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

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.

A new Culture novel is always grounds for major celebration

http://evanlaar2012.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/celebration2010.jpg

not sci fi?

iin't the culture kinda goofy? like delany meets lensman written by a spastic like niven (best) or brin (worst)

it's absolutely goofy, yeah. but super fun and my idea of a utopia so i'm always happy to spend time there. and banks is a perfectly decent writer iirc.

i'm reminded of how good a writer banks is in general every time i read an alastair reynolds

that's fighting talk.

second acclarke novel of the week just turned up from amazon - hammer of god on wednesday, childhood's end today. both mentioned in some (slashdot?) list of sf with unhappy endings.

i aways mean to read more banks. i've only read the non-sf ones and the bridge. the bridge is kinda sf. sorta.

Whatever Peace is, might be a good time for me to re-read it, having finally gotten to A Visit From the Goon Squad, The City and The City, and 2626 this year. Egan, Mieville, and Bolano are in the SF Encyclopeida Online. Also, from John Clute's massive entry re Wolfe (stopping before possible spoilers, although w Wolfe it's sure not just what happens but the way he tells or doesn't tell it)
Peace (1975), an afterlife fantasy set in the contemporary middle USA, is, word for word, perhaps Wolfe's most intricate and personal work; though not sf, it is central to any full attempt to understand his other novels; his sense of the great painfulness of any shaped life--

I've read three Elizabeth Hand novels, I think. Every time going in it's like wow this is right up my alley but then... nope.

Would try again tho.

hmmmm...

what happens?

some things are better in theory of course.

i dunno just something in her tone didn't sit with me. I seem to recall that ppl in her books are 'cool' in a way that bugged me. Coolness in fiction is a slippery slope. (obv i mean cool in its non-thermal sense)

Jack Vance is 96 today.

teh bonarhnuters

read childhood's end over the weekend. cheery!

Another unwritten essay. The 20th Century English Cosmical View: Stapledon, Clarke, Dyson.

got my copy of golden summer!

So I was all set to read Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, I thought, but didn't realize it's what happens after dealing with climate change in this century, looks like I better check these first, anybody read 'em? Descriptions from Science Fiction Encyclopedia Online:
he Science In the Capital sequence-comprising Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007) – again faces the Near Future directly, in this case at a point when Climate Change has begun – it would seem undeniably – to transform the world as the Gulf Stream fails, Washington is drowned, and weather patterns world-wide become hugely turbulent. The sequence focuses on America, on American Politics, on right-wing American Climate Change Denial, and ultimately on some radical Technological fixes for what seems to be an irreversible series of Disasters. There is no clear sense that the solutions offered here will work – even if the American government manages to attempt to implement them – but Robinson's perpetually active protagonists struggle on: hoping to make the story of technological fix come true

sounds boring technocrat stuff

little bit of ice-9 will solve it, don't worry

I really liked the climate change trilogy: clever, funny, quite touching. My only complaint is that the disasters are constantly imminent, but never quite happen on-page.

Cool, I just ordered Forty Signs of Rain (good title for a song too)

DragonCon 2012, via CBS Atlanta--my neighbors are there:
http://wgcl.images.worldnow.com/images/1767362_G.jpg

Doctor Living Stone I presume

http://wgcl.images.worldnow.com/images/1767379_G.jpg

oops this is the one I meant that caption for

http://wgcl.images.worldnow.com/images/1767373_G.jpg

golden space is turning out to be a bit of a slog

i understand the future is meant to be placid and staid because everyone is immortal and has no reason to rush around doing shit but it also feels like i am reading about someone's six hour afternoon where they do shit but sit on couch and sip tea

it's heating up toward end of first chapter though so maybe it will get better, i just remember it being more thought-provoking .... i guess it *was* my first exposure to transhumanist sci-fi