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

Agree it's patchy but the highs are unfuckwithable imo. The attack of the swine creatures, with the housekeeper's obliviousness adding just the right amount of doubt to the whole narrative - you wonder if it's just the old fellas age-addled hallucination. Then the trippy voyage into the future, with the time-lapsed sun, is a stunning piece of visualisation, probably long before anything similar was seen on film.

the timelapse sequence reminded me of The Time Machine, albeit the film of TTM, can't remember how the book handled that.

all the different suns got confusing.

Didn't realize that growing your own tongue was such a, uh--thing: Esperanto was George Soros' first language? And Tolkien said the main reason for writing Lord Of The Rings was creating a place where the three languages he devised could be spoken? That's what it says here, in the purportedly nonfiction saga of a language inventor who got a good review in a Russian magazine, which compared it to the language developed by the Supermen in Heinlein's "Gulf." Soon after, the lower-case utopian starts getting fan mail--intense, arcane queries--from Russians; also, eventually, an invitation to a conference in an obscure corner of the Russian Federation--so, with intrigue and reservations, off he goes http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/24/121224fa_fact_foer

Esperanto was George Soros' first language?

yeah that was an awesome factoid

I believe that's an established factoid about Tolkien as well.

Loved that article. Gonna clip it out for the scrapbook. While reading about the Sapir theory I was like 'Aha, the inspiration for Jack Vance's Languages of Pao!'

still reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. it's, uh, dry. but what do you want from Mars colonization? its definitely taking me a while though. and then there are the other two books...

can't help but think about the science of it all too. seeing as how i know nothing about science and there is probably a ton more Mars data since the book was written. still, i haven't given up on it. writers who love science not always so hot when it comes to writing about actual people. though KSR tries his hardest to interest you in his main characters.

It's been abt 15 years but I remember it being a pretty hot page-turner EXCEPT there were certain characters whose POV bored me to tears and when I'd get to one of their chapters I'd be all nooooooo and stall out for a couple of days.

xpost our stalwart utopian voyager in the New Yorker piece had a crucial experience early: seeing Magma live!
Can't resist mentioning again the only full-length Robinson I've read, The Wild Shore. Lives up to its title, w eco-change barefoot boys and all. His short stories were good too, but don't think I've read any since the 90s. Would hope Green Mars and Blue Mars would be not so dry, especially considering their titles.

I've been really wanting to read that themed trilogy of which Wild Shore is part.

Yeah, The Wild Shore, Gold Coast, Pacific Rim. Maybe not in that order, but they're all still sitting on my shelf, waiting patiently for me to finish.

Reading Matt Ruff's MIRAGE, which is really good so far: set in parallel world where big pan-Arabian nation encompassing Middle East/Northern Africa is hit on 11/9/01 by jets hijacked by Christian terrorists. Could be really heavy-handed and crap, but is instead sprightly and clever. Likeable Muslim cops investigating the terrorists keep coming across clues that their world is all WRONG.

Wow. That's pretty bold.

I read his Fool on the Hill long ago and didn't really like it but there was def promise in it.

It's lots of fun. I like the idea of the UK as a sort of Iran equivalent--they have nukes, the PM is Holocaust denier David Irving, and he's always threatening Israel (which is in the middle of Europe, taking up much of former Germany as part of WW2 reparations) with destruction.

And Saddam Hussein is a mob boss, and Osama bin Laden a powerful politician, and head of secret government black ops group Al-Qaeda.

Yeah, Saddam is sometimes said to have closely studied Mafia methods, esp. while in prison for trying to whack the Prime Minister of Iraq
http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/spring03/iraq/saddam.jpg

Apparently not just Photoshop; I've seen video of it too.

read Dick's The Skull yesterday, available as a free download lots of places. was quite fun.

Picked up my old copy of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin when I was home for xmas, and now I'm reading it for the first time since I was like 18. And wow, it's still fucking great! She can write a great sentence, and she's got so many good ideas. I may go on a binge of her stuff after this.

Yeah---the first and second Le Guins for me were Left Hand and The Dispossessed---very compatible.

Lathe of Heaven is also great, in quite different in themes/style

I need to read some of her short stories. those two big new collections look nice.

Didn't Scott or somebody link the 70s Public TY version of Lathe, when it was posted on YouTube maybe? Linked on this very thread? I'll check later, gotta go (but it may well have been removed from YouTube)

I recommended Left Hand to a relatively new acquaintance of mine, then I saw it in a second hand bookshop and decided to buy it for him on a whim. This was a couple of months ago and he still hasn't read it, every time we meet it is now a mostly lol but kinda sad thing between us.

Four Ways To Forgiveness is all-time for me. its later and less famous but i think it might have changed my life or something. i never wanted it to end.

i still haven't read any of the earthsea books and there are still other novels and collections i need to read.

omg get on to earthsea asap. four ways one of my faves too.

i will i will! i got a lot to get to...

Guys thanks for reminding me that Left Hand is on my to do list for this winter.

Reading "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" by Charles Yu -- a Christmas gift from my brother, who loved it. It's good, so far -- kind of Vonneguty, but more hard-science with the faux physics than KV ever got. (And full to the brim with canonical sci-fi references.)

Inspired by (iirc) this thread, have been reading a nice Pan edition of PKD's GALACTIC POT-HEALER that I inherited from Martin Skidmore (along with quite a few other of his PKD's that I'd not read before.) It's good fun - the blurb from the Scotsman on the back says "The Sunny Side of SF"! - and unsurprisingly there are lots of neat throwaway ideas (like the competition to write dreams for the world's population) but I think I prefer my Dick a little bit bleaker and scarier. Also, even by PKD's standards the female characters are horribly one-dimensional - ie beautiful but deadly to the male.

Ooh, I have HOW TO LIVE SAFELY and hadn't gotten to it yet.

Anyone read Redshirts? It was recommended by a friend and I'm wondering if I should bother

No but I just looked it up and it looks like pretty light reading, which is not to say that I wouldn't totally read it.

"pretty light reading" is kind of my raison d'être so that's a big plus

In that case you might also like READY PLAYER ONE.

I bought it in an airport because the cover is commercial in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones for this moment.

oh that looks awesome

OK, read that zombie story in the McHugh book and it turned out to pretty good

i really hated Ready Player One

aw

I have mixed feelings about it, yeah. It seemed to start out promisingly but ended up feeling like everything that happened was inevitable; it was, itself, like playing through a video game.

It didn't even really satisfy me on a spot the reference level

and all over his face broods a universe of rainbows, dingy and fat, which from the fat vapours of the pitch bringing forth rainbows, not rainbows of heaven, but, so to say, fallen angels, grown gross and sluggish. But, years ere this, I think, I had seen the bulrushes: for, soon after the volcano came, in roaming over to the left shore of the cataract's sea---the whole left shore is flat and widespread, and hath no high walls like the right side---I walked upon a freshet of fresh warm water, and after following it upward, saw all around a marsh's swamp, and the bush of bulrushes. This is where the oysters be so crass, and they be pearl oysters, for all that soil be crass with nacreous matter of some sort, with barrok pearls, mother of pearl, and in most of the oysters which I opened pearls; with a lot of conch shells which have within them pink pearls, and there be also the black pearl, such as they have in Mexico and the West Indies, with the yellow and likewise the white, which last be shaped like the pear, and large, and his pallor hath a blank brightness, very priceless, and so to say, bridal.

That's from "The Dark Lot of One Saul," by M.P. Shiel. Had heard of him as a xenophobe, racist, anti-Semite and indeed, it seems that he was as smitten by the Yellow Peril as much as his Elizabethan castaway was the yellow pearl, to say the least. Also wanted to deport the Jews to Palestine, thus "making him a Zionist of sorts"--mots juste, Great Tales of Science Fiction eds. Silverberg & Greenberg! But in non-shit-talking stories like this, he earns the crack in his pot, a la xp David Lindsay. Other goodies in here so far from Twain, Kipling, Wells; compatible though creakier Poe and Verne. Currently reading "R.U.R."; quite a contrast so far with Shiel.

This quote is is one of the tamer bits actually; hard to avoid spoilers.

Anybody read this? Wish it were bigger, but seems to encompass several elements of Shiel's perspective:
http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n0/n1176.jpg

I think I read it? I think [perhaps it was RIDICULOUS. Sigh. Sometimes I wonder how amazing it would be to remember things.

galactic pot-healer is really bleak!!

heh temporarily put GPH aside and only resumed reading this morning - the moment when the protaganist encounters his dead self underwater is extremely eerie, have high hopes for a rousingly desolate finale.

The Purple Cloud is fun in overwritten way. That is one ugly, ugly cover, though (sadly, it's the version I have too)

I know. I'm sorry. But there is this

http://www.digital-eel.com/blog/library/Purplecloudpage.jpg

...which turns out to be from the opening page of---the whole freaking thing??
http://www.digital-eel.com/blog/library/The_Purple_Cloud.htm