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

I think the takeaway is that in parallel universe where I am writing scholarly articles on this stuff I will be sure to avoid this issue by the following type of formulation "this story originally appeared in Weird Tales, 1943, under the byline *looks at copy of original magazine on desk* Lewis Padgett, pseudonym of the writing team Kuttner and Moore. For a discussion of a more detailed attribution I refer you to the literature."

Probably the safest course.

Oystein I'd be interested to hear what you think of The Book of Skulls, I found it unbearably misogynistic
Overall I thought the book was OK, though I'm still not sure why it's marketed as science fiction. I guess it could be marketed as fantasy as a way of hinting to readers that "y'know, this immortality racket *MIGHT* be real!" Guess there's a big discussion one could have about what labeling something as a certain genre even means.

I didn't think of it as misogynistic when I read it, but I did find it hard to read about the way these kids saw women, and their (to me alien) promiscuous attitudes. I guess that's not too different. Tbh, I thought that was more about my hangups than the author's, but I have a tendency to assume it's my fault when I don't like something like this in a book. Maybe the author had a reason for it, but I couldn't really tell.

Since it's all told from these guys' perspective, you can always argue that it's just the characters being misygonists, not the book! But then why's it there? Some of the stuff about homosexuality was pretty weak as well.

Still, there was some fun to be had in seeing how all these characters saw and judged one another, and I did think it picked up halfway through once the damned roadtrip and introduction of the characters was more or less done.

Wonder how those fuckers at the temple would've handled it if one of the kids who showed up had been a woman, given one of the idiotic trials they had to go through. It will be some time before I'm up for reading any more Silverberg, I think.

(sorry that this is so messy -- I'm about to leave work but figured I'd try to at least say something)

I haven't read that one but it doesn't sound particularly representative of peak Silverberg imo

For me that peak would be "Mugwump 4"

Haven't heard of that one; still want to read his Dying Inside, which has been described to me as somewhere between prime Philip Roth and PK Dick, at least atmospherically.
Also in the sense of SF etc. with literary appeal/standards (no painful/clunky syntax, anyway, nor too-crass grasping at tropes), I'm so far enjoying Vampires in The Lemon Grove, short stories by Karen Russell.It's holding up well in the wake of other crossovers from Creative Writing turf, xpost Whitehead'sZone One, Perrotta's The Leftovers; ditto the most recently xposted back-and-forth of Hartwell-Cramer's Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder and Anderson's Tales Before Tolkien. So far.

Oh yeah, and she's got that new novella about dealing with a world epidemic of insomnia, but so far it's only available for Kindle and Audible. Good interview this week on Fresh Air podcast; think she read some of it too, but need to re-listen amid less multi-tasking/-slacking.

Will check that out, thanks.

I tried reading the Book of Skulls last year but couldn't finish it. Didn't like the misogyny, didn't like any of the characters or find them sympathetic or intriguing.

Just finished 'Store of the Worlds' by Robert Sheckley which I enjoyed very much, though. Lots of interesting ideas and although a lot of the stories are influenced by technology and social/political events of the 50s/60s, overall the concepts and execution/writing felt pretty contemporary to me.

Think Sheckley really stands the test of time. If he were a B-picture director or noir cinematographer he would be eventually get his MoMa retrospective I guess that NYRB collection is the equivalent.

Haven't heard of that one; still want to read his Dying Inside, which has been described to me as somewhere between prime Philip Roth and PK Dick, at least atmospherically.

More Roth than Dick, but not a bad description: it's an ageing-Jewish-man-losing-his-potency story, but instead of sexual power it's telepathy that's fading. It's a really good book.

Thanks Oystein (and salsa shark), I ws a bit worried I ws being oversensitive bt yr experience(s) w that book sound like I'm not alone, so good. Also sounds like Book of Skulls isn't Silverberg at his best, so if I get the opportunity I'll prob give him another go

Reading this new one, Adam Christopher's 'The Burning Dark', after seeing a couple of rave reviews. So far it seems more like a not-great, not-awful haunted-house story set on a spaceship that relies on your having seen Aliens to do the heavy lifting in its world-building.

I think I need to get Ancillary Justice.

This story A Logic Named Joe by Murray Leinster is celebrated and studied as having predicted the internet in 1946. It's written in a kind of humorous pulpy style reminiscent of Fredric Brown. Let me know what you think.

Read three of the five Sheckley novels compiled in this: http://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/images/Sheckley-600.jpg

Not bad, generally amusing, occasionally tiresome. There's an extended fantasy-type detour in Mindswap that is fairly pointless and goes on way too long, for example. Journey Beyond Tomorrow struck me as the best, the one where the satire and the stylistic shifts in authorial style work most in concert. Oddly, I am also reading Pohl's "Age of the Pussyfoot" at the same time, which contains what has to be an intentional and direct nod to Sheckley with the "Immortality, Inc." conceit.

three stories in to this and i wanted to stop. one of the stories being some xian parable about god dying and the devil going to heaven and another story being a long fairy tale about a prince and princess didn't help.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c2/CrownOfStars.jpg

i might go back to it. in the meantime i started this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/TheWholeMan%28Brunner%29.jpg

when is that Tiptree collection from? Pretty much every story in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is amazing, but I know her style shifted over the years

Otm. Kind of reluctant to read anything else and find out it is not as good.

Glad you basically liked the Sheckley, Shakey. I have that book too, so far have only read Mindswap but have head that Journey Beyond Tomorrow is the best. B-b-but what happened to your sf reading project on the other thread?

unpublished and later stuff. so...not exactly representative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_of_Stars

Think Sheckley's rep, sev decades ago at least, was for being more consistent in short stories-novelettes-novellas. Tiptree's stuff got crazier later, but sometimes it worked out great, if strenuously.

B-b-but what happened to your sf reading project on the other thread?

I had to put Vol 1 aside for the moment since Sheckley was on loan from the library and had to finish that first, but I'll get back to it. and then I have to finish Age of the Pussyfoot and Brunner's Jagged Orbit. And Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop lol

Ha, I use exactly the same system of prioritization.

Does your library have copies of either of the in-print Sheckley story collections The Masque of Mañana or The Store of the Worlds?

Yeah, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is prob the best place to start Tiptreeing. And speaking of xpost Priest, here's Tom Shippey's take on his latest, from recent WSJ:

Christopher Priest's "The Adjacent" (Titan, 374 pages, $24.99) is a novel in eight sections, telling four stories. How they fit together—and this is a common feature of "The Prestige" and other Christopher Priest novels—is never explained completely.

The start, however, is conventional enough, by sci-fi standards. We find ourselves in the "IRGB"—the Islamic Republic of Great Britain, apparently. Women wear burqas, soldiers are called not Ian and Donal but Ibrahim and Hamid and the IRGB is part of the "Kalifate."

There are signs of serious climate change, too—droughts and cyclones—but something worse is happening. Mysterious triangular patches of total destruction have started to blight the earth. Within one of them, Tibor Tarent's wife Melanie has disappeared.

Flash. Now it's World War I, and another figure—this time not a photographer like Tibor but a magician named Tommy Trent—is on a troop train with someone who turns out to be H.G. Wells. Trent's mission, to advise the military on camouflage, gets nowhere.

Back to Tibor, who arrives at a Kafkaesque place where the receptionist won't speak to him. Then it's 1943, on an air base, where we hear the story of a Polish female pilot, who has a brief romance with an aircraft mechanic called Torrance.

By now the experienced sci-fi reader will have grasped that we are in a novel of quantum uncertainty. In fact, it is the Perturbative Adjacent Field that is blasting whole areas—into another dimension? And who is doing it, and why?

These questions, which would preoccupy any other sci-fi writer, are never answered by Mr. Priest. His focus is on Tarent/Trent/Torrance, who must be variants of one another. Their stories loop back uncannily, like Möbius strips. The dead return, because in this universe their deaths never happened.

"The Adjacent," then, does not provide the typical sci-fi boost: a buried analysis of the present, a warning or solution. Instead it's all visions, illusions, mystery. The only resolutions are personal ones.

Yet the presence of Wells reminds us that this is how sci-fi started—world's end and entropy in his "The Time Machine," a war somewhere we don't know in "The Land Ironclads." Mr. Priest has Wells claim to be merely a man with opinions. My guess is that Wells thought more highly of himself than that, and of sci-fi, and that most readers would agree. So this is not a book for traditionalists. A chiller, not a thriller, meant to disturb. Would we all be different people, in different dimensions?

That's a wee bit spoilerish. Wonder if anyone else besides me has read it yet.

What did you think of it? Sorry if I forgot the post; been doing a lot of zigzag wandering lately.

The dust blows forward and the dust blows back.

Sorry. I couldn't put it down. I've read many of his other books and felt it touched it many of his themes and tropes- doubles and doppelgängers, WWII aircraft, magic, the islands of the dream archipelago, intertwining alternate realities that can't be untangled- so that it clearly referred back to his other work in way that was a welcome well-constructed whole and not a feeble flashback or a cynical cash-in, "this is what my public expects of me." Interested to see the reaction of someone who hasn't read any of his other stuff.

You might want to look at reviews page on his own site: http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/books/the-adjacent-2/reviews-for-the-adjacent/

Although again, some give more away than others.

Alex, have you read Malzberg's Gather in the Hall of the Planets?

i don't think i would recommend The Whole Man by John Brunner. i'm not a big telepathy psy-guy though. so many psy-guy books in the 60's. ESP-mania.

Gather in the Hall of the Planets. This was very good. Black comedy in which the beleaguered sci-fi writer protagonist has to save the planet from destruction by identifying which attendee at a giant sf convention is the alien. Very meta, like a 70s descendant of What Mad Universe. On to Beyond Apollo next I guess.

so many psy-guy books in the 60's

haha yeah this started in the late 50s afaict, see also obsession with Freud/psychoanalysis

Gather in the Hall of the Planets is great, it's included in a collection I have called "The Recursive Fiction of Barry Malzberg" iirc. the first story has a similar setup, ends with protag confronting an obvious parody of a scientologist, good stuff.

this one

v funny

Was afraid GitHotP it was going to sag under the weight of a lot of corny jokes and puns, but it wasn't like that at all. Very on target. Tried to read Philip José Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" the other day and that was indeed overfull of bad puns.

haha yeah this started in the late 50s afaict, see also obsession with Freud/psychoanalysis
cordwainer_smith_psy_ops.jpg
jet_propelled_couch.html

Barry N. Malzberg was a prolific and talented writer in the 1970's

He does a really good job of evoking 1970s New York City. Keep expecting to see a trench-coated Walter Matthau step off of mass transit.

he def burned out and is not as prolific as he was at his peak. could also read that at his no longer being talented :(

agree he's great w the 70s NY vibe, a bunch of his books (Herovits' World, Overlay, etc.) are shot through with that

I just read Jeff Vandermeer's 'Annihilation', really fun. Sort of a neo-Lovecraft vibe that also brought to mind 'Roadside Picnic', that movie The Descent, and some of the good parts of 'House of Leaves'. It has two sequels coming out this year, curious to see where he takes it.

Also curious about his other work but 'steampunk' comes up a lot in reference to his main series, which is sort of a red flag for me.

Thought the label for him was "New Weird."

I had the same reaction as Jordan--really liked Annihilation, but had avoided vandermeer's other stuff because of this vibe of forced whimsicality that radiated off it.

Boy, Karen Russell's xpost Vampires in the Lemon Groveincl. hungry hearts and other parts, driven to desperate imagery, counter-worlds always in character. A couple stories don't reach the standards she usually sets here, but the very last one changed my mind with the very last sentence: from thinking she was veering back toward early Salinger, then early Pynchon--to being captivated by the sense that the narrator, the character, felt he had to do it this way, grab what he could while he was finding his own voice, while scribbling or tapping away, maybe in night school, in prison, in a psych ward, a park bench, his office, kitchen table--writing a story he had to tell. First time I've had that impression since the xpost title story of Charles Beaumont's The Howling Man,, discussed way upthread.

Man I just do not get cordwainer smith

What did you try to read this time?

Feel like "Scanners Live In Vain" is the place to start. Or maybe "The Game of Rat and Dragon."

He puts the opera in space opera, and something else as well, that old Atom Age CIA man (Burroughs was a fan). Not like anybody else, but def from the heyday of legal (and govt. researched) LSD. He had his own agenda as well. Closer to home, Science Fiction Encyclopedia's John Clute has some tasty links: https://twitter.com/john_clute

Just read Scanners. Previously started on one of the Instrumentality novels but didnt get very far. Its the prose tbh, the really repetitive use of invented jargon for an interminable length, followed by exposition = yawns.