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

"That's how we control the flow of the light. We're pushing it forward and backwards in time, so it avoids events that would otherwise disturb it," Prof Weiner explained.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22780651

oi thomp

http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/post/52877022704/how-much-of-sf-is-fiction-susan-napier-tells-us

that sounds like an academic book that i would like to read!!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/24/195317782/author-richard-matheson-i-am-legend-writer-dies-at-87

Hadn't seen that, thanks! The comments are good too; he wrote Duel?! Seems to fit: the well-paced focus on detail X dynamics of dread x choices. Which is why The Shrinking Man seems like the perfect place to begin, or anyway that's my first Matheson, except for all those Twilight Zones, though I didn't retain his name initially, with my childhood all shook up (thanks, RM). This All Things story is a bit different from/than/of (what are we supposed to say now) your blog link (I Am Legion is a really good novel too; don't remember much of the first screen version they mention; never saw The Omega Man or Legion)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=195599347 Good discussion of RM upthread, and Ward Fowler links a scary scarry story.

up this thread, that is.

today it irked me that i couldn't remember who wrote the story about the astronauts who are to go on a simulated six month mission they realise after something goes wrong isn't actually simulated. can anyone help me with that.

harry harrison?

idk and I wanna know, that is a helluva premiss.

i've read that recently. or something like it.

ah, it was JG Ballard's Thirteen to Centaurus, which is close. only that's a multi-generational ship, not 6 months. and a different twist.

http://www.ballardian.com/thirteen-to-centaurus

ooh i don't know. that sounds like ballard riffing on the conceit rather than what i was thinking of but who knows. also sfdb doesn't have any anthology i remember reading for it.

Thought of that Ballard story too but seems like the opposite of what the question was unless thomp inverted it in his mind at some point.

i finally made it to Blue Mars. i feel about as old as the old people on Mars in these books. they get really old. i can't say that i really care what happens to anyone at this point. more a sense of duty than anything else. this is interesting:

The Mars trilogy rights were at one point held by James Cameron,[6] who planned a five-hour miniseries to be directed by Martha Coolidge,[7] but he passed on the option. Later Gale Ann Hurd planned a similar mini-series for the Sci-Fi Channel, which also remained unproduced.[8] Then, in October 2008, it was reported that AMC and Jonathan Hensleigh had teamed up and were planning to develop a television mini-series based on Red Mars.[9]

is it this? ("Simulated Trainer"/"Trainee for Mars")

that's a broken link jordan

ugh, try this?

http://books.google.com/books?id=zkIlwxiicdkC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22Fifty%20in%20Fifty%22&pg=PA352#v=onepage&q=%22Fifty%20in%20Fifty%22&f=false

Maaan, how did I not realize Matheson wrote all these (sadly updated):
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/matheson_richard

Good presentation by Ray Monk, re his new bio of J.Robert Oppenheimer. Would like to read Oppy's short stories; not seeing online, but I'll p check his collections of essays on science and how it relates to all sorts of things in the Atom Age; in sunshine and in shadow. Will prob start with Atom and Void on account of cool title. Turns out he's a character in fiction too, like Harry Turtledove's alt-historical "Joe Steele."(Stalin as American son of Russian immigrants.) Anybody read it? Here's Ray (My IE10 is currently balking at vids, but other browsers OK)
http://www.booktv.org/Watch/14612/Robert+Oppenheimer+A+Life+Inside+the+Center.aspx

Underground round:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-pluto-moons-kerberos-styx-vulcan-william-shatner-20130702,0,311385.story

wait wait why is ray monk responsible for a bio of oppenheimer

Should he not? Never read him, but Booktv says he also biographied Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, so(maybe Hawking next?)

what, wittgenstein -> russell -> oppenheimer seems like a natural through-line for you??

You guys should check out the cover of new Guy Davenport collection.

Who's that on his t-shirt http://www.amazon.com/Guy-Davenport-Reader/dp/161902103X/ref=sr_1_1/191-0430251-3236404?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373031337&sr=1-1#reader_161902103X
Thomp I take it he's going for some connection of eggheads going for concerns of eggheads x concerns of community (didn't W. end up offering apologies all around? And Oppenheimer's essays on science and community were searching, basically making amends)

witt, russ, opp, the 20th century supergenius line.

i dunno but i don't think it's meant to be more than an oblique/lateral relation, or if you like a structural affinity

http://www.biographile.com/behind-the-books-with-ray-monk-author-of-oppenheimer/14416/

BIOG: Until recently, your work has been primarily focused on great philosophers. What inspired the switch to science in covering the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer?

RM: I was asked to review a collection of his letters & found them absolutely fascinating -- in a way that has some parallels with my fascination for Wittgenstein. Just as, with Wittgenstein, my aim was to show his philosophy and his ethical and spiritual concerns to be twin parts of the same soul, so my aim in writing Oppenheimer’s life was to find as much unity as I could in the ‘bright, shining splinters’ (to use his friend Rabi’s phrase) of which he was composed.

w's 'apologies' ('confessions' you mean, prob) were few, specific, highly personal, and more or less inscrutable to those to whom they were made. nothing like russell's involvement w/ society and politics.

Yep. I was kidding, barely restraining myself from busting out with a round of "All Apologies." But going with the role of "public intellectuals",from Russell to the Oppensaga, ultimately toward RJO's essays on post-Hiroshima science and community, seems like a pretty reasonable move. Look forward to his next.

I have this book in hand. Having read 2 1/2 other biographies of Oppenheimer and biographies of others mentioned in it, this one looks definitive. You can skip his essays.

Skip whose essays, Oppy's?

Yes. He had a habit in later life of making eloquent general pronouncements which, when looked at closely, turned out not to mean much.

I liked it when he song the John Donne poem in Doctor Atomic, although I guess that wasn't really him.

Shakey Mo Collier posted bout thishttp://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Latinos-Anthology-Science-Classics/dp/0819566349 on ILE's Speculative Fiction Poll thread---want!

http://revistanautilus.ro/wp-content/gallery/tamas-noiembrie-2012b/cosmos-latinos_coperta.jpg

More relevant to this thread than expected: most of the best of Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories For Late At Night. Mind you, the best is not the most of these stories, though most of the failures are gratifyingly ambitious, pushing through or against early-to-middle-ish respectable magazine slickness, to something thumping you and darting away--but ultimately suffering from unity of effect, for lack of a better phrase ( dun yeah, I didn't get some of 'em). Margaret Ronan's "Finger, Finger!" did very discreetly point me toward an off-page resolution/justification of the ending, via an unobtrusive and early clue, riskily recalled (hard to do this right; even Gene Wolfe
Nevertheless, I did get Jerome Bixby's "It's A Good Life", a little different than the Twilight Zone version, but just as great. Funky country fun can also be had in William Hope Hodgson's "The Whistling Room" and M.R. James's "The Ash Tree."
George Langelaan's "The Fly" is sweet, sober, tragic and low-key audacious, minus the camp of the first screen version or the awesome thump and dart and thump some more of Cronenberg's re-make.
The one that really grabbed me: "Vintage Season," a novelette by C.L. Moore, better known for collaborations with Henry Kuttner. This is a tale of an innocent 20th Century lad encountering kinky time travelers, eventually including or followed by a composer of metamorphic works...first published in a 1946 issue of Astounding, the last place I would have guessed (can be taken as a female writer's critique of Astounding's axiomatic white male earthlings uber alles, though can also imagine Campbell and crew getting turned on by i)(I kinda was).
Also, though not really thread-revelant, the volume ends with more unsettling gender scrutiny via "The Iron Gates", a WWII-era novel by Margaret Millar, wife of Ken Millar/Ross Macdonald, where women (oh yeah, some men too) are keeping the homefires burning and the merry-go-round turning, with madness and murder finding their seats, of course. A little too b-movie talky at times, or creatively overwritten at others, but the zingers can go deep (enough to distract me from obvious clues).

One more from the Hitchthology: "Evening Primrose", by John Collier: a poet forsakes this cruel world and stumbles into a subculture of people living among posh Manhattan department store mannikins. Light touch flicks momentum, through eerie elegance, tawdriness and plain dust: the poet's a fule, but his streaky point of view is increasingly hard to dismiss, as he veers into a romance a bit more tragic than comic. This is prob the most Hitchcockian story in the whole thing.

There's a great John Collier collection put out by NYRB

yeah fancies and goodnights. it's great.

i haven't read any new sf or fantasy in a while, what's good

What have you read in the past that you liked? (just need some touchstones)

Afraid Sturgeon's Law is still in effect after all, thomp.

Just read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and can recommend it - with caveats. It's a very well done first contact story, uses the common device of alternating before/after chapters to ratchet up the tension, finely managing the balancing act of keeping the reader intrigued by the mystery but not frustrated by the lack of answers. And when the final answer comes it's suitably, maybe even overly devastating. The main characters are an unlikely mix of types and personalities who get on so uproariously well it's almost sickening, and it's certainly implausible how uniquely qualified they all are for their mission (while at the same time being almost the last people on earth you might imagine being selected for such an honourable and dangerous undertaking).

The main problem though is the religious element, of which there are two aspects. The first is that the Jesuits are running the show, and they seem to be trying to atone for the mistakes of catholic conquests past. Instead of assuming the natives are savages fit for slavery and extermination they make the opposite mistake of coming with hearts completely open (but minds equally closed). In an interview Russell says first contact is "impossible to do right" but it's hard to imagine it being attempted more naively than here. Of course if you think that men of the church (and they are largely men here, although there are "strong female characters") are and always will be starting from flawed intellectual premisses then their failure becomes perhaps slightly more plausible, though no less ridiculous. The second aspect is that there is a strong theme of theodicy running through the book, and like all theodicies it is a nonsense. The last pages almost made me want to throw the book across the room with their acquiescence to "the mystery" - and yet I can't help but be slightly pleased to hear that there is a sequel which explores the problem further. A slight masochistic trendency, but the skiffy was strong enough to make putting up with the other stuff worthwhile.

What have you read in the past that you liked? (just need some touchstones)

if you're not interested in making an argt for the objective value of the things you think are good why would i even begin to trust your judgement??

ledge that just makes me want to read a set of spoilers so i can go 'oh ok then', also how do you feel about 'a case of conscience' by james blish

"yeah fancies and goodnights. it's great."

i have the original paperback of this. tons of fun.

if you're not interested in making an argt for the objective value of the things you think are good why would i even begin to trust your judgement??

if you're not interested in not being a dick, why should anyone bother to recommend things to you?? ffs

ledge that just makes me want to read a set of spoilers so i can go 'oh ok then', also how do you feel about 'a case of conscience' by james blish

I'm gonna stick up for The Sparrow, it's a good yarn well told and I'm looking forward to the sequel. Haven't read the Blish but it sounds *ridiculous*, I could only read it as a reductio ad absurdum - but that's how I'd treat any work with religious themes tbh. Harry Harrison's short story An Alien Agony is more my style.

Up next: China Mountain Zhang.

Craig Harrison: The Quiet Earth -- 1981 NZ novel, basis for the rather great 1980s film

http://stuffpoint.com/apocalyptic-and-post-apocalyptic-fiction/image/215013-apocalyptic-and-post-apocalyptic-fiction-the-quiet-earth-screenshot.jpg

Man wakes up, finds out everyone else on earth has vanished, due to experiment he was working on and was attempting suicide to escape the effects of

http://www.listal.com/viewimage/4015515

http://i2.listal.com/image/4015515/600full-the-quiet-earth-screenshot.jpg