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

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.

"One of"? There is only one novel, as far as I know.

In any case, you are in good company, Shakey, it was roundly rejected by pretty much all the editors at the time, first appearing in something that was little more than a fanzine, as opposed to a prozine, as the current retronym goes.

Maybe it was some anthology or fixup? Cant remember.

im intrigued about this - http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books-arts/back-to-the-future-30177082.html

It was Norstrilia xp

That is indeed the only one. Although at one point it was broken in two.

I'll have more to say tomorrow, too hard to type much on my phone.

My pov is pretty much the exact opposite of yours but I don't know how much I feel like typing it into my phone right now either. Although who knows how much time I will have once the week starts. "Scanners" is one of the most original, sui generis things I have ever read and even rereading have never seen any obvious flaws. Not put off by the style at all, find it almost cinematic, don't find it over-expository, find instead a keen sensitivity to registers of speech: the Scanners are speaking formally both as a ritual aspect of their profession and also as a way to authenticate what they are about to decide, the wife is speaking formally as a means of keeping her husband at a distance, the only person trying to speak informally is the cranching Martel himself. And perhaps some of his buddies, the one who is able to speak normally while uncranched for one, but he and Martel get in trouble from the chief Scanner Vomact because of it. Love the bold outlandish images but then the subtle intelligence to add in the telling details, the Scanners have not one but two ways to communicate: lip reading, but also scratching with a finger on a board. Wonder what Lem thought of it, oh wait I'm sure he thought it was silly or he could have done it better himself.

Cordwainer Smith is so wonderful. Also on a phone, so I'll just say good post. I would read anyone who could pull of the scope and tone of his stories. They're like fairy tales but not quite. He's good at zooming in and zooming out and "world-building" without becoming tedious or losing the intimately human aspect of his stories. I guess some Tiptree has these qualities sometimes. Who else?

Speaking of whom, here is a very interesting paper comparing Tiptree and Smith, http://starcraving.com/?p=149, written by psychologist Alan C. Elms, who is an expert on Smith, whose biography he has been working on for years. His website also has lots more on Smith and some more on Tiptree as well, along with plenty of other stuff of interest to ilxors, like a time travel Buddy Bolden story reminiscent of yesterday's big music story, and a takedown of Albert Goldman's Elvis bio.

Michael b, that john Kelly book looks really interesting. I read one of his earlie r ones, the non-sf Sophisticated Boom boom! and that was excellent.

Left out the third way Scanners communicate, talking in screechy voices.

Shakey, did you ever read what your man, Frederik Pohl had to say on this topic? http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/12/cordwainer-smith-the-ballad-of-lost-linebarger-part-1/

In the intro to one of his collections, Alfred Bester provides a brief paragraph that's a parody of how easy it is to write science fiction - it has a melodramatic tone and is littered with nonsensical terms; this is what Smith reads like to me. The Capitalization of Repeated Phrases (the Talking Nail, the Up and Out, Scanners), paragraphs littered with oblique clues about things Scanners must/can/shouldn't do, cranching, habermen etc. this stuff just gets on my nerves.

moving on in the collection - C.M. Kornbluth's "The Black Bag" is great, for a large portion of it I was trying to recall whether or not it had been adapted for Twilight Zone or Outer Limits or something (altho the ending is way too gruesome/macabre for either of those shows)

If you're going to write stories with such ridiculous language I kinda dig it more when there's an implicit acknowledgment of how silly/arbitrary it is (PKD and his wubfur, or Lem's satirical stuff, or Pohl, etc.)

man, i love norstrilia.

Would like to check out more Kornbluth. What collection are you reading?

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 1, Robert Silverberg ed.

per this thread

Pi

Sorry wrong thread. That was meant for NED RAGGETT

j/k it was a pocket post. More to say later.

I am reading Kingsley Amis (ed), THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION.

My favourite story is Frederik Pohl's 'the tunnel under the world'.

(from reading John Clute's twitter)

I had no idea Lucius Shepard had died. And i had NO idea he was the age he was. I always associated him with the Blaylock/Powers/Jeter/Robinson cadre but he was already writing in the fucking fifties!

Yeah, he was something of a prodigy---think he had some stories professionally published (in YA mags, maybe genre too) when he like 13 or something. People just eventually came across them, in some kind of pre-Web archives (what the ancient ones called "stacks," perhaps). Don't know that he ever commented on any of that.

But yeah, your generational association seems right, always did.

Never read anything by him. What's good?

Shakey, there is no acknowledgement of the silliness because he is not being silly or arch, he is serious. In lots of sf space travel is presented as an engineering problem - if and when the pointy-headed engineers get the cold equations right, all will be well. Here he showing the potential human cost and suffering: these guys, whether convicts or gentleman volunteers, have of necessity been surgically altered, literally cut off from the rest of humanity and their own humanity, and it may turn out it was all in vain. A haberman is called that after somebody named Haberman who invented the procedure but it's kind of a German pun, which isn't that hard to see in English, he is a halber Mann, "half man." If you can read into The Martian Chronicles an imaginative retelling of the colonization of North America, you can read into "Scanners" a retelling of the settlement of, um, Australia.