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

yeah that's what got me on to it was the michael caine vs albert finney etc etc thread

Green Man is very good black comedy/rural horror: fairly misogynistic, but then it is lateish Amis. But The Alteration is def better, as Ward says

just pimpin ma new breakaway thread
Dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial? Don't mind if I do (a weird fiction thread)

Green Man had been sitting on my shelf for an age, then I had a dream a couple of months ago that told me to read it, so I read it. I liked it, but didn't like it a lot - generically a bit underpowered, not much in the way of fright or rural chills, but I think that would have been fine if there hadn't been quite so much opinionating kingsley in there, felt like I was getting some man-of-the-world bs – the thing about women/how sex is/how to drink – thrown at me about every few pages (which is def the narrator speaking, and the book is about the narrator's fucked-upness, partic in those aspects, but all the same feels like KA can never resist dropping an opinion. A challenging opinion)

BUT all sorts of sharp sex/death things going on, and a nice theological turn.

I'm not sure it is that misogynistic really (homophobic though, yes) - it treats the female characters the main guy doesn't want to go to bed with fairly decently iirc, and elsewhere the confusion and sex is p crucial. It's on the same old KA men/women traintracks, but he's a sharp observer.

(I'd put it as middle Amis (69), rather than lateish fwiw.)

Haha serendipity-- simak represent!

http://io9.com/5924671/the-surprising-novel-that-got-kim-stanley-robinson-interested-in-science-fiction?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_twitter&utm_source=io9_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Haven't read The Green Man, but reminds me, I should give The Green Child another, less caffeinated shot--it seemed a little subtle at the time-time. The only novel of Herbert Read, highly regarded art crit:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--zNbo1jPFOg/T1kojWWtflI/AAAAAAAADm4/VG6PYcoslaw/s1600/greenchild.jpg

His more typical subject

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2010/7/1/1277982254325/herbert-read-ICA-006.jpg

that's an amazing cover

The Green Child has great spooky dank cold English countryside atmosphere.

do any nyc posters have a suggestion for a bookstore with a good selection of female authored sci-fi? the strand sucks in this regard...they only had 1 le guin book and 2 butler that i had already read (cool entire row of stephanie meyer's "the host" and half a shelf of pride and prejudice and zombies crap tho).

i did however pick up this
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/a9/81/062e90b809a080a1b18a6110.L.jpg

OK, this Simak talk has got me to read 'City'

Maybe you should try McNally Jackson on Prince, bg. They have a small section that is somewhat curated and may have what you are looking for.

xpost cool report back!

Shakespeare's Planet made me v happy, have now proceeded on to The Werewolf Principle. Was gonna do Mastodonia but my dodgy epub download of it is full of glitches :(

Really liked City. Wasn't sure after chapter 1--seemed a bit folksy and daft--but I'm a sucker for intelligent dogs and the slow vanishing of humankind, so this was right up my street.

Sounds quite like my cup of tea too!

Crappy old used bookstores, bell. Around. There's just not much of it compared to sf written by men, so it's thinner pickings.

Simak is the best! "Waystation" is my favourite of his, followed by "Ring Around the Sun", and I have a fondness for Catface or Mastadonia. Going to order "Time is the Simplest Thing" and "Goblin Reservation". Yeah, he doesn't faff about.

Also, Cyril M. Kornbluth is pretty good, shame he died so young. Would recommend "the Syndic" and quite enjoyed "Not This August".

i'm excited to read "city" too, been on my list for a long time

thinking about whether i've ever seen a "female sci-fi" section in a sci-fi bookstore, pretty sure i haven't

on the subject though, i think this woman is underappreciated

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255685095l/1967582.jpg

this book is great

simak love does my heart good.

good discussions of some female SF authors earlier on this thread. So what's the Pamela Sargent book like?

also, is Tanith Lee any good?

oddly i bought Women Of Wonder at the weekend from the Amnesty Bookshop, female-centric SF by female writers, edited by Pamela Sargent. not read it yet though. Ursula KLG is the only author i recognise.

it's early 80s posthuman sci fi. you catch echoes of things like engine summer, xenogenesis, oryx and crake and the crystal world in it.

let's see.

cloning, cure for cancer, stasis, cure for death, invention of asexual offspring by year 2100 (elementary particles style)

and so the story is set in the future of that, maybe like year 2300 or something?

some people are getting back from a space voyage iirc and some of the characters are really old/young people from our time. everyone is just kinda spaced out and half conscious because everything has become so placid. a bunch of people form death cults and then i think there might be a plague or something?

i don't know, it's not clear if its dystopian or utopian or anybody gives much of a shit but it's a good one if you've been enjoying the fear of death thread

Five stories about immortality--spanning hundreds of years but having a few of the nondescript characters in common--from the author of The Sudden Star and Watchstar. In the opener, biologist Merripen develops a new variety of human--hermaphrodite and not subject to emotional vagaries--who'll be better able to cope with immortality than run-of-the-mill humanity; the expected complications ensue. Then superchild Teno and a number of eschatologically preoccupied types discuss life after death. And, in two considerably more lively pieces, a couple of boys running away from their aimless, suffocative parents are captured by a psychotic old woman and her android servants--while Merripen, trying to re-establish contact with the vanished superkids, falls foul of biologist Domingo, creator of (and god to) a non-selfconscious folk with Jaynesian bicameral minds. So finally, in the title piece, Domingo wakes from suspended animation to meet the now self-aware and highly advanced descendants of his bicamerals. Drab, often dreamily unfocused work overall; and Sargent's main point--that immortality would stultify human development--is obvious enough without the talky belaboring it receives here.

so necessary

read this when i was like 13 o_O

Sounds pretty rad! Also Koogs good find on Women of Wonder, been meaning to pick that up for a while.

oddly everywhere else in the world only has the compilation (Women of Wonder / More Women Of Wonder) which is itself called something like Women Of Wonder Classics (to distinguish it from the other more contemporary compilation). reviews are... mixed.

It looks like there's a Women of Wonder, More Women of Wonder, New Women of Wonder, Women of Wonder: The Classic Years (1940-70) and Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years (1970-). Lots of wonderous women.

Classic Years is a comp of those first two iirc

the late great, I've just ordered a copy of Pamela Sargent's The Golden Space after your mention. Sounds exactly like the kind of book I'm looking for.

also, is Tanith Lee any good?

On the whole, hell yeah. She's sort of the progenitor of the type of kicked-sideways Gothic Fantasy that someone like Neil Gaiman traffics in, but far more visceral and primeval. Her Tales Of The Flat Earth series feels more like emergent mythology than straight-up fantasy. I'd start with those.

Also, if you see this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7c/Red_as_blood.jpg

grab it, it's great.

Also, this thread to thread: Angela Carter

Decades ago at the sci-fi convention mentioned six years ago on this thread, science fiction., I overheard a brief conversation about TL in which an elderly woman who I seem to remember as resembling Tweety Bird's grandmother said

"My query:
Tanith Lee
Perplexeth me.
Might she be
A Romany?"

http://www.soulculture.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/JIMI-HENDRIX4.jpg
Right now I'd like to do a little thing by Tweety Bird. That's his grandmother over there

Sorry. Carry on. As you were.

yeah i mentioned upthread that i got 3 women of wonder paperbacks. haven't read all three yet but i think they are all worth getting just cuzza who is represented. plus i think all the long introductions are really essential. especially in the first book which is a fairly comprehensive history of women sci-fi writers. really interesting and it will definitely make you seek out even more stuff.

also, is Tanith Lee any good?

She wrote one of the all-time great episodes of Blake's Seven, didn't she? I always feel that I should explore her work more.

Now that yall mention it, I finally notice some Tanith Lee at my local library, the Secret Books of Paradys, The Secret Books of Paradys, both are all (?) in one volume each. I should check those out, right? bookflap descriptions seem promising.

Oops one of those should have been The Secret Books of Venus

Thought it was like naming an album Peter Gabriel or Chicago or Caetano Veloso, except that the author's name wasn't The Secret Books of Paradys.

From Fantastic Fiction site

Paradys--the city--was a place of decadence and decay, of luxury and lasciviousness, and, after the revolution, a graveyard peopled by the insane and the dead . . . and by those who preyed on both. The strange and the tormented dwell in Paradys--prowling its dark streets and twisted alleyways, passing the endless hours in the city's elegant mansions and smoke-tarnished inns, wandering in moldering graveyards and the stark surrounding countryside. For the land here is bound by a timeless, soul-chilling magic, and that power has cast its spell over all who have ever lived in this foreboding and dangerous place.

All who came to Paradys were forever touched by its dread magic. The City was not one place but three, bound together by a labyrinth of ice yet separated, perhaps by time, perhaps by some long-forgotten enchantment, into Paradise, Paradis and Paradys--each cursed in an entirely different way.

Relapse Records artists to thread!

These omnibus editions I found aren't actually complete, or the Venus isn't, anyway here's one of the latter series that
http://www.daughterofthenight.com/tla78a.jpg

i highly recommend Land Under England by the way. it really is kinda hg wells + bf skinner circa 1935 but that doesn't do it justice. its a trip. and totally mind-bending. i think werner herzog could make a great movie out of it. half of the fun is just trying to picture everything in your head. you are totally there in this earth underworld. i kinda loved it there but by the end you REALLY want come up for air/sunlight.

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1222825996l/920941.jpg

Will have to look for that. Somehow reminds me about Mark Sinker in Wny Music Sucks remembering a forever lucky fellow schoolboy who found a land or anyway source of great archaeological interest under England one day when they were cutting class, and instead of raising a flag there,(didn't have one handy), Mark's bro took a shit.

"The Island" by Peter Watts (Year's Best SF 15, Hartwell & Cramer, eds.)---The narrator, a female-identifying entity, awakens once again on outward bound ship/portal, where things long since post-human pass through. A cosmic cloaca, and Damon Knight would dig this take on how a Galactic Empire would really work, esp. with centuries of suspended animation so often an unexamined given in today's s.f. She's ready to get back into her eternal feud with the Chimp, derisive name for the ship's hard drive (they need each other, she hates him/it, even more for being so detached). This time, she soon encounters her son, a perhaps mentally challenged human grown from the Chimp's secret stash of narrator's and her long-dead lover's materials. It all gets pretty harrowing, somewhat tragic, also could be titled "Angry Candy" or "Psychocandy." Gotta check some more Watts--apparently he's set all his stories adrift on the Web.

cosmic cloaca??

Women of Wonder surprisingly good so far (apart from the one i read yesterday, about a fat camp)

am interleaving it with JG Ballard Short Stories which contain a lot of ideas i've never read before. halfway through Chronopolis in which time is illegal. (there's a PDF of the entire 2 volumes available via a quick google)

All Peter Watts work is free on his website: http://www.rifters.com

Someone hated Watts--Lamp, maybe?

The Rift trilogy is pretty brutal. I think I may have bogged down and not finished the third book.