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

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

what is that black thing (not cat woman)

was reading The Hammer Of God* and missed my tube stop. and the one after it.

* specifically the marathon towards the beginning

started reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Door_into_Ocean but gave up after 60 pages, was obviously going to be an insultingly simplistic story of arrogant young male gradually learning the ways of and being accepted by peaceful harmonious non-violent superior female culture.

started http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_Moon, gritting my teeth through the first few pages of "it was the season of pwiddle in gwimmle kibble and the flittles and spizzles and tribbles were all in bloom"

finished the bonehunters. was far more into it than i expected to be. wish i actually remembered some of what had happened to these people in the other books, oh well.

Syree Johnson followed the shuttle trajectory on the bridge displays. Automatically her mind reviewed the planetary data. Point six nine AUs from its primary, a G8 emitting .48 of Sol's energy per unit area. Maximum energy reaching the planet at intensity .66 micrometers, roughly the same as Earth. Point seven three Terran mass, 5,740 clicks in radius .9 Terran gravity on the planetary surface. Rotation of 26.1 Terran hours, period of 213 rotations, inclination to the ecliptic of 3.2 degrees. One major almost-circumequatorial landmass plus coastal islands, some of them large. Unremarkable composition, except for some strong radioactivity in the second-highest mountain range, identified by the flow of neutrinos registering on the Zeus's detectors.

None of it mattered

NO SHIT SHERLOCK

LOL

the awful gobbledegook i complained about before:

All morning Enli rode steadily. It was Am, that luscious season, and the larfruit was ready to harvest. Villagers swarmed over the orchards, singing and picking. Between the villages and orchards lay long lush stretches of uninhabited road, glorious with wildflowers. Shade-blooming vekifirib, yellow mittib, the flaming red bells of adkinib. The warm air smelled sweet as shared reality, and in the sky the sun burned clear orange. Enli passed few bicycles or handcarts, and made good time toward Rafkit Seloe. She could be there by noon.

But then, just a few miles shy of Rafkit Seloe, she turned her bicycle off the main road, toward the village of Gofkit Shamloe. Suddenly, desperately, Enli wanted one more look at Tabor.

But it's ok because there's wormholes and a Mysterious Alien Artefact and it's only 200 pages.

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

I suspect this is why Iain Banks made the wise decision, in his Culture novels, to write about the edges of that civilisation--where placid,staid, infinite energy society meets angry, "uncivilised" alien species and tries to co-opt them with black ops

All morning Enli rode steadily. It was Am, that luscious season, and the larfruit was ready to harvest. Villagers swarmed over the orchards, singing and picking. Between the villages and orchards lay long lush stretches of uninhabited road, glorious with wildflowers. Shade-blooming vekifirib, yellow mittib, the flaming red bells of adkinib. The warm air smelled sweet as shared reality, and in the sky the sun burned clear orange. Enli passed few bicycles or handcarts, and made good time toward Rafkit Seloe. She could be there by noon.

But then, just a few miles shy of Rafkit Seloe, she turned her bicycle off the main road, toward the village of Gofkit Shamloe. Suddenly, desperately, Enli wanted one more look at Tabor.

this sounds like chapterhouse: dune!

is that gobbledygook or future autechre track titles?

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-08/30/save-the-sci-fi

^ bookshop in brooklyn tracking down and republishing OOP SF (very slowly)

Just read "the Goblin Reservation" by Simak - wished it was longer, it was great.

Borrowed Cordwainer Smith's "The Rediscovery of Man" from the patient/staff library at the hospital I work at. Great to have a dusty room full of books, compared to the library which I 'run' which is full of textbooks and computers. Lots of Harry Harrison books, RIP!!

Lawyer Ash Kalb, musician-anthropologist Cici James, stylist-writer Jamil V Moen, and former Gawker media community manager Kaila Hale-Stern are the intrepid crew behind the Brooklyn-based bookshop.

stylist-writer?