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

hm. is it good? what's good about it?

Like all the Simak I've read, it is soulful and humane and somehow patient yet right-to-the-point. Setup is pretty great: at a date a couple centuries in the future, everyone on Earth suddenly disappears except for the people within one small zone of the midwest (basically one family in a country house and one small tribe on a nearby reservation). All the robots on Earth also remain. People and robots do a bunch of thinkin' and evolvin'. Then stuff happens.

Simak is a nice counterweight to some of those SF dudes of his generation who were sort of hardcore materialist/libertarian blowhards or w/e.

oooh that sounds great! is it kinda like delany w/o the genderbendery?

He is not as relentless in following up the evidence as Delany, I'd say. Simak oft content with ~it is a mystery~

hm! i will look for it.

isn't "city" by simak? how is that one, i think it's on my shortlist w/ "stand on zanzibar" and a couple of others.

City's pretty cool--the first chapter/story was a bit dodgy, but it really kicken in after that. It's the history of the world from the near to the far, far future, as told in folktales remembered by the hyperintelligent evolved pacifist vegetarian dogs that are now (along with robots) Earth's dominant species

KICKED in, I mean

simak = love

yeah i'm going to go buy both of those NOW

Really enjoyed The Golden Space. Didn't find it 'drab', nor full of 'talky belaboring' (per review upthread) - she's telling a story not dryly outlining a theory. Characters were really believable, she did a great job of getting into their heads, with a Le Guin like sensitivity and compassion.

Didn't find it 'drab', nor full of 'talky belaboring' (per review upthread)

i think this is the lamest criticism of any book. indeed, "drab" is the dumbest. "this olive green jeep is so drab". "this book about eternal life becoming limbo is so drab".

anyway yeah that's what i recalled! i got it from a free library dump in, uh, maybe 90-95? i lost it but i always think about it, esp when i read stuff like "elementary particles" etc

are you hanging onto your copy? how much did you get it for?

If I like books I hang on to them, so yeah! I got it for yer average second hand price, £5 inc postage. There's plenty on abebooks.com from US sellers.

Is elementary particles any good?

terrible cover though (of the golden space). "hmm the characters have young bodies but are really old. i will draw a young person with a really old hand."

it was the era of MJ tbf

anyway just ordered it along w/ the inevitable first of enginer summer (happy b day to me)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/02/EngineSummer.jpg

i plan to get that. i know you compared it to the book of the new sun and we er didn't react in the same way to that, but i'm still intrigued.

xp yes the sci fi chapters are good, death by anal parts not so much

kinda like the sci fi version of irreversible or something

it's the backwards of new sun and anyway i think the comparison is obvious

not to say you're not picking up on the obvious but

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7c/Wolfe_shadow_%26_claw.jpg/200px-Wolfe_shadow_%26_claw.jpg

contenderizer should read that engine summer one as should all the other "science of mind" goons

rest in peace! just read this...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/books/harry-harrison-a-prolific-writer-of-satiric-science-fiction-dies-at-87.html

really enjoying roadside picnic. anyone read that geoff dyer book about stalker etc?

harry harrison was a g, bill the galactic hero and its many sequels were major for young me.

Yeah, I remember being hooked on the DEATH WORLD books
http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327944642l/2037559.jpg http://spire.ee/shop/images/harry_harrisson___deathworld_2.jpg http://spire.ee/shop/images/harry_harrisson___deathworld_3.jpg

Really liked A TRANSATLANTIC TUNNEL, HURRAH, too

how is this just not the same as xanth

i'm not defending then now, i hasten to add, but 12yo had different standards, and endless killer aliens pretty much met them

This is the only HH i can recall reading. Proper YA stuff and funny with it, still really holds up.

http://childrensbookshop.com/images/bookimages/80/80722.jpg

is this stuff funny HAW HAW like xanth and bill galactic hero or is it just snicker funny like roald dahl

a mordant wit that should appeal to teenage cynics of all ages.

hm

did he do stainless steel rat?

that sort of fatalism?

if i had read SSR maybe i could tell you. but i wouldn't call it fatalistic, the heroes are good guys and they win in the end.

just reading about xanth and ... what?

Visual access to underwear - Because underwear is so closely tied to sexuality (even more so than nudity in Xanth), men become automatically "freaked out" when they view panties. This is made a common joke, most prominently in the novel The Color of Her Panties

xanth is for retards

stainless steel rate was the bomb, i forgot how good that series was

i always confused harrison with david drake which is odd

bill the galactic hero is DIRE though

can we get an update on what epub and mobi readers people are using for ipad? bookman? anything better?

So great!

http://harryharrison.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/bgh-equinox1975-0380003953-michaelgrossb.jpg

can we get an update on what epub and mobi readers people are using for ipad? bookman? anything better?

calibre?

I'm reading (whispers) Stephen Baxter's new novel, Wheel of Ice, which is a Doctor Who novel

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kEj9hrJkWBs/TkApdG8pQyI/AAAAAAAAU2Y/aJSjkQVWN9Y/s320/Sidgwick-98125+Simak+Out+of+Their+Minds.jpg

Clifford D Simak - Out Of Their Minds.
Surprisingly pointless really, started off heading in the direction of Philip K Dick but ended up as a jocular fantastical comedy novel. I'm guessing he banged this one out pretty quickly. Maybe I'll try Way Station, if that's no good I'll give up on the guy.

Have you read City? Think that's generally considered one of his best.

nice cover tho

i prefer bookman to calibre on ipad. am i missing something?

Never used Bookman, so I'm not sure what it's capable of. Calibre lets you change formats, covers, metadata, etc easily, and with a couple of add-ons will bust DRM, etc, for ebooks from anywhere.

hmm it's on ipad?

A book on my shelf twenty years before I read it: The Howling Man, short stories by Charles Beaumont. Title tale (later a Twilight Zone script, like several of these, most even better in the original) is the one about a traveler in bad weather, who stops at a monastery. Very hospitable to him, but why is that poor gentle man locked away? The traveler is increasingly troubled--he's also the first-person narrator, a nice, humble guy himself, which often means trouble up ahead, when a oh-so-non-literary, nice li'l narrator also has to convey the anxious spoon-feeding exposition and underscoring of the "literary"-as-fuck author. But this narrator, tortured by his conscience and his fear, his certainty, has obsessively drawn himself into hard-learned, self-taught eloquence, right from the beginning. How often does this happen?!
Beaumont was Hollywood king of the killer opening, though some of these come off too slick. And his sardonic-to-macabre humor , though often agreeable, even empathetic, could shade into something more repellent--misogyny, for instance: slick and shallow and sincere. Seems, according to William F Nolan's intro, that he came from some kind of boondocks gothic situation (orig name: Charles Nutt, a prodigy with sev. false starts before he made it, still youing, as a writer). A bit like Saki, H.H. Munro, whose sister confirmed that the aunts who raised them could be sadisict. Dunno about Nutt/Beaumont's alibi, but in any case, you could say the last laugh was on him: he died of Alzheimer's at age 38.
As Nolan tells it, he was a complex person, mercurial, but close and considerate to his wife, kids, and friends, with great enthusiasm beyond or along with the facility. I'd even like to read his damn car books! Also need to check out some of the b-movies he scripted, fairly well-known but not to me.

nice

Was just listening to a long Harlan Ellison interview and he namechecked Beaumont a couple times. Need to investigate...

hmm it's on ipad?

I've not used the ipad version, but it is available: http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#id28

http://io9.com/5937312/this-falls-must+read-science-fiction-and-fantasy-books

elizabeth hand! don't think i know her. seems like my kinda gal.

i like that gene wolfe reissue cover too. i do kinda like the idea of tricking people into reading sf. i know it shouldn't matter, but the best books deserve classy covers.

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/04/24/peacetorbook_270x405.jpg

and i want those le guin collections when they come out.

i swear the comments on that site read like one person who is getting paid to write comments. new culture? i am so there. hot diggity. going on my amazon wishlist. booyah!

Peace isn't science fiction, but it is prime Wolfe. Yeah, the cover is great too, the title and its graphic over the rest of that=Wolfe as hell.