taking it like, "yeah you'd kiss a fridge if your p-drive was strong enough--but it's not! You're more frigid than the fridge!" This being the era, at least in neurotic Amerikan suds fiction and too much "nonfiction", when women might be labeled frigid. But this is worse than for those broads, cos I take it "progenitive" means having progeny, not just sex for sex's sake. But that's not the end of "The Conflict."

It's close to it though. Unless my edition is missing some pages. I prefer the next story, 'Robby', it's excellently droll although the actual punchline, if intended as such, is weak.

The Odessa joke loses something in the translation, perhaps.

You're right, the fridge incident is close to the end, but not the end. I'll have to look at the Odessa bit again, but reading the one about "my brother" now, in between pesky other activities.

well i finished wolfe's "the fifth head of cerberus"

it was very beautiful and provoked many deep thoughts about cloning and culture and colonization but i feel like i'm missing something

it seems pretty obvious that at least someone or someones is not what they think they are ... but who? everybody? and who is what?

i mean i know the obvious answer is "nobody is actually who he thinks he is and all culture is actually just old cultures with new cultures overlaid on top of them DO YOU SEE"

I think the answer is probably meant to be 'everybody, but they'll never be able to work it out for sure either way'

yeah i think it's almost like a reverse of those stories at the beginning of martian chronicles, except the martians end up becoming human?

the story also reminded me strongly of heinlein's "einstein intersection", in which aliens comes to a post-apocalypse earth, take human form, and are so strongly influenced by the human experience that they more-or-less forget what they used to be (without completely forgetting they're not human). for a lot of the narrative it's very easy to forget that these are not psychic / mutated post-apocalypse humans but aliens in more-or-less human form.

"einstein intersection" is Delany

Would like to see Heinlein's Einstein Intersection--he could do it, it's in him somewhere. Or was.