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

Shiel was the first literary King of Rodonda, the crown which has now passed down to Javier Marias

Thought that stopped when Shiel's successor passed on? According to that
xp http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/shiel_m_p But how did this new King arise?

Blaylock on steampunk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-p-blaylock/on-steampunk_b_2494561.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

So, Blaylock is my favorite writer of fantasy of the generations after Wolfe and Dick and Lafferty. But more because of his extraordinary body of contemporary southern california suburban magic realist novels, especially the holy handful of The Digging Leviathan, The Last Coin, The Paper Grail and All the Bells on Earth. His victorian novels were really great but not the engine of his greatness to me.

He always kept his distance from the steampunk thing until the last couple of years, when as far as I can tell he finally said to himself 'fuck it, I'd be a fool not to grasp this low-hanging fruit' and embraced the whole grandfather of steampunk thing. And lo and behold, he's got multiple new books coming out and reissues of the old ones. Good on him, I say. I'd probably have done no different.

But I'm here to tell you to measure your justifiable 'ewwww steampunk' reaction because Blaylock is the most amazing prose stylist and his work is jammed with the ineffable and bursting with heart. I love him madly.

I'll check out the Cali magic realism, thanks! Which of his steampunk novels should I start with? I really didn't like The Difference Engine, but not against the subgenre overall.

For his victoriana, get the relatively recent Langdon St. Ives omnibus and start with the first one, Homunculus. In print from Subterranean or cheap on Nook/Kindle.

Powers' Anubis Gates is probably the best of that whole strain, tbh.

thx---what about John Shirley?

I haven't read any Shirley. My only exposure to him is the lyrics he wrote for two late blue oyster cult albums! If I ever see his boc inspired novel Transmaniacon I'm gonna get it though.

Wow, didn't realize he was this involved with music, as writer and performer: http://www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley/jsmusic.html

But I'm here to tell you to measure your justifiable 'ewwww steampunk' reaction because Blaylock is the most amazing prose stylist and his work is jammed with the ineffable and bursting with heart. I love him madly.

Blaylock has written some of the best descriptions of food I've read anywhere. The California books are the best... The Last Coin and The Paper Grail especially.

I've read all of Shirley's odd transreal/cyberpunk hybrid books and they're all great. Perhaps start with the Eclipse trilogy first and then City Come A-Walkin'. He's mostly writing straight-up horror these days and I haven't kept up.

Apparently Marias is the DISPUTED king since 1997: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Redonda

can somebody talk to me about luis mcmaster bujold?

i am enjoying the hell out of the young miles sequence, but i'm not sure if i should dig deeper into the universe w/ other sagas.

Quite a diligent, even passionate entry about her work in http://sf-encyclopedia.com Have to check her out, thanks. Also liked this:
You expected the dunes to change, they were like a person, though only one who had known the heights and swamps of them can explain the curious sleeping vitality of the sands under the forest. Things with a smaller life than the dunes would flutter and creep and stalk boldly though them until you might think of them as dead and tame. But Dr. Thorne had seen the traveling dunes shifting restlessly before the winds and felt a kinship with the great never-lasting hills.
That's from "Dune Roller", female writer Julian May's 1951 science fiction debut, published in Astounding. Not the best time or place for feminism, but her damsel in distress floats some speculative zingers effectively enough, and her male scientist target's "female" conception of the dune roller turns out to be a typically male simplification, we learn at the very end. Pretty sly times encounters with passages like the above, qualling subterranean drive of the suthor as well as the dune roller. Considering the promise of this story, can see how her later Galactic Milieu octology might lead to SF Encyclopedia to comparisons with Lessing (as it does). Oh yeah, this is the first counter to (often anxious) tonnage of testosterone in the aforementioned Great Tales of Science Fiction Le Guin'll be along later (can't come too soon).

God, sorry! I meant:
Such slyness also encounters passages like the above, equaling subterranean drive of the suthor as well as the dune roller

eh I meant we get slyness, plot/character twists, as well as the bit about shifting of the dunes--"they were like a person"--incl a person like the author, with her drive and ambition as subterranean as it had to be, in an Astounding Mag pulp "hard" s.f. exercise ca. 1951 (when she was 21, even)

http://io9.com/5976281/why-alien-invasion-is-the-perfect-metaphor-for-growing-up-black-in-america

i'm still reading Red Mars...how sad is that? i think i'll be reading it forever. that's how it feels. i'll never finish. it just keeps going into infinity. i can't give up though part of me wants to. i've been cheating on Red Mars too and reading other books at work. don't tell it that. it's a secret. it's engaging when i'm reading it but sometimes its so hard to pick up. plus, the copy i have is horrible. beat up fat oversized-paperback that's even water-stained inside. it was probably in someone's bathroom. i can't stop thinking that it was in someone's bathroom...it's so unloveable. nobody ever would have bought it in a million years if i hadn't bought it. it's my cross to bear.

Scott I thought you might want to know that I had to read that post out loud to my wife last night when she was wondering why I was laughing so hard. I have known so many of those disturbingly swollen bathroom paperbacks in my life.

"paperbacks" eh?

there was a particular copy of Fowles' The Magus, beloved of my wife, which I had to surreptitiously put outta its misery

Why!?

It had become viscerally disgusting to hold. I swapped it out for a new (used) one.

Oh yeah---which reminds me of a friend who took a paperback (the basic drugstore kind, not the fancy trade pbs, which might have better paper) to the rain forest--when she got settled into her campsite, finally pulled it out of her bag--and lo, the pages of William Styron's Darkness Visible had become huge! Also her tampons.

lol. That's helpful to know

yeah, watch it in the rain forest (another girl had something sufficiently different to share w her)

a Robertson Davies novel?

Didion (very dry)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51g8q-L7sWL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Frederik Pohl - Slave Ship

SF war novel, about the attempts to train animals to aid human warfare. The idea of America vs an extreme religious group rather than a country has aged well, but overall it's pretty incoherent. Could've done with some of C.M. Kornbluth's craziness! My copy is ex-library and was disintegrating as I read it, probably worth the £1 I paid for it just about.

awesome cover though

Yeah! Not the typical Pohl cover, is it? That was a real thing, like the pioneering researcher Dr. John Lily got involved in what turned out to be a plan to train dolphins as commandos. Movie Day of the Dolphins based on this situation, but I never saw it. I do know Lily got way into LSD research, not using it on dolphins though (or soldiers, as in the project described in Dec. 17 New Yorker---there were others like that too). Also use of suicide commando critters in Vietnam: dogs mostly, I think.

can i resubmit my humble req. for info abt. luis mcmaster bujold?

it's 'lois', for one thing

goddamn, did that twice. i like my franco-latin scots version quite a bit, to be honest.

I finished all of the Young Miles cycle, and I'm debating reading the Miles in Love compendium. While I enjoy the books by and large, at points they're feeling a bit too Douglas Adamsy. I've got the sensation that I'm reading Act I before Act I before Act I. When does the story really start, if ever? The Vorkosigan stories are pleasant enough as fluffy romps, but IDK that they've got enough brain-fodder to sustain my attention/interest for 1400 more pages, unless something HAPPENS besides hijinks and Miles' perpetual awesomeness.

soda, I responded above; didn't know about her, but found appealing article:
Quite a diligent, even passionate entry about her work in http://sf-encyclopedia.com Have to check her out, thanks.

Here's the New Yorker article I mentioned, about experimenting on soldiers: "Operation Delirium" (the film stills are from the researcher's footage) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/17/121217fa_fact_khatchadourian

Octavia Butler's Patternmaster, v disappointing. Honestly I'm just bored of that strain of SF where everyone is still embroiled in a Hobbesian war of all against all, without any authorial reflection or judgement on this state of affairs. To my mind this problem is particularly prevalent in golden age SF and up to the 70s, but maybe I'm just distracted by the enormous spaceships and speculative physics of my preferred brand of modern-day hard SF.

Re the latter, just read "A Meeting With Medusa" by Arthur C. Clarke. Another from xp Great Tales of Science Fiction, and a sudden bounce back through this volume's Verne and Wells--which go with so many later inclusions, in terms of somewhat warping Earthly context of mixed motivations, outward bound in time and space---but especially here, where new improved balloons cruise Earth and then Jupiter---but he makes it seem plausible. Ditto lifeforms in precarious "terrain" of Jovian atmospheric strata. All so beautifully described, light and dark sides. Gotta read more of his, maybe especially the collab with Stephen Baxter?

You might try Butler's Kindred, more of a play of timelines, characters' resourcefulness/manipulative charm etc (African-American slips back into slave times, but then again---)

I thought her short story Bloodchild was great, dealing with a thoroughly different - alien indeed - kind of social contract. Would like to know if any of her novels tread similar ground. Lilith's Brood perhaps?

Been a long time since I've read her, but the strange social contract is def an ongoing theme, and this article might help:
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/butler_octavia Finally finished Great Tales of Science Fiction, and while the SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR goes too far, and some nice stories suffer by context, incl proximity to others--god, there sure were a lot of: O what a great wild party, but then Debbie Downer pulls a string, and human limitations kick in or New Improved Man must at least pay sudden dark dues, like we couldn't have guessed, if we will have forgotten how the previous 10 stories did end (nultism vs. boredom, sorry)--still, some syththetic life forms slip through the walls---like Kipling's, good-humored, shrewdly andseriously uneasy "As Easy As A.B.C.", Wells' robustly mischievous "The New Accelerator"--others don't slip though, they just parade their own thing, acknowledging context or not, like xp Twain's "Sold To Satan", Cordwainer Smith's "The Burning of the Brain", Tiptree's reckless "Painwise", Sheckley's triumphantly slick, strong "Warm", Saberhagen's tough sensitive space opera "Goodlife", Le Guin's "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" (eerie reverie, like the Twain, but hers also mixes in the Le Guin ccs of sunshine, man). And of course the xp May has its aforementioned wiles, ditto one by Peter Phillips, although he seems to have given L. Ron some ideas that really were taken TOO FAR (not P.'s fault of course). Overall, worth getting from the library or for a very small price, and I'm curious about The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces, which is the unabridged version of this big-assed tome.

And of course the xp Shiel is its own parade too. I think that's why they picked such marvels, to give us breaks from (in) the grand tombahip of context--anyway, much appreciated, Silverberg & Greenberg (even though the Silverberg story is just big slick shit, though prob got him some big tit mag money; got a whirly girl too)(ok I've read worse)(but this bad stuff suffers from overall context too!)

thx for link, think i'll check out kindred, and the xenogenesis series (lilith's brood? whatchu talkin' bout wikipedia)

I've just finished reading an anthology of stories written by winners of the Octavia E. Butler scholarships to Clarion & Clarion West (they've sent one young person of colour to each workshop each year since 2007). There's some really good stuff in it, and they manage not to retread Octavia's themes too heavily.

http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/book/bloodchildren/

In the interests of full disclosure etc etc I should say that I'm friends with the editor and the first story is by my mate Chris, but I would not stan for it on here if I didn't honestly like it.

Appealing description of this on Amazon, which shows some other related, like a Nalo Hopkinson-edited---anybody read this?
http://images.indiebound.com/831/525/9780446525831.jpg

from Amazon:
...The earliest story in Dark Matter is acclaimed literary author Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Goophered Grapevine" (1887), in which an aging ex-slave tells a chilling tale of cursed land to a white Northerner buying a Southern plantation. In "The Comet" (1920), W.E.B. Du Bois portrays the rich white woman and the poor black man who may be the only survivors of an astronomical near-miss. In George S. Schuyler's "Black No More" (1931), an excerpt from the satirical novel of the same name, an African American scientist invents a machine that can turn blacks white. More recent reprints include science fiction master Samuel R. Delany's Nebula Award-winning "Aye, and Gomorrah..." (1967), which delineates the socio-sexual effects of asexual astronauts; Charles R. Saunders's heroic fantasy "Gimmile's Songs" (1984), in which a woman warrior encounters a singer with a frightening, compelling magic in ancient West Africa; MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Octavia E. Butler's powerful "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" (1987), in which the cure for cancer creates a terrifying new disease of compulsive self-mutilation; and Derrick Bell's angry, riveting "The Space Traders" (1992), in which aliens offer to trade their advanced technology to the U.S. in exchange for its black population. Other reprints include "Ark of Bones" (1974) by author-poet-folklorist Henry Dumas; "Future Christmas" (1982) by master satirist Ishmael Reed; "Rhythm Travel" (1996) by playwright-poet-critic Amiri Baraka (who has also written as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amiri Baraka); and "The African Origins of UFOs" (2000) by London-based West Indian author Anthony Joseph.
Most of the stories in Dark Matter are original; these range even more widely in their concerns and themes. In the generation ship of Linda Addison's "Twice, at Once, Separated," a Yanomami Indian tribe preserves its culture in coexistence with technology, while visions tear a young woman from her own wedding. Bestselling novelist Steven Barnes examines degrees of privilege and deprivation when an African American woman artist is trapped in an African concentration camp in his unflinching contribution, "The Woman in the Wall." In John W. Campbell Award winner Nalo Hopkinson's sexy, scary "Ganger (Ball Lightning)," two lovers drifting apart try to reconnect through the separation of virtual sex. A mystic power awakens in the devastated future of Ama Patterson's gorgeous and tough "Hussy Strutt." An artist's infidelity changes two generations in Leone Ross's astute, magic-realist "Tasting Songs." In Nisi Shawl's sharp, witty mythic fantasy "At the Huts of Ajala," the spirit of a modern woman must outwit a god before she is even born. Others contributing new stories are Tananarive Due, Robert Fleming, Jewelle Gomez, Akua Lezli Hope, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Kalamu ya Salaam, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Evie Shockley, and Darryl A. Smith. --Cynthia Ward

I know there's a thread for this, and I won't say too much about it here, but just watched ep 1 of Season I of Game of Thrones. How are the books? Never read much George R.R.

Game of Thrones DVDs: appreciate the character studies via action, but awaiting return of the White Walkers or some other kinda magical. Now reading Hartwell & Cramer's The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF which is appropriately choosey re Le Guin, Wolfe, Bob Shaw (his first slow glass story), Kuttner & Moore, but more striking/new to me are once genre-celebrated writers coming from the other, basically tech-oriented side---Hal Clement, Raymond Z. Gallun, Robert L. Forward, Dean Ing--whose exuberant, bold and sometimes slightly mad engineering def extends to character construction, which seems mainly self-taught. Not that it isn't always, ultimately (if it really works), but pretty sure tbeir workshop courses didn't incl. creative writing (well maybe Ing, but his syntax seems litte bumpier than the older gearheads--do dig his wry, class-wise take on leisure consumers in space; very 70s, minus expected dated details, so far)

The only duds in here so far are from vast troves of "hard SF" titans: Heinlein's snotty, superficial "It's Great to Be Back", Asimov's conventionally plotted "The Life and Times of Multivac", and Clarke's award-winning theological tearjerker, "The Star".

conveniently plotted, that is.