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

Surprised about Disch being a douche over the years.

I don't really know if he was a jerk on personal/professional level, but who knows. The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of was published in 1998 so maybe that was at the beginning of his end-of-life bitchiness? I don't know. His prejudices are not attractive, and his pointless digressions (Caesar's Column? nobody even knows what that is or has been influenced by it) seem to exist merely for him to vent his spleen. Of the major figures attacked he seems to reserve his most bilious opinions for Ursula K. LeGuin, at one point ridiculing her for making simplistic claims (and I'm quoting verbatim here) like "War is bad, and men are to blame for it. Capitalism is bad, and men are to blame for it." etc. The problem is, those claims are not at all ridiculous or ahistorical - war and capitalism ARE bad and they have historically been developed, fomented, and implemented by men. It is not sexist or overly dogmatic to point this out, it is a simple fact. But Disch feels like these positions are somehow patently, obviously false because they are presented by a strident, didactic writer who he does not credit with understanding nuance or ambiguity. He may be write about LeGuin's limitations as a writer (she IS didactic) but he just goes too far.

I get the impression from his criticisms of fascists like Heinlein that Disch does not think war or capitalism are actually good, just that they aren't exclusively the fault of men...? I have no idea.

aaanyway moving on to Carol Emshwiller's "Joy in Our Cause". so far this is a bunch of stuff that is p good, but bears only the most tangential relationship to SF.

Tangential's cool. This thread def has some of that, re the "speculative fiction" part of its title. The Carol E. stories I've found here and there are good, and her hubby Ed's SF illustrations are fondly remembered by lifers (blanking on specific images, but I'm sure his covers lured me and my school lunch money).

Look at any of those Galaxy Project reissue covers.

I like her writing in general and I can see why Moorcock would feel it fit in New Worlds (text intercut with images, non-linear narratives, prose broken up into short chunks). But yeah it isn't really "speculative" either, its mostly her ruminations on being a middle aged woman/mother and po-mo stuff about the nature and mechanics of art and writing.

Find her Carmen Dog short novel, totally amazing US magic realism

Thanks, will check. Ruminations, speculations, magic realism, like life, coolio.

i blame the sword of shannara. or star trek books.

I blame the Thomas Covenant books.

^^^

just got my copy of Sladek's "The Steam-Driven Boy and other stories" in the mail

lookin forward to the parodies

Awesome

don't think I've read any Sladek before, beyond the odd piece in New Worlds/Jerry Cornelius comps. I've thumbed through the Roderick stuff but it's appeal seems... limited

Wikipedia page for this book has weird thing where names of authors parodied are linked but the linked text has vowels missing, as if that is enough to mask their identity.

Anyway, Sladek is one of yr better stylists. That book doesn't have stuff he wrote with Disch does it? No, that's Maps.

the Heinlein, PKD and Cordwainer Smith parodies are all A+. lol @ "Solar Shoe Salesman"

"Solar Shoe Salesman" is awesome.

Just discovered Graham Joyce died recently. Jeez, so many writers in these fields have died in the last two years.

http://www.fright.com/edge/RIPGrahamJoyce.htm

I just finished The Yiddish Policeman's Union, my first Chabon. It's a police procedural set in an alternate time-line (Israel was defeated in '48; Alaska's Sitka Federal District became a provisional Jewish "homeland," with its own timeline running out in the 2000s). As such,The City and the City seems more exotically inventive, more of a crime dog's walk on the *alternate* wild side (mind the bits of look-what-I-can-do poo). But Chabon's serving chicken soup for the open wounds, and sneaky mallets for the topography. Wish he'd hacked the template a bit more toward the end, but overall loving the way he jolts me in passing (he's something of a prose-poet, and he knows it, doesn't let it go to his head).

From London WorldCon, another view scross and into genres, dwellers, etc: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/dispatch-from-worldcon/

Latest issue of Ansible, incl (prob my last post re) London WorldCon, w brief, entertaining comments. Also incl.latest award winners (intrigued by Retro Hugos---what SF from the 1930s should I read??)
http://news.ansible.co.uk/a326.html

Search for "the door dilated" brings up some interesting stuff:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/01/sf-reading-protocols
http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/protocol.htm
http://kimstanleyrobinson.info/

There are look a hundred some odd comments on that first one and most of them are quite good too.

But please feel free to go through and post the ones you don't like here.

“The red sun is high, the blue low”—how it fills in doubled purple shadows on the planet of a binary star.

Doubled green shadows surely. With cyan and yellow fringes.

Think there's a bit of special pleading going on here. I'm sure I could find dozens of "literary" novels on my shelves where it's not clear from the first sentence who is speaking or what they're talking about, I think the thought process of a non-SF fan reading "Friar Sparks sat wedged between the wall and the realizer." is more likely to be "I don't know what a realizer is but I know I'm not going to give a shit when I find out."

Lol, you are correct.

the suggestion that it requires some special skill-set to read sf sort of bugs me - strikes of a certain strain of (largely unfounded) elitism that's always present in fandom and is uniformly unattractive and unjustified. I mean, reading any kind of literature involves grappling with context and interpreting what is/isn't important in the text, sf is not unique in this regard. Much easier to take non-sf readers' criticisms of sf as what they are - prejudicial readings.

or what ledge said

"Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts."
Brian W. Aldiss

Always loved that quote but I easily get lost in SF because my knowledge of science is miniscule and there are said to be several great writers who demand more science knowledge of their readers. I've always wanted to read Greg Egan but I've heard his work can be difficult unless you know a bit of science.

Thought it was hard to read because badly written.

Hahaha that Aldiss quote is fucking fantastic

I've mostly heard truly enormous praise for Egan, this is the first I've heard of him being a sloppy writer.

Yeah I think that Aldiss quote made me burst out laughing the first time I saw it.

To be honest I haven't really read much Egan, and often get him confused with the other Gregs, Benford and Bear, along with the Elizabeths I assume they are married to: Moon, Bear and Hand. What I've read of him just seems like hard SF gobbledygook that I can't really get into. I don't even like his most famous story that much.

Like this:

Waiting to be cloned one thousand times and scattered across ten million cubic light- years, Paolo Venetti relaxed in his favorite ceremonial bathtub: a tiered hexagonal pool set in a courtyard of black marble flecked with gold. Paolo wore full traditional anatomy, uncomfortable garb at first, but the warm currents flowing across his back and shoulders slowly eased him into a pleasant torpor. He could have reached the same state in an instant, by decree— but the occasion seemed to demand the complete ritual of verisimilitude, the ornate curlicued longhand of imitation physical cause and effect.

oh paolopaws

Lol.

Think there were more subtleties to the posts responding to that article than just "if only the mundane readers would bother to acquire the sf toolkit instead of comforting themselves with that EZ Reader cozy comfort realist stuff."

Hm. Now that I posted that and reread it maybe it isn't so bad.

I remember enjoying Bear's early Blood Music, although I did get more interested in some of the characters passing through (good profiles, right up to the moment of their oops upside the head and then some). But the doom also turned out to be a good disgusting parody of then flourishing New Age and pop cosmology; certain SF utopian trends too. Haven't read any of his others: they all got a lot more pages, duhhh.
Benford is weird: some genuinely creative drive competing w ponderous I Am A Real Scientist self-consciousness, the sub-Heinlein, sub-Poul conservative yet outward bound problem-solving righteousness, too often--yet sometimes his artistic side wins.

more interested in the character sketches than the plot, that is.

I've mostly heard truly enormous praise for Egan, this is the first I've heard of him being a sloppy writer.

Not a sloppy writer, and his earlier novels and short stories are tremendous. But his last 3 or 4 books have been alarmingly poor. I understand that he has pretty much said that now he is only interested in ideas and not characters, and the books are vast, complicated thought experiments about alternate physics and rebooted mathematics, which makes them interesting in a sterile sort of way, but pretty lacking as literary experiences.

So which things would you recommend to the reluctant, James M?

Anyway, I'd like to say that on the one hand, I basically agree with the Delany-originated or -promoted idea that sf should be judged using different criteria from those appropriate literary, "mundane" fiction. On the other hand, it makes trying to figure out based on stylistic considerations whether you are going to want to continue reading something an interstellar version of the Monty Hall problem- you can't tell behind which dilating door lies the Big Dipper of the Day and which dilating doors just lead under Capricorn.

Like should I continue to read this George Alec Effinger story?

I T WAS Y EAR 30, Day 1, the anniversary of Dr. Leslie Gillette’s leaving Earth. Standing alone at the port, he stared out at the empty expanse of null space. “At eight o’clock, the temperature in the interstellar void is a negative two hundred seventy- three degrees Celsius,” he said. “Even without the wind chill factor, that’s cold. That’s pretty damn cold.”

Re Egan, I'd try Teranesia (DNA optimisation bleeding through parallel universes) or Quarantine (detective thriller meets quantum theory) for the novels, or the short story collection Axiomatic, which blew my mind when I first read it--full of amazing ideas used up in 25-page stories which most SF writers would kill to hang a 600-page doorstopper on.

bought this the other day. will read soon. some stories are online.

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/12/table-of-contents-the-years-best-science-fiction-thirty-first-annual-collection-edited-by-gardner-dozois/

(so many links in the intro. to online content.)

Egan's Diaspora is a good post singularity parallel universe billion year spree, Permutation City a rather philosophically inclined exploration of brain simulations, mind as software. But yeah I gave up on him after reading a story with the worst possible caricatures of scientist as enlightened free thinking superhero, artist as ignorant blinkered luddite. Online if you're a glutton for punishment: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PLANCK/Complete/Planck.html

Lol. Think I am inclined to prefer hard sf when it has at least a dash of Arthur C. Clarke mysticism. That thing is right out of the Sladek parodies.

Actually Sladek parody of Arthur C. Clarke himself is pretty good.