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

I was a little harsh on it, and him, it would be fairer to say that he just didn't appeal to me as a character. I kind of feel that he went nowhere and achieved nothing, which is obviously not true, it's just that where he went and what he did never aroused my sympathy. I do think that in terms of world building it suffered from telling not showing. Constant references to "the cleansing winds campaign" were never backed up with anything and felt hollow, and the whole thing didn't seem overly distinguishable from any other less communist more plausible near future possible world.

I think about the whole drawing doors conceit a lot. Well, a lot more than I should.

If anything stuck with me it was the section where San Xiang gets raped. Not the best thing to be left with but that section at least was (horribly) convincing and affecting.

OK, I've been sold on the Apollo Quartet books

Hope I didn't oversell. So far he's only written two and is researching the next, I think.

Just finished another Hitchcock anthology,Stories For Late At Night Seems more uneven than xpost Stories For Late At Night, but even several of those what fumble their endings do provide captivating settings for this old nature boy, who likes to read creepy old books while safe in the library (only one panel of the ceiling has fallen so far), despite outbursts of this freaky-for-local, monstrously green monsoon summer.
Good examples (and def Subjects For Further Study) incl Irwin S. Cobb, whose at-least-suitable-for-middle-school-campfires plot is comes after a tour of the sometimes repulsively beautiful, "occasionally bottomless" Reelfoot Lake, one result of the Mississippi Valley's 1811 earthquake--a real thing, right? When the River ran backwards?
Another one I'll keep a lazy eye out for, whose British landscapes are catnip to a big rolling butterball of crusty presumption, is Nugent Barker. Right off, can see his why-bother-with-an-article "Curious Adventure of Mr. Bond" 's ending coming, but he doesn't care, and will soon see why he shouldn't (cos it's a good chilly build-up, anyway).
Kinda cautiously hopeful about Basil Copper too, considering his somewhat Gahan Wilsonesque imagery in "Camera Obscura", and Miriam Allan DeFord, whose sweet "A Death In The Family", about a lonely, though proactive undertaker (yeah you can see that one coming too), could be appealingly laid out on MeTV's digitally embalmed episodes of the original half-hour Hitchcock anthology series (unless the sponsors chickened out). Ditto Margaret St. Clair's "The Estuary" (unless it's too simple/subtle), and Robert Specht's "The Real Thing" (unless it's too much like the real Mayberry).
Theodore Sturgeon's novella "It" might work in the later, hour-long version of Hitch's tubeshow (on which Bruce Dern, for one, got room to be pretty disturbing). Though on the page, it would have worked better if he'd stolen the first line of whichever Ray Bradbury story, "He came out of the ground hating", or something equally plausible.
Fritz Leiber's narsty "X Marks The Pedwalk" is still a cutting-edge car-toon, not too far from Ballard, but Damon Knight's "Not With A Bang" doesn't quite match the expectations raised by his best or even best-ish, while Ellis Peters and Donald Westlake don't come close.
However, T.H. White, who I thought was just corny because of "The Sword In The Stone", which I probably never read", gets a real sparkly, sunny, livid Lapland up in "The Troll", which almost seems like an implied satire of The Magic Mountain flushed clientele (just a bit, just in passing). And I'm amazed again at the difference between Algis Budrys' perhaps unfairly-remembered voice as a reviewer (he used to lecture us on "scientifiction"--yeesh!) and as a short story writer: "Master of the Hounds" title character seems like a ruthlessly effective channeling from AB's own pissy darkside, and the plotting messed me up good, and would make an ace ep of the Hitch show!
But the real question is, Who Is William Wood? As yet Google yields no clue---is he Gene Wolfe? Ira Levin? Uh--Christopher Isherwood? This last because "One of the Dead" offers desiccated glamor and queasy vitality of the Southern Cali artificial paradise (Hollywood exurbia, a little scorched but lots of stars and bizzers tucked away in these quiet hills).
There's this producer--of horror movies? Or just a buff?--Guy Relling, whom I never met but whose pronouncements on the supernatural reached me from time to time like messages from an oracle, claims that the existence of the living dead is a particularly excruciating one as they hover between two states of being. Their memories keep the passions of life forever fresh and sharp but they are able to relieve themselves only at a monstrous expense of will and energy which leaves them helpless for months or even years afterwards...There are...exceptions...particularly the insane ones, who, ignorant of the limitations of death as they were of the impossibilities of life, transcend them with the dynamism that is exclusively the property of madness, with no kind of spoiler, just a spur to infernal inference of oh-shit hindsight.

Damn, sorry! This 'un is Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories That Scared Even Me. The one I carried on about before is ...Stories For Late At Night.

Read the first Apoolo Quartet novella--it was really good. Not 100% sold on the very ending, but still ace.

Cool. Yeah, the only part where I had a moment's hesitation was the very ending, but not enough to reflect badly on all that had gone before.Saw in an interview and in his science fact blog that he hadn't read any science for a long time but what got him back into it was reading Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth , by Andrew Smith, about the Apollo moonwalkers, and it shows. Highly recommend that book, which received glowing reviews from Arthur C. Clarke and J.G. Ballard among others.

The second AQ book involves a manned flight to Mars so afterward I dipped into a similar novel which he references, Voyage, by Stephen Baxter, but it started bugging me very quickly, various things Sales had under complete control quickly turned into Alternate History Mugging in other hands- "Hey, this is where the timeline diverges, see? see?" *Nudge, nudge, wink, wink*

From Nat Geo---mysterious circle on ocean floor

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/files/2013/08/photo2.jpg
Photograph courtesy Kimiaki Ito

The circles, scientists say, are actually nests created by male pufferfish, which spend about ten days carefully constructing and decorating the structures to woo females. What’s more, this industrious pufferfish is thought to be a new species in the Torquigener genus, according to the study, published July 1 in the journal Scientific Reports. Genus? More like Genius!
Pufferfish video: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/places/culture-places/food/japan_pufferfish/

OK, some people here seem to like that Stephen Baxter book, maybe I will give it another looksee.

Voyage (Baxter) is good, but having JUST finished Apollo Quartet 2, yeah, Sales is better. I think Baxter just writes too much too fast--lots of good ideas, but he's not a brilliant writer. Pretty much always enjoyable, though.

Just checked, and Baxter has written 51 books (many of them ~500p) in 22 years, so he has a scary Joyce Carol Oates rate of production

Some allegations of cut-and-paste plagiarism floating around our there which seems"

unsurprising

Orgbotics? Only for good things:
http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/08/27/researcher-controls-colleagues-motions-in-1st-human-brain-to-brain-interface

Dang, missed DragonCon again--still HotLanta, obv.

http://binaryapi.ap.org/996ffa8ec26046ccbf4ba258febe7aa0/460x.jpg
credit: AP Photos

RIP, Frederik Pohl.

Whoa. The last one standing. So soon after Vance. Dang.

I read Gateway because of the ilx poll and it kicked my ass.

He was one of my favourites.

i loved some of the stuff he would post on his blog. apparently they are going to keep posting stuff he wrote for it. which is cool.

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/

great, underrated writer. and yeah, kind of the last of his generation

Space Merchants and Merchants' War are all-time. Also JEM

Also Man Plus

cool find at the book store around the corner this morning:

https://sphotos-a-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/75916_10152491570037137_1062939507_n.jpg

i went there looking for r.a. lafferty since jon was talking him up the other day and i think i only have his short stories in various best-ofs and collections. found a copy of his And Walk Now Gently Through The Fire...short story collection. found the galaxy on the floor of the store under a pile of books. also bought The Fifth Galaxy Reader and a copy of Cordwainer Smith's The Insrumentality Of Mankind collection.

"Instrumentality"

Nice find with the Galaxy! I just could not get into Cordwainer Smith from the one Instrumentality book I picked up. idg the appeal.

Also Man Plus

I seem to remember enjoying this until the almost literal deus ex machina conclusion (iirc?)

Have you read "Scanners Live In Vain," Shakey?

i loved Norstrilia.

I think it was Norstrilia that I started reading and didn't finish. Haven't read "Scanners Live in Vain" - there's kind of a hole in my sf reading when it comes to a lot of canonical short stories, I think. Mostly because the short pieces I've read have tended to be in individual author collections (PKD, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Silverberg, Pohl etc.) I have a great New Worlds anthology... but when it comes to anthologies in general I kind of don't know where to start or even look. Tons of stuff on Amazon doesn't list the individual stories included so I'm always hesitant that I'm gonna purchase something and find I already have a bunch of the stories included...

Best Story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964 (Unabridged Version)

aha! Yeah I feel like my knowledge of that golden age era has been really limited to novels, which is clearly not where a lot of the action is. then I read interviews with Malzberg where he rhapsodizes about what the best issue of Amazing was or whatever and I'm like jeez I really need to get on this

Note that the Britishes prefer another book, a Penguin anthology edited by Brian Aldiss.

This one, also mentioned upthread, I think: best story in the penguin science fiction omnibus, 1973

that thread makes it sound considerably worse

I think what they were trying to say is: no sf, please, we're British.

lol

i am kind of proud of that thread

So I figured.

'Scanners' is the canonical Smith choice, but I prefer some of the other - weirder - stories - things like 'On the Storm Planet' - so completely singular and weird

weird

Yeah Shakey we've talked about a bunch (several) anthologies on here, some of them bigass and uneven--big asses should not be so bumpy--yet sometimes described story by story, so you might feel like you've guessed which collections would be worthwhile overall. And you might be wrong, but still. Haven't gotten to Nostilia yet, but the Smith short stories I've read get very operatic, not like "space opera" in any usual sense, although I could see him as one of the inspirations for Battlestar Galactica's Millenial reboot.
I recently came across Lafferty's "Encased In Ancient Rind" in Quark/3, from 1971: A Quarterly of Speculative Fiction, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker. Thought I'd read this before, and that it was mostly terribly dated, but don't remember Lafferty at all, so I better check the whole thing, because Lafferty's tale seemed dated for a second, but quickly spun me through something lighthearted but not not lightheaded; too much commitment to deft detail; but not really lighthearted either (except he and his readers don't have to live through what his characters do, so hey!)(not yet anyway, so hey). Kind of an outlier inspiration to some New Wavers like Delany, according to this intriguing profile:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/lafferty_r_a

yeah I've been curious about Lafferty for awhile but his stuff seems a bit hard to get at the moment

There are a few Lafferty stories in some of those Orbit collections.

John Clute wrote all that about him? Man, that guy is indefatigable.

Speaking of Orbit, you know who else I like from those collections? Richard Mckenna, the Sand Pebbles guy.

Damn, they cover him too! Looks good, thanks for mentioning:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mckenna_richard_m

those orbits are the bomb. i always forget which ones i already own when i see them in stores. i should carry a list in my wallet.