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

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?

fashion blogger

who sometimes directs photo shoots for friends in exchange for blogging about their boutiques

just a guess

I certainly wish them well. Also awesome to imagine discovering Cordwainer Smith while in the hospital, as patient or staff...Just read Steel, previously uncollected stories by Richard Matheson. Mostly from the early 50s, the last two from 2009/10. Title story was also a Twilight Zone, about the robot or android boxer breaking down, so his place in a fight is secretly taken by the boxer's owner, a contendah 'til humans were banned from the ring--too inhumane, of course. The flesh guy may can get away with it, even if he's beaten to death, because the artificial pugilists are designed to provide each gory detail of a satisfying conflict. So we get a good example of RM's early pulp combo of the obsesso protagonist with some social overview (human perversity, inside and out). Plus the suthor's eye for detail: the real android boxer can't move his eyes around that much, which gives the human stand-in more of a shot.
But it's not really that a good a story on the page, better on the Twilight Zone. Ditto, maybe, the one about tracking down the source of dirty jokes, which very eventually became the basis of a Family Guy episode. Haven't seen it, haven't made it through any ep of The Family Guy, just seems too elbow in the ribs, like most of these stories. Maybe it's just a matter of taste. I do like "Descent", about preparing to go underground, to avoid the Atomic Bomb ("we'll only be down there about 20 years," the scientists assure Americans). And my favorite, about one of his seeming favorites, a pissy-obsesso writer: this one, in "When Day Is Dun", may be a survivor in spite/because of hisself. Also likeed "A Visit From Santa Claus," about a guy who's taken out a contract on his wife, now he's going back and forth about it, natch. That one, from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, doesn't bother with elements of the "fantastic", yet is Matheson as hell. But start with The Shrinking Man , AKA The Incredible Shrinking Man, and I Am Legend (or Legend: the last non-vampire becomes a marauder in a world of vampire normalcy)

http://magicmonkeyboy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/drink-my-red-blood-by-richard-matheson.html

^my fave matheson short story, which deeply affected horror-obsessed-young-me when i read it as a boy. the whole treatment of vampirism seems very similar to the vibe that george a romero was going for w/ his movie martin, and i know romero admitted that matheson was the primary inspiration behind NOTLD. you can see why stephen king is such a big matheson fan, too - that 'naturalistic'/everyday treatment of the supernatural. again, this story reminds me v much of parts of the tobe hooper tv movie of salem's lot - vampirism as teenage yearning/disaffection

Holy shit! That blows away most of the stories in Steel, but as always we get the Mathesonian obsesso vs. convention (and why is there such a nasty shack in the nice normal town) vs. the truly sane, if that's what the author and reader are. Glad I did not read that as a child or teen.

He seems to have some empathy for everyone, measured via his sense of justice, both pretty down to (dark) earth. Could imagine him as a priest who's heard it all (in confession, in his head, other places). Don't know that much about him except through reading, though Fritz Leiber once mentioned in an interview that he didn't share Matheson's sense of "occult doctrine" (or maybe it was Leiber's sense of Matheson's sense, don't know how well they knew each other)

On to the next block: Ward mentions George A. Romero's mention of Matheson: i know romero admitted that matheson was the primary inspiration behind NOTLD. And I just finished (my first reading of) Colson Whitehead's Zone One, about removing zombies from Manhattan real estate values, to help civilization make a don't-call-it-a-comeback (we've been here all along). Romero deals with zombies' connection to consumer conditioning (here I'm thinking more of Dawn of the Dead than Night of)by swooping through and glancing off the advancing wall of socially significant others, as a tiny-bucks-hemorrhaging director and all zombie-removers had better. But Whitehead and his obsesso protagonist keep shuffling back: the zombie plague is a mutation, they're a leap but not a stretch from our sad, immortality-thoughe-consumption-chasing pre-afterlives, I get it already. Still, Whitehead and his POV guy, nicknamed Mark Spitz are monster movie consumers since childhood: they know just when to jump back into the fray--Spitz, the dedicated B student survivalist, whose sense of ID is "sort of a template", also knows when to run like hell. Plus, gear-shifting is required: the zombies, referred to as skels here, are either the ravenous hordes, or the strangely appealing stragglers, who just hang out, entranced, apparently, by "the outline of a shadow of a phantom" of something that once meant so much to them, when anything did. A place where something happened, or a place that reminds them of that place, that face, etc. And all the survivors are stragglers in a way, in their own ways, not too similar to the other kind, the terrible trendies. Main prob, seems like, there's not enough gaps for the reader to fill, digesting what's just happended: Whitehead describes the action very well, then explicates (some of) the implications. Fortunately, he's got a charged, nuanced precision of vision for extending our world and swinging the wrecking ball. It's eerie, funny, creepy, grand, off-hand (sardonic 50s s.f., Catch-22, V. also come to mind. Lke persons of authoritah say here and in Night of the Living Dead: "They're all messed up."

"sardonic" like working cit-soldiers gotta be, but necessarily tuned-in/out too, picking up the sound of trouble, comradery and audible to the reader thren-oh-deee.

James Tiptree Jr's Up the Walls of the World. Starts out v much like Clarke's The Gods Themselves, with a human story and an alien story and a thin thread between them, although in this story the aliens are only from another planet not another universe, and the thread is psychic not physical. And there's a third part to the tale, in the shape of the enormous galactic entity threatening both species. It's an easier read than the Clarke because the aliens are less alien, despite being giant flying telepathic manta rays that hear light (plus a nice bit of gender reversal where the male aliens look after and protect the children, because they're stronger, duh); and the human characters are more likeable, especially Doctor Dann, where the slow reveal of the empathetic powers he is ignorant of is very nicely done. But it all ends up in a very different place, more like Stapledon than Clarke in its grand conception and vast staging.

that all sounds really good--i must get a copy

finished the first volume of Ballard's short stories. favourite 3 stories being Chronopolis (time is illegal), The Subliminal Man (advertising) and Thirteen to Centaurus (generational ship). i think volume 1 finishes around 1963.

have started Vonnegut's Sirens Of Titan which is great so far.

has anyone ever written a fantasy novel about christopher marlowe

Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age, about Marlowe living in the Faerie realms after his supposed death.
Nat Cassidy's The Reckoning of Kit & Little Boots, a "metaphysical buddy comedy" about Marlowe and Caligula.
Steven Savile's For This Is Hell, depicts Marlowe as involved in occult practices as a wizard. 2012 (Novel)
Deborah Harkness's 2012 novel Shadow of Night features Christopher Marlowe as one of the story's antagonists. In addition, the School of Night of which Marlowe was reportedly a member, is a major factor in much of the story's plot.

those sound like they suck

don't be so judgmental, i'm sure a "metaphysical buddy comedy" about Marlowe and Caligula could be hilarious.

Yeah. Marlowe was a piece of work, and if we gotta have bromance, which apparently we do, judging by the DVDs at my esteemed library, then a "metaphysical buddy comedy" about Marlowe and Caligula looks like the way to go.

"metaphysical" edutainment, hell maybe I'll do a library request, for real.

bought a book by jack mcdevitt today. don't know if i've ever even heard of him. on the cover stephen king sez he's the logical heir to arthur c. clarke and isaac asimov. which is probably a good thing, i guess. book is called Chindi.

also got The Visitors by simak which i don't think i have. nice hardcover too.

think i was actually more excited by the 1st edition of louis auchincloss's The Embezzler i found though. 25 cents! and margaret bourke-white's autobio which was also 25 cents and which looks great and it has a million of her photos in it.

right now i'm reading O Pioneer by frederik pohl.

Cool, I've wondered if Mad Men's writers haven't picked up some pointers from Auchincloss. Haven't read McD., been thinking about it, seeing his tomes at Friends of the Library's shop. Science Fiction Encyclopedia's John Clute sez: He composes ostensibly positivist tales..,for readers looking for release, as demonstrated in his light-fingered ease with Time Paradoxes in Time Travelers Never Die (2009); but the contemplative reticence underlying his work should never be ignored. He is perhaps the most adult of all writers of adventure sf. Or perhaps not, but seems worth a shot.

Chindi's got some good stuff in it, but also some colossal failures of imagination. Can't say more without giving away some of the fun Big Ideas in it, though.

Started Nicola Griffith's 'Ammonite' last night: this is great! It's from 1992 originally. Best SF novel I've read in a while: a bit of Tiptree gender shenanigans, a bit of le Guin anthropoligical/weird human biology shenanigans, a touch of 'Alien/Aliens', but lots of other cool things too. And really nicely written, too.

This is only vaguely relevant, but I had a bit of a mind-boggling science-fictional moment today. My wife is pregnant, and our daughter is gue in Jan next year. According to the doctor, the life expectancy for a white Australian female born in the next 12 months has now hit 100 years--so, assuming we avoid the inevitable collapse of human civilisation, she could well still be alive in 2113. I feel like my wife's going to be giving birth to a time traveller.

congrats on impending life form! and yeah babies will make you ponder all sorts of astral and metaphysical questions. 100 yr. avg. is pretty insane too. you guys must really be seeing the benefits of all those roo burgers.

only 513 years to 2525!

I've rarely been much impressed w Bruce Sterling, but maybe I've missed a lot. "Black Swan", in Year's Best SF 15 (Hartwell & Cramer, eds.) is the payoff for a lifestyle he describes as "dividing atemporal time-zones among Austin, Turin, and Belgrade, and his alternate global identities as Bruce Sterling, Bruno Argento, and Boris Srebro." This is one of his Bruno Argento stories, which originally appeared in Italian as 'Cigno Nero' in the Spring 2009 issue of ROBOT Magazine. The title refers to the concept behind Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan: The Impact of The Highly Improbable." But not one of those rip 'n' write, fumbling-the-Big-Ideas pawfuls moldering in many an anthology (elsewhere in this one, for inst). A freelancer and his equally ravenous source go drinking and stressing though several Italys (same bar and sector in each), really gamey in every sense. Try to wrap my brain around its pulpadelic plot twists, which wrap themselves around my brain instead, then get whisked away like a used towel. It's crassly cunning and yet somehow more (or maybe I've finally met my match, like these guys do [not a spoiler, cause it can't be pinned down like that, at least by me]).

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

― the late great, Sunday, 2 September 2012 20:24 (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did it improve? (for you)

Winners of British Fantasy Awards:
http://www.omnivoracious.com/2012/09/2012-british-fantasy-award-winners-include-jo-walton-lavie-tidhar-joe-hill-and-the-weird.html

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/help-from-heinlein.html

My God, what a fountainhead (no libertarian joeks plz) of generosity. Can't imagine what it was like to be Sturgeon reading it, in his situation and time to boot (a hundred dollars in 1956, just for one thing). All those ideas, and in a conversational, oh by the way--he wasn't only being considerate as hell, he evidently really did miss tossing ideas and impasses w Boucher and those guys, maan Boucher alone always seemed so astute, the first editor I was ever aware of, in my childhood nirvana of s.f. and mysteries. Good to know Hein himself had a shrewd eye on symptoms of life, incl. his old mentor Campbell and L. Ron as well.

Other Heinlein letter of note:

Whether one speaks of technology or social institutions, “civilization” was invented by us, not by the Negroes. As races, as cultures, we are five thousand years, about, ahead of them. Except for the culture, both institutions and technology, that they got from us, they would still be in the stone age, along with its slavery, cannibalism, tyranny, and utter lack of the concept we call “justice.”

http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/heinlein-and-racism/

See my description upthread of Farnham's Freehold: after a nuclear exchange between the great white powers that were, North America is refurbished by AFricans and Asians--Farnham's family and friends emerge from their fallout shelter into a colony ruled by sheiks of color. Farnham clashes again with his asshole son, this time over the latter's racism, though his faithful servant joins the fuedalists, Mrs. Farnham enters the harem (Farnham's already taken up with his son's ex, but damn), and his son--well, read and weep (or laugh). Other thing that comes to mind: Delany has described coming across the narrator of Starship Troopers mentioning that he's black--in passing, way into the book--and how much that meant to him, coming across that. He was well aware of the book's "hysterical" tendencies elsewhere. Glory Road gives us a kind of All-American post-Holden Caulfield Vietnam veteran drop-out, swashbuckling across the Universes, and bumping into his cultural hang-ups, tangled up in the qualities that got him so far, make him so attractive...as with PKD, RAH's sense of novelistic overview can sometimes effectively deal with a mess of perceptions and defensive proclamations. We get some of that in his letter to Sturgeon. Not to defend any bs letters, or Heinlein's working for the Presidential campaign of Goldwater, whose own libertarian principles (which eventually led him to him denounce the Moral Majority and associated Republican pols)also had him, in '64, opposing the Civil Rights Act and Social Security, while advocating the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam.

Speaking of story ideas: gun companies vs. desktop weaponeers--3D printing yall
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/stratasys-followup/

more for mind-miners: William Clancy, who's been w NASA for 15 years, coming to specialize in studying human x machine cognition, chronicles 8-1/2 years of scientists x Rover expeditionary craft, in Working On Mars. Also describes the way it's been written about before, by journalists and scienists. The word "cyborg" comes up, not too often. Makes me think about remote-controlled "drones" too.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/307910-1 He's not a dry or gushy guy, just about writing

Willliam Clancey, that is.

picked these up down the street. dusty shop near me having one of its half-off sales. which is pretty much the only time i buy stuff there cuz his prices are kinda dumb. 4.50 for a Tor paperback that's been sitting on a shelf for 5 years makes me pause. for 2.50 i'll go for it. (plus the REALLY old stuff that has been there for decades - before the current owner even owned the place - usually has old 2 dollar prices so for a buck they are definitely a steal.)

The Lights In the Sky Are Stars – Fredric Brown
Heavy Weather – Bruce Sterling
Space Platform – Murray Leinster
Brightness Falls From The Air – James Tiptree, Jr.
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volumes One, Three, and Five)
The Seven Sexes – William Tenn
The Year Of The Cloud – Ted Thomas & Kate Wilhelm
The Synthetic Man – Theodore Sturgeon
Involution Ocean – Bruce Sterling
Strangers In The Universe – Clifford D. Simak
The Investigation – Stanislaw Lem
The Gates Of Creation – Philip Jose Farmer
Way Station – Clifford D. Simak
Those Who Watch – Robert Silverberg
Triton – Samuel R. Delany

Not sure which years those Silverberg collections cover. He goes from interesting 1950s pulp writer to GENUINELY AMAZING 1970s short story writer to slickly professional but uninvolved 1990s writer-for-cash

volume one is early 80's. volume five is mostly 60's. volume three is the biggest and all 70's. nice (some quite long) intros by silverberg before every story. which i always like. (unless its harlan...cuz he can do a 5000 word intro/memory lane thing before a story that is 3000 words)

James M about Silverberg. Recently read his Nebula-winning "Sailing to Byzantium" and enjoyed it while it lasted but was ultimately underwhelmed.

And skot otm about lengthly Harlan E. intros

James M otm, meant to say

Heavy Weather – Bruce Sterling

I still like Sterling's non-fiction more, but I liked this quite a bit. Would love to read a sequel.

Finished The Hydrogen Sonata, the new Culture book. Not his best. Not terrible but it all struck me as a bit pedestrian, a bit Culture-by-numbers. The ships were doing their usual masters of the universe type thing (which i haven't actually tired of and hope i never do), there were weird alien races, there was a high-stakes race for a prize/to avert disaster. It just didn't really grab me. The high-stakes race didn't really seem that important (ok it might have concerned the future of a whole civilization but w/evs), the weird aliens and other things didn't seem up to his usual level of invention. And it wasn't until the last quarter of the book that the plot began to gather any real momentum.

Tried to pay more attention to the prose that I normally do for this kind of thing. It's not bad but... ok the ships doing all their sexy beyond hi-tech stuff with energy grids and fields and effector weapons is all written in a very technical style and that's fine, wouldn't have it any other way. But the rest of the book is not dissimilar. The landscape descriptions e.g. are very dry, very basic. Grass is yellow and tall, trees are coppery and thick-trunked, rocks are jagged, sky is red-gold, clouds are striated. I suppose it's fair enough in sci-fi where the colour of the grass or the sky might be open to question but there's little delight to be found here. Dialogue otoh he has a great ear for, particularly the messages between the words, the implications not in what is said but in how it is said. This does tend to mean that everyone is either a paragon of politeness and tact or a phd in sarcasm and mordant wit, as the situation demands, and no-one ever suffers from esprit d'escalier, but of course everyone is a genius in the future and it makes for entertaining reading.

I do enjoy the Culture books, though I haven't read the last 2 or 3--lost my enthusiasm when his non-SF books went to complete crap. I just wish his crazy aliens who are physiologically so inhuman were a bit more inhuman in their thought processes and behaviour.

Chairman of the Commission: You can read in several languages, are acquainted with higher mathematics, and can carry out certain kinds of work. Do you consider this makes a man of you?
Other: Certainly. Are people capable of anything else?
In "A Day of Wrath" (by Sever Gansovsky, another from Path Into The Unknown--The Best of Soviet Science Fiction), manimals have busted out of their Island of Dr. Moreau-type confines, having eaten one of their creators, reportedly also sometimes eat each other, and take over remote, densely wooded areas, where peasants (oops, ex-peasants) may collaborate them out of a pervasive climate of fear, of terror. The Govt. is nowhere to be seen, the manimals don't care and mostly don't bother to be seen, a popular reporter comes looking for a bit of morning edition sensation, with a quietly intelligent, all-too-expert guide ( talkin bloody, hard-won expertise). Shadowy yet blythe spirits of menance, vs. rational self-defense and somewhat capricious self-risk: traces of Orwell and Matheson. The guide/hunter is methodical like a Matheson hold-out, the high I.Q. critteroids strut around like O'Brien in 1984; might be some correspondences to Animal Farm as well. Those fuckers really are scary, but when they call, "Hey journalist, have you come to kill us? Come out and talk to us", I find myself wanting to second that--yeah, you're stuck there anyway, might as well ask a few questions. Might flatter the manimals enough to get back to your desk, and the guide could toss them a few copies of the published results. Also, I'd like to read the beasties' answers. Can see how they might lure/lull old school (our kind of) humans. Everyday dread can have its own droning. perversely attractive undercurrent--it's a system, the way these competent monsters generate it.

http://retrobookshop.com/images/products/detail/105176.jpg

Direct from Russia today! Crazy person dancing on shoulder of party robot!

Da!

I'm reading The Fellowship of the Ring, for the the first time in over a decade. I read Tolkien annually as a kid before the movies sort of put me off. I didn't realize how much I'd missed it. It satisfies some craving for contemporary myth like practically no other book.

Of course it could just be the warm nostalgic feeling of rereading one's first favourite book.