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

i like the focus of this thread. on ile it would turn into something else. people talking about burritos or whatever.

The new Gollancz fantasy masterworks books look really nice, I bought a few a couple of days ago (Avram Davidson's Phoenix & Mirror and Lucius Shepard's Dragon Griaule), new releases include Holdstock's Mythago Wood and Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy.

I really dislike the bright yellow they use for the SF classics.

there's already several sci-fi threads on ILE but they're all sort of dead-ends (my personal favorite is the Science Fiction and Teh Gays thread)

The new Gollancz fantasy masterworks books look really nice

Yeah, quite classy.

I really dislike the bright yellow they use for the SF classics.

For the first titles in the relaunched series they yellow-tinted all thew cover art, too: it makes them all look a bit urine-dipped. Fortunately they've stopped doing that for the most part.

Enjoyed this thread up to now, hope it doesn't take a turn for the worse. Feel like we've had a reasonably civil and interesting discussion so far. Like the fact that it is on ILB, easier to locate that way.

Yeah I meant those yellow tinted ones too. For an ambitious line that wants to introduce people to SF I don't know why they designed them like that. I guess they do stand out a mile in the shops.

Since Dow objected (being one of the main contributors to the thread)I killed my new ILE thread idea, now that other objections are there from other main contributors, the idea is even deader. I was just checking.

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/26/86/0d90a2c008a03da9bc799010.L.jpg

picked this up out of a pile of free books in the park on Saturday! Used copies go for $30 and up on Amazon. Only read the first story so far but def into this.

Yeah that, 900 Grandmothers and Ringing Changes are the lafferty gold. Nice score!!!

My brother is a Steve Aylett fan and he showed me this funny trailer to Aylett's new book about originality, which is being crowdfunded here
http://unbound.co.uk/books/heart-of-the-original

You can even win a lunch with him!

I haven't read any Aylett yet but my brother reads me funny bits from the books quite a lot. Aylett has my eternal respect for creating the title "The Inflatable Volunteer".

Aylett's an odd one - I prefer the Beerlight stuff myself, although the one about assassinating God was good. He's great at stringing together funny aphorisms/epigrams, characterization/plot are secondary to maintaining a kind of nonstop forward motion insanity.

Curious if his Lint film will ever get a home release
http://www.steveaylett.com/Pages/aylettLINTTHEMOVIEpage.html

Features lots of writers and comedians.

I got a proof of the new Peter Watts, 'Echopraxia', and am loving it so far. If you enjoyed 'Blindsight', it's set in the same world. If the presence of scientifically rationalised neanderthal vampires in that bothered you, this one also has body/brain-hacked soldier 'zombies'.

Woah, I started reading blindsight just last night. The silverberg short story?

i didn't know there was a silverberg story by that name? I meant the Peter Watts novel.

Get a load of these guys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crkt1kiNj4E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-oYbjDK3Z8

Kinda wish Poul Anderson had put on full Moondog anachronistic gear for that interview.

I actually blurted out an audible "yay!" when I saw the Lafferty cover (and that's a great book). He may just be my favorite author.

I read Aylett's Bigot Hall years ago. I liked it, but never followed up with him. Any consensus on where to go next?

Laugh With Lafferty

Lint seems to be the favourite Aylett book. It's about a pulp SF writer who is a moron but also maybe a bit of a genius.

got a copy of Malzberg's "Breakfast in the Ruins" for Father's Day. Always a pleasure to read such an amazingly sharp writer. The cynicism and negativity get a bit wearying; fortunately this is leavened with heavy doses of humor, and while he makes grand claims about the uniqueness of his perspective its hard to disagree with him, he does occupy a singular space. So far I've only made it through a bunch of the shorter pieces, looking forward to digging more into the details.

David Langford's ansible Twitter feed links a Facebook announcement of Daniel Keyes's death. I finally thought of looking at his SFE profile, which incl. several books written after Flowers For Algernon. Anybody read 'em? I've never seen anything in anthologies, other than the originalFlowers...
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/keyes_daniel

arguably the most popular sf novel ever published

seems crazy to me but then I *was* taught it in high school English. which is more than I can say for any other sci-fi novel.

progris report :(

I'm glad it's arguable 'cause I would have guessed The Martian Chronicles.

For somebody known as a one book guy he rid it out a lot better than, say, Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Read somewhere recently, maybe posted it here, that (even) Horace Gold wanted to tack on a happy ending!

http://www.locusmag.com/1997/Issues/06/Keyes.html

Oh, Gold became notorious for that shit. I've read several mentions from his authors to the effect that you never knew how your story ended 'til you saw it in print.

Not that he was the only one, in his heyday or after. I suspect some writers internalized it, too; they knew what the editors or publishers required.

He didn't change the ending to "The Tunnel Under The World" did he? Or maybe Pohl was editing himself by then.

i had 'martian chronicles' and 'canticle for leibowitz' in high school : /

We took the same train from the city home,” he said, “and on a ride back I said to Dan, ‘This is a very nice story, but I have a few suggestions.’ And
Keyes burst into tears and gripped me by the lapels and said, ‘No, no, no, don’t be like Horace! Horace says that I have to keep Charlie smart. I can’t do it, I just can’t do it!’

^ From Barry Malzberg's forward to Cyril M. Kornbluth's With These Hands (The Galaxy Project) as told to Barry by Robert P. Mills, who bought the story for The Magazine for Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Wikipedia says he first came up with the idea for the story while working for Marvel Comics, but did not pitch it to Stan.

Stan Lee Presents A Flower for Algernon

Hey Alg, It's Cerebratin' Time!

That report has been reverted, btw.

more popular than 1984 or brave new world? or the war of the worlds? but yeah definitely high school english class popular. at least in the u.s. it's great too. deserves every accolade.

more popular than 1984 or brave new world?

in some ways I want to disqualify such sci-fi works by non-scifi authors, but yeah these are pretty commonly taught too. but Flowers for Algernon is simpler and easier to teach, without the messy political baggage

true, they are ringers. and yet i never actually thought of flowers as a sci-fi book when i was a kid.

me neither tbh but then Keyes was not famous for anything else the way Huxley and Orwell were - because he was toiling in obscurity in sci-fi mag ghetto.

anyone got opinions on Budrys? I've never read him but he keeps popping up in this Malzberg book.

Canticle not a big thing this side of the pond but 1984 and BNW were the kind of thing you read at school (i did 1984 for my o-levels in, yep, 1984. failed, abysmally)

Shakey, you gotsa read Rogue Moon

Gotsta

i've bored people about budrys before. try Rogue Moon and Who? the short story collection Blood And Burning is quite good too, the 1/4 of it that i've read so far.

Did you like Michaelmas, koogs? They say he predicted the internet with that one

y'know, i've read it but a quick look at a synopsis tells me i need to re-read it as i can't remember the first thing about it.

Tried to reread it a few months ago, couldn't get into it.

'rogue moon' suffered when i read it because i kept picturing rusty venture and brock samson

who? is kind of sillier though

I've only read a few Budrys, as I came across them in big old anthologies, but they were captivating, amazingly different from the pissy voice of his ancient book review columns. Which might be unfair, since I skimmed those in high school, but doing so put me off checking his fiction for quite a while.