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

of the authors that seem to be going through a popular career resuscitation due (in part) to the current cultural political climate - LeGuin, Delany, Russ, Butler, Piercy, I'm sure there's others - I would definitely put Russ and especially LeGuin at the top of the heap. But that's just me.

'woman on the edge of time' was definitely a book that stayed with me for a while.

started 'revenger' by alastair reynolds -- hadn't read anything by him, figured i'd check out something shorter than revelation space -- and . . . it's a young adult novel? i kept waiting for some plot twist or, um, revelation, but no. and i don't have anything against YA -- god bless earthsea, etc. -- but there was no depth to anything at all in this one.

read peter watts' 'blindsight', which i think JM recommended? it was great, although the re-creation of a certain extinct species might have been a little much.

now reading 'chaga' by ian mcdonald. i like it even though the heroine is awfully precious.

I couldn't make it past 20 pages of Blindsight, hated the narrative voice/tone

there's a certain kind of ironically swaggering voice that some hard sf authors seem to have gotten third-hand from hardboiled/noir sources and I really hate it. Blindsight had that. Scalzi's "Old Man's War" had it too.

I feel like Zelazny kind of used that tone

Am currently reading 334 by Thomas M Disch, which also has a somewhat ironically swaggering narrative voice, often, in SF (and elsewhere), deployed to tell us just how clever the author is. Of the American New Wave, Disch and Zelanzy seem the most prone to (predominantly classical) literary allusion /appropriation of modernist literary techniques; Delany joins them too on the more 'poetic' wing. 334 is a series of linked stories set in a dystopian future NYC (334 is the housing block that most of the main characters live in). It has some interesting things in common with Dhalgren, inc the ugly sex writing, and in fact Delany wrote a book-length study of one of the stories from 334 - 'Angouleme' - that I've just ordered. Disch is much more cynical than Delany tho - this is very untranscendent SF. Best line: "It got so bad that at one point there were four teevee series about zombies."

lol

how bad have things gotten when there are twenty or thirty teevee series about zombies?

I have a soft spot for Disch - he has some amazing short stories (cf "Now is Forever") - and Camp Concentration and 334 are both masterfully done imo. The other books I've read of his range from bad ideas well executed to just complete nonsense. I don't disagree about his cynicism, he was definitely a sour fellow.

some other old thoughts here: rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

i have a copy of Fun With Your New Head that i've never cracked open. Opinion?

top shelf stuff imo, perhaps his best

oh sweet

I couldn't make it past 20 pages of Blindsight, hated the narrative voice/tone

i can kind of see what you mean -- and watts isn't above showing off how smart he is -- but otoh the book's in the first person, and the narrating character is not swaggering at all.

don't remember much about 'camp concentration' except that i liked it. i think it had some catch-22 in it?

also started 'version control' by dexter palmer, which was trying way too hard for very obvious social commentary

Camp Concentration is basically all a huge setup for the twist that happens on the last page

(it's an ingenious setup though)

Reading Shadow of the Torturer for the first time. It's way more *fun* than I was expecting it to be, and Wolfe writes the most readable purple prose I think I've ever encountered from a sci-fi writer.

B-b-but ave you read Jack Vance?

ave typo was a reference to Gene Wolfe’s religious bent

I haven't! I actually haven't read widely at all so I'm making a huge generalisation

(widely in fantasy)

Vance is the undisputed master of decorative prose in SFF

Yeah, if you like Wolfe, you might well dig Vance (I prefer him). Torturer and others in the New Sun series aren't fantasy, geekly speaking: as with others in the dying earth thing (incl. maybe JV's The Complete Dying Earth, which I've got but haven't read), they can be seen as planetary romance or science fantasy, with some elements of ecotastrophe, for instance or way in its wake---although the Wolfe books (as I dimly recall from the 80s) just have a really old Urth, in need of a New Sun (which will meet the same ol' Urth right? Read on).
I have a soft spot for Disch - he has some amazing short stories Yeah---can't remember where I
long ago encountered this or the title, but there's one that starts out with Ugly American tourists---caricatures often found in other slick-lit fiction of late 50s-to-early-70s---making themselves at home in or near coastal North Africa, I think---but just as they reach a peak of reek, US Gov commits a military atrocity in some other culturally and ethnically related region, the Middle East, I believe---and Mr. and Ms. Asshole suddenly find their credit declined, to put it mildly---they get swept up in a shitstorm---political prescience aside, it becomes more about unwelcome, unavoidable empathy--- maybe TD's slickest twist evah, but more "O shit!" in the immediate reading experience.
Like some live performances of "Ballad of a Thin Man," from a flourished sneer to sheer (protracted) fear---that's the only comparison I can think of.

Heard about Disch's On Wings Of Song rcently, sounds great, these covers are amusing
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/7/7d/NWNGSFSNGH1979.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/e/e1/BKTG01901.jpg

Did LeGuin require reviving? I thought she was always popular? Read about Disch's digs at her and other writers, they seemed completely unfounded. I listened to an interview and he said he treasured his grudge with someone (Algis Budrys?), didn't know if he was joking but sounded crazy.

Just seen this blurb

From the introduction by Eleanor Arnason: "Sargent has a quality usually associated with hard SF: a certain kind of intellectual rigor. With her, it carries through all of her work. She thinks things through. ... Notice, when you read this collection, how many different kinds of stories are here and notice the range of moods: the stories go from really funny to really dark, with a lot in between. ... I also want to mention Sargent's persistence. Writing is a hard life. Many good woman writers I admired in the 1970s, '80s and '90s have vanished. They stopped writing or stopped trying to sell their fiction or changed their names and moved to writing romance, gay romance, generic fantasy -- whatever they could sell. In one way or another, they were silenced. Sargent has kept doing thoughtful, serious fiction, dealing with the issues that interested her."

Free ebook here for a few more days https://www.sevenstories.com/books/3273-lovestar. Read the first few pages and seems promising, although the blurb comparisons might put you off.

Oh fuck, it's God
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/8/86/BKTG09307.jpg

it me

Are you there, bizarro gazzara? It’s me, James Redd.

New from Strange Attractors Press:

http://strangeattractor.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/faunus-cover-forwebsite.gif

“Machen’s a slippery ghost.He eludes us. The best of Faunus blows smoke towards the space he occupies invisibly and attempts to extrapolate his exact shape from hollows in a moving cloud.” Stewart Lee

For twenty years, Faunus, the biannual journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, has been publishing an astonishing range of scholarship, debate, archival material, and esoterica relating to the writer H. P. Lovecraft described as a “modern master of the weird tale.”
Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was not only an author of weird and decadent horror fiction lauded by Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro (among many others); he was also a journalist and essayist who, over decades, produced a vast body of nonfiction on subjects ranging from High Church theology to “the truth about curry”. This anthology gathers some of the highlights of Faunus, from its very first issue to its most recent. Subjects include the Great War, the Celtic Church, the “real” little people, Machen and Modernism, Machen and the occult, and myriad other investigations into Machen’s life and legacy.

With a new introduction by long-term Friend of Arthur Machen member Stewart Lee, the book makes newly available reprints of rare pieces by Machen himself as well as items from the Faunus archive by writers including Tessa Farmer, Rosalie Parker, Ray Russell, Mark Samuels, and Mark Valentine.

http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/faunus-the-decorative-imagination-of-arthur-machen/

Curious as to Machen's thoughts on curry, hope they're not racist.

Some good stuff in this free journal: http://sumrevija.si/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SUM-11_FINAL_pages.pdf
Includes new Peter Watts story for those who like Peter Watts, like me.

Andre Norton - Storm Over Warlock

This book has an aesthetic of old generic science fiction that I can easily imagine a very deliberately retro cartoon tapping into (in a sort of Ariel Pink way). Ships like plates, insect people and reptile people, a colorful planet (but not especially lush) with glowing plants.

In the author biography page, Norton describes herself as being a staid teller of old fashioned stories. The style did come across slightly odd to me, not quite wooden or robotic but staid is probably closer. I've seen someone describe her writing as detached but there is a definite investment in the characters and the observations about gender/species relations are hardly without emotion.

Main character Shann is black and in 1960 that was unusual, he is one of two human survivors on a planet attacked by insect people (it is often written like a survival journal). A love of animals comes across in the depiction of the two wolverine pets.

I was worried this was going to be a simple humans vs insect people story but it gets more interesting when the dreams and reptile people are focused on. I was kept guessing about the trajectory and even close to the end I really couldn't tell where it was going. But ultimately I cant recommend this because every situation is over-explained to tedium and although there are interesting things in here, nothing to make the journey feel like it was all worthwhile.

My bedside oxford dictionary didn't really describe fiords (or fjords) very well because after an online image search, it changes the look of this fictional landscape considerably.

I should have started with another Norton book. The reason I chose this one is because I happened to find it in a charity shop last year and someone on a Norton thread recommended Forerunner Foray (the third book in the series, only tenuously linked to the previous two). Despite feeling let down, I do actually want the first omnibus because the next two books sound much better, but who knows, some people love this book. But next I'm going to the short stories, Wheel Of Stars (someone said it was a good horror fantasy) and Search For The Star Stones omnibus and Solar Queen omnibus.
I'm determined to know what Norton is all about.

Really good interview with Quentin S Crisp about his new horror(?) novel. Talks about Nagai Kafu among other things.

http://www.holdfastnetwork.com/sherdspodcast/26/5/2019/21-graves-an-interview-with-quentin-s-crisp

Was very fortunate to recently catch the fact that not all versions of Simak's City contain the final story "Epilog". Not even the SF Masterworks version includes it.

Here are the ones that do
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?92546

I bought the Methuen edition.

Bit shoddy of Gollancz: normally they're more careful than that.

Reading Ann Kavan’s “Ice”, wiki entry of author noted ref by “post-rock band Carta”, instantly recalled membership of ilxor akm, lattice of coincidence identified

from Robert's "Epilog"-inclusive City link above, fave cover (if can't see it, is noir chien, paws in pocket)s:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71tH-EvL-vL.jpg

Waiting for Maigret.

Finally got the new Ted Chiang collection EXHALATION, which is predictably great. Sadly it only has 2 new stories in it which I haven't already read. Ah well, there'll be another book in the early 2030s.

Which ones are new?

'Omphalos' and 'Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom'. All the others have been published online and in print in one place or another.

Newly discovered (and translated) Stanisław Lem story:
https://przekroj.pl/en/literature/the-hunt-stanislaw-lem

Sad!

As in bad?

As in ;_;

It's fine, bit of a mood piece, not up there with his philosophical/speculative highs.

I just received City in the mail. Simak says he has mixed feelings about including the story in the book but did so for the editor. It was written a long time after the other stories and perhaps some feel it spoils the book? But I've mostly heard that fans like it.
Perhaps Gollancz wanted the original book as it was. The Gollancz introduction does note the existence of the last story, but from what I could find out from reviews, offers no explanation for leaving it out, so perhaps it was a mistake.

Also, if you're going for Cordwainer Smith, note that Rediscovery Of Man has been used as a title for both a Best Of and a Complete Stories collection.

Cant remember if I noted above but Strugatsky Bros' Snail On The Slope is getting a Masterworks entry. I presume it's a new translation because the earlier translation was said to be a disaster and the brothers hated it.

RIP Dennis Etchison

On the subject of long delays between books. Evangeline Walton maybe holds record for biggest gap, with 36 years between two entries but I'm pretty sure she wasn't writing that whole time.
But it really isn't that unusual for some to be stuck for 10-20 years. Sometimes due to poor sales, contracts or just having difficulties writing.
Of course some begin with a clear arc in mind and some are open ended with each novel, just in case. Long comments thread about some of this.

https://www.tor.com/2019/05/29/hope-springs-eternal-five-unfinished-series-that-remain-a-joy-to-read/

I happened to buy Steerswoman's Road by Kirstein last week.

As for my favorites, I've only read the first of Somtow's Inquestor books so I don't know if the fourth book in 1985 was open ended but he started it again last year.

Another incompleteness spotted from a review. M John Harrison's Viriconium omnibus doesn't have these stories
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?78184
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?42243
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?78183

but I'm guessing he just doesn't like them enough since the first one has only been printed twice.

What do you mean by the last? It has “In Viriconium.”

In US at least.

It might be a mistake but it's listed as a separate thing from the 3rd novel.