ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

good recommendations so far ... here are a few more horror novels not yet mentioned:

Ramsey Campbell, The Doll Who Ate His Mother; The Face that Must Die; Ancient Images
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Stephen King, Salem's Lot; The Shining; The Stand; It
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness
Michael McDowell, The Elementals

Dan Simmons' Carrion Comfort was pretty good, but there's a huge plot surprise at about the 2/3 point that might make you throw the book away.

Some people say the short story version is much better. It must be very different because it's a small fraction of the novel's length.

Watched Howl's Moving Castle and it was very easy to watch, once I got used to mix of drawn (?) and photo-based imagery, and suspenseful enough (also liked how she was in diff *degrees* of the spell, visually), but not as involving as the ones in a TCM Miyazaki festival (long ago, so comparisons of visuals and overall effect might be off). Did get most of the themes, but a couple of important plot points had to be clarified by online exposition, hopefully accurate.
Anybody read the book, the trilogy? Thinking about trying these or others by Diana Wynne Jones, discussed on that list of good female fantasy writers Robert posted here.

Also the first issue of Wormwoodia, thee journal I've occasionally linked here, is back in print:

Wormwood 1
Writings about fantasy, supernatural and decadent literature
Edited by Mark Valentine

Now back in print

Issue 1, Autumn 2003

Gustav Meyrink: The Monster-Magician in Kafka’s Shadow by Adam Daly
The Heroic Hereafter: Explaining Eddison by Jonathan Preece
Ernest Bramah: A Challenge to the Biographer by William Charlton
A Very Real Presence: Dame Muriel Spark, Briefly Interviewed
The Ninefold Kingdom and Others: Four Fictional Visions of the Political Future by John Howard
Everything Ends in a Greater Blackness: Some Remarks on the Fiction of Thomas Ligotti by Mark Samuels
The Decadent World-View by Brian Stableford
Revisiting Ramsey Campbell by William P. Simmons
Camera Obscura
Late Reviews by Douglas A. Anderson Anderson edited the splendid Tales Before Tolkien---but what's Muriel Spark doing here? Was she into fantasy, supernatural, decadent lit? Maybe not, and that's why it's brief.
more info:
http://tartaruspress.com/wormwood-1.html

Spark wrote a really good book about Shelley and Frankenstein, plus the supernatural creeps into a number of her stories

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uR3rUk_LnYw/V2o7FEZXUKI/AAAAAAAAA8A/RhI_k5hJ5C0-aAI7MaHeH20Sj1eOweCwQCLcB/s1600/img133.jpg

If images are gone,
they're covers of a 60s supernatural kinkoid thriller published in Britain as Ask Agamemnon, filmed as Goodbye Gemimi and republished with that title---anybody read/seen it??

details:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2016/06/ask-agamemnon-jenni-hall.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

Oh and I finally finished xpost Naomi Novik's Uprooted. Title theme goes deep, makes me think of my own life. Also really like how the narrator lives the story moment to moment, almost nonstop, with no fatigue of reading interest. Magic is just a part of her, tapping into her and generated by her, also the aforementioned "political" element, ditto "horrific" elements meet with the urge to merge via magic--can't blame it all on the boogieman or woman---all-too-human and parahuman and other emotions and motivations get tangled and electric. I like the not-too-mutable personification a lot better than just having another 1- or 2-D Mordor-wannabee murking about. Or Something with a brief bitter alibi just before the smoke takes it out and the sun comes up etc.

The fact that they can't get her name straight is a weird thing

NYRB Classics Club is offering DG Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe as bonus-bait for signing up. The name and seemed vaguely familiar---turns out SF Encyclopedia likes his far-sighted social commentary x canny literary chops pretty well. Synthajoy looks like it might have Ballard and especially Cronenberg appeal, for inst.
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/compton_d_g

re-reading Pohl's "Jem", underrated late-period near-masterpiece. Dunno what inspired this particular book but it exemplifies the best aspects of his style, characters are sharply drawn, plot is both wildly imaginative and plausible. I never hear people talk about this one though, it seems like an obscurity in his bibliography for some reason, even though it's much better than the heechee books.

I've seen that occasionally, will check a nearby thrift store good for SF/
xpost NYRBC edition of The Continuous KM, w intro by Jeff VanderMeer, is out July 5, but looks like the SF Masterworks is still around.

re-reading Pohl's "Jem", underrated late-period near-masterpiece. Dunno what inspired this particular book but it exemplifies the best aspects of his style, characters are sharply drawn, plot is both wildly imaginative and plausible. I never hear people talk about this one though, it seems like an obscurity in his bibliography for some reason, even though it's much better than the heechee books.

Oh wait, that was you, never mind.

lol

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is good and yes, quite Ballardish, as is his The Silent Multitude, about some very 1970s people dashing round an otherwise deserted English city falling apart thanks to weird concrete-devouring nanotech.

hey youse guys what novels scream FANTASY IN THE 80S WAS LIKE THIS to you, pre-dragonlance

wait was dragon lance early 90s. what even is left to believe in

Zimmer Bradley, maybe? Before she died and turned out to be a paedophile.
Tedious old Stephen Donaldson?
The endless Shannara bollocks?

Mythadventures

Piers Anthony

david eddings

Oof yeah

Oh man those Piers Anthony books were so goofy, but I ate them up (as a kid)!

I feel like a lot of the 80s vibe was one of "humorous deconstruction" - fantasy tropes were well established by that time and people were either goofing on them or making them "darker"/"edgier"

Or else they were endless Anne McCaffrey special precious snowflake Pern novels

https://sfmistressworks.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/moreta.jpg

Ha yes.

Tedious old Stephen Donaldson?
The endless Shannara bollocks?
Hated this stuff too.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to read Piers as an adult. Probably horrible

What about Andre Norton?

I somehow sidestepped both of those.

I once lent a girlfriend a Banks Culture novel, and she lent me an Anthony Xanth book, and then dumped me before we could swap back. The Xanth was worse than the dumping.

i have a friend who estimates he's read at least 80 piers anthony books

Anthony Xanth is a great name. We should adopt that as a convention like the Smash Hits tradition of referring to, like, Matty 1979

I just reread 'Pawn of Prophecy'. I also looked at the Thomas Covenant books but I just couldn't bring myself to go there again. I also picked up a Terry Shannara, who even as a teen I couldn't bear.

Thanks for the idea re MZB--I'd never learnt about her at all, it mink? so that might be interesting.

*i think

oo'tis:

"I feel like a lot of the 80s vibe was one of "humorous deconstruction" - fantasy tropes were well established by that time and people were either goofing on them or making them "darker"/"edgier" "

like its interesting to think of yer robert asprins and yer Michael swanwicks existing in the same continuum but I feel like both these tendencies lay outside the terrible slick mainstream of the 80s fantasy machine (which was trying I think to replicate eddings-style 70s successes perhaps? I realise my ideas of sales figures for this stuff are basically entirely spurious)

does SF have a matching uptick in space opera do we think. I guess cyberpunk was busy happening

When did the boring "military" SF book still carried on by Baen and their horrible covers kick in? The 80s might be too early, though I guess the (much better) book they sort of spawn from, The Forever War, is 1970s.

boring "military" SF BOOM I mean

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe also made into the p good film Deathwatch by Bertrand Tavernier, w/ Harvey Kietel and Romy Schneider - parts of it filmed in Glasgow, so of local interest to me, but is now seen as being prophetic in some ways of 'reality TV' (tho Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary got there first)

This is the book that screams FANTASY IN THE EIGHTIES to me (and this edition in partic)

http://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/books/1432756104i/12164830._UY200_.jpg

From what I hear, the first two Pern books are good and Piers Anthony did some good stuff (this coming from people who generally don't like their work)

unrelated to my recent enquiries, tho also a fantasy novel of the 80s, i suppose, i've been reading diana wynne jones' 'witch week', which was advertised as a knockabout fantasy but turns out to be equal parts a satire on british schoolmasters and a masterful essay in pre-adolescent psychology

I love Diane Wynne Jones, and will always be a little bummed that she didn't get more props from Jo Rowling.

the first two Pern books are good

my wife is a huge Anne McCaffrey fan and was a completist at one point but even she can't bear the later cash-in/endless series of telepathicats and space unicorn girls or whatever. McCaffrey did have some good novels scattered across her different series' but she was not shy about banging crap out for quick $$$

(granted she's hardly unusual in that respect)

like its interesting to think of yer robert asprins and yer Michael swanwicks existing in the same continuum but I feel like both these tendencies lay outside the terrible slick mainstream of the 80s fantasy machine

this could v well be the case, I'm just spitballing based on personal memories of what was popular w my peers at the time

some friends of mine have an excuse to drink that they call an SF book club and i never go because i never read the books they are reading and i drink alone but they are reading The Name Of The Wind and they swear its good and that i should read it. but i don't really read straight fantasy ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Wind

lol @ entire first paragraph being about the different cover editions

I think somebody here recommended it a month ago.

And neither cover referred to is the Chesty McPecs one shown there

the name of the wind is sort of enjoyable, the second one totally awful. lamp compared it to harem anime which was p accurate

harem anime where you're continually expecting the lead to turn to camera and explain why polyamory is the only morally justifiable position but they never quite do

Thanks for the tip on xpost K Martenhoe and Deathwatch, Ward. Yeah, been wondering about DW Jones since Robert posted that list and descriptions of female fantasty writers (also I asked about her xpost Howl trilogy).

The only McCafferty I've read was a very early Pern story in a science fiction anthology, which seemed to fit, at least in terms of Dunean planetary romance, as they say @ SF Encyclopedia Online: no description of dragonic endocrine system etc., but the setting adds to dynamics of characters and plot, though mainly the family dynamics and intrigue make me think of a Mother-of-Dragons spinoff from Game of Thrones (I'd prob enjoy it more than the parent show).
Think this was a Hartwell anth, and he introduced it by saying she was one of the later, if not last, younger writers carefully guided by John C. Campbell Jr., who, whatever his Big Ideas, did know something about how to tell a story. But maybe that wore off later, when she was really cranking 'em out.