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

Gibson's 80s work was seminal and massively influential and yet I viscerally hated both the concept and execution of Virtual Light and Idoru so much that I've never given him another change.

the last time I cracked open Neuromancer, which was a few months ago, it just felt kinda corny but I think it's just acquired a lot of baggage for me over the years. Prefer Sterling at this point tbh (even though he burned out in the 90s too imo)

Sterling! Always look fwd to his anthologized stories (the only way I've read them) because never know of his kneejerk "punk" attitude is going to come on and remain all glib and half-assed hipster---or if his artful alternate voice will (just in time) slip on through to the other side, to leave me hanging and filling in the gaps, with a buzz that lasts awhile. Kind of his own worst enemy, but it kind of works for him--storywise, anyway. The only longer work I've read is the one about the old people dominating culter, --b-but they're all disgustingly rich; what about the rest of us, eh? Oh well maybe tongue-in-cheek, but didn't hold my interest.
So damn old I remember getting a buzz from WG's "New Rose Hotel" in Omni, but some others seemed instantly dated, and think it was Count Zero, as serialized in Asimov's, where he really seemed to be folding in elements of smoggy 70s made-for-TV "movies, " which put me off: in the tradition of clunky and clinical SF idea-mongers, but grubbier----that may all be wrong, but that's where I stopped. But this new one, h'mmm.

Sterling's range of ideas is broader than Gibson's imo, and some of his best short fiction has left an indelible mark on my psyche, particularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_(novelette) and "The Moral Bullet"

Shakey posts reminding that there are multiple places in the archives where Martin Skidmore basically calls Asimov the worst stylist and M. John Harrison the best.

calling Asimov a "stylist" at all seems like a misnomer

Heh, fair enough, but
Prose Stylist

And this, although the relevant post is now above the zing fold: Science Fiction : search and destroy

i reread the foundation trilogy a few years ago and not only is it terrible writing, he doesn't have the chops to make the psychohistorical path plausible. cool ideas, too bad about the rest

Still like Gibson a lot, but Agency is just a lot of running around to no real purpose. At least it avoids using the same plot it feels he's done over and over again, whereby some rich person improbably sends an odd savant on a quest to locate the origins of some vaguely artistic Macguffin.

This Is How I Win (The Time War)

I'm bracing myself for Van Vogt, not any time soon but I'm sure it's something that needs to be done and a good chance I'll like some of it.

I've heard that Sterling once called Mary Doria Russell the Shania Twain of SF to her face in a panel. Rude.

Yeah, see, you never know with that guy (although such a comparison is not necessarily such a putdown, unless he explained how he meant it that way). On the other hand, once turned on BookTV just in time to see him address a group of librarians on digitalization: "Who'd wanna rely on this? "(ruffles book pages), "When they could have this?" (snaps CD-R, then the latest thing)

I'm pretty sure he meant it as an insult, it was at a time when many science fiction people were getting really pissed about what they perceived as mainstream fiction dilettantes getting undue attention for mediocre work (most recent time was the hubbub over Ian McEwan). Jeff Vandermeer written about it somewhere and said that Russell had more genre background than Sterling had assumed. Her novel polarized people a bit.

Interview with Gwyneth Jones. Half of the interview is about Joanna Russ but the rest is about her new collection, videogames and the Bold As Love series reprinted in SF Masterworks series soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aQIEehLuRo

Russell's novel seemed to borrow a bit too heavily from James Blish, as I recall, plus it had the absurd thing of people on a starship packing extra supplies in case time dilation didn't actually exist.

https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2020/01/copter-crash-isabel-fall-and-the-transgender-sf-debate/
Interesting times.

Back onto Joanna Russ, this time the collection "Zanzibar Cat", which appears to cover a broad swathe of the 70s and a scattering of other pieces, a couple I've read before. A worshipful foreword by Marge Piercy. As with the collection I read a few months ago, the stylistic breadth and the humor are really striking, it seems like she really stretched out in shorter fiction as opposed to her novels. So far:
- Nebula-winning "When it Changed" is brief but dense, theme is adjacent to "The Female Man" but posits the (re)introduction of men to an all-female colony as a kind of "first contact" scenario; the interactions with the male explorers are so well rendered.
- "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand" is a relatively straight Jules Verne homage, although there is a feminist undertone in the titular protagonist's fate (forbidden any further "voyages" and compelled to deny she ever took any at all by her oppressive husband).
- "Soul of a Servant" delves into racial politics, specifically assimilation, in a quasi-medieval scenario.

"New" old stories by Octavia Butler coming soonish:
https://subterraneanpress.com/news/announcing-unexpected-stories-by-octavia-e-ebutler/

I have never been able to get into Butler. One of these days

v curious about this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Strete, unable to find any of his books through the library system though

Which no doubt makes you even more curious.

I love a challenge

Know the feeling

The only thing I've read by Strete is his short story 'Time Deer', in this volume:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_Award_Stories_11

You can get one of his collections from the open library
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1872140W/The_bleeding_man_and_other_science_fiction_stories

there are also several books on 1ibgen

bhahahahahaha
https://i1.wp.com/www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/0/01/WWHRBTTBGV1977.jpg

that is 100000x better than my boring edition:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TCEC7rXSL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

that's the one I have too and... no way! That '77 one has absolutely nothing to do with the content

yeah but don't you want to hang out with that guy

I finished 'Children of Ruin', and I gotta say it was very enjoyable. Writing-wise it plays to its strengths (forward motion, exploring all the angles of the chosen topic, which is mostly communication between species with radically different modes of thought) and avoids spending much time on its weaknesses (character & relationships basically, although I appreciate that it has a casually progressive attitude toward sexuality without actually including any embarrassing sex scenes).

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/510E60529TL.jpg
My edition

Imagining the plot as a mashup of those three covers and I really want to read it now!

Space biker escapes mushroom planet and learns to play the cello from a skeleton

What is this fascination Russ has w duels, it pops up a lot

Imagining the plot as a mashup of those three covers and I really want to read it now!

Bram Stoker - Dracula

I knew going in that this wasn't going to be my ideal version of Dracula (I doubt one exists), which would have been one of my favourite books of all time. Although there are predecessors it surely has a big part to play in creating a lot of my favorite gothic horror aesthetics in wonderful things like the Castlevania videogame series (though I would have preferred this series without actually featuring Dracula as a character), the dark prog band Jacula and probably a host of other things with great castles in them.

The book is far too long, could have done with many more paragraph breaks and could have done with cutting a quarter of the length, if not a third. I started off liking Van Helsing but it wasn't long before I got sick of him, he talks far too much. Lucy's illness and everything that develops from that goes on far too long. And far too many declarations of trust, friendship and love.
Mina and Lucy are often treated as if they're a better species than most women, there's a brief caricature of a jew. The introductions and appendixes (see below) examine Stoker's prejudices, examples of his journalism have assertations about the corruptibility of women and a racial slur about runaway slaves.
When working class men are featured, I wondered if when they are described as something like "not a bad sort of fellow", if we're normally supposed to assume otherwise.
The descriptions of Dracula's lips remind me of many prejudiced depictions of foreigners and criminals but I'm less confident in making this connection.

Despite the length, much of the plot is impressively composed. I am pleasantly surprised by how much I hadn't seen in screen and comic book adaptations, but understand why some of them would be difficult to include and there were obvious opportunities to make things scarier that other versions arguably bettered. I particularly liked the scenes in the graveyard overlooking the seaside and even though it goes nowhere, the talk about the blue fire is interesting.

Biggest surprise might be just how many characters have a major role. Dr Seward gets roughly as much viewpoint time as Jonathan and Mina. The vampire hunting team is 6 people but adaptations usually cut it down to 2 or 3 of them.
Renfield's parts are consistently enjoyable and he's somehow the most convincingly realized character. It is interesting just how much the diaries and documents are a major feature of the story.

The first several chapters and the last chapter are easily the best parts and if I ever re-read it, I'll probably stick to those chapters, as they contain the majority of the pleasing atmosphere and images. First few chapters could have come from a much better book and I kind of wish the story had never left Romania.

Some commentators would have you think this book is all sexual heat but I think the plot drive ends up dominating everything else, so much time devoted to strategies, reading and planning, going back and forth large distances.

I have the 2003 Penguin version edited by Maurice Hindle, with long introductions and appendixes. A great deal of it looks into Stoker's life and psychoanalyses him. I normally find this sort of thing lazy, reductive and full of confirmation bias, but a lot of the evidence here is fascinating and most of the arguments pretty compelling; above all the significance of the scene which Stoker dreamed about and retained through each draft.
One major complaint: I would have liked to read "Dracula's Guest" (I'm sure I have it somewhere in an anthology) but it somehow isn't even mentioned anywhere in all the extras.
Stoker's letters to Walt Whitman are a spectacle for just how much he pours himself out and Charlotte Stoker's (his mother) account of the disease ravaging her town has some amazing stories.
I couldn't hold my patience for much longer and skimmed through his pro-censorship article and his interview with Winston Churchill.

I'm inclined to read the Icelandic version (Powers Of Darkness) and Dracula In Istanbul but not for a few years at least. Then sometime the sequels by Freda Warrington and Reggie Oliver.

Should have emphasized more just how fucking overlong it is. But the best parts are beautiful.

The Icelandic version is the opposite of overlong. It follows the early Harker chapters fairly faithfully, then accelerates through to a different conclusion in about 25p.

The descriptions of Dracula's lips remind me of many prejudiced depictions of foreigners and criminals but I'm less confident in making this connection.

Pretty sure I read there was an influx of Eastern European immigrants to the UK around this time and that Stoker was definitley tapping into xenophobia there.

What confuses me is how this story is almost never told from a class pov, even though Dracula is quite clearly a member of the nobility preying on those below him. People just too interested in the horny side of it to care, I guess.

Franco Moretti has a wonderful essay which I am forgetting the name of in which he reads Dracula as a figure of ascendant capitalism: the foreign businessman, with a fortune of dubious provenance, who is not bound by conventional Victorian morality in his pursuit of a return on his investments.

Looks like a basic take on The Way We Live Now, although Trollope's supporting characters are more engaging/bearable than Stoker's, judging by great descriptions of the latter above! (Both books long-ass, but AT makes it work, I think.)

Snagged the Audrey Schulman book on Kobo for 2.99, fyi

maybe the coronavirus is just the living planet's way of preparing our bodies for helliconia summer

Reminds me: I've been thinking of trying to dig up my old paperback of Charles Oberndorf's Sheltered Lives: published in the early 90s, it looks back on AIDS as in the first or next wave of pandemics, leaving chronic conditions in their wake, for which sex is to blame, can't ever be anything else in the environment, no no no. Mainly what I remember are distant "quarantine" camps, other people keeping heads down and working for the fuel to keep working in cubicles etc. Mainly, state of siege as new normal is what I related to, since there was always some kind of crisis humming back there, even before post-9/11!---- SFE adds: His first novel, Sheltered Lives (1992), sets the fully realized lives of his protagonists – a male prostitute and his client, who may be a terrorist – in a mid-American, Dystopian, Near Future world where vast Keeps house vast populations under constant surveillance by an AI with a sense of humour; the AIDS-like plague, that has distorted Sex and justified repression in general, is not cured. The possible terrorist is def against the camps, so look out. http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/oberndorf_charles

The male prostitute works in a state-run, sanitized facility.

Some observations I made elsewhere...

I really wish the blue flame thing came up again, I wonder if he did have further plans for that which he didn't use. Maybe in Powers Of Darkness or Dracula's Guest, both which use discarded ideas?

Although the journey to the castle in Coppola's version is lovely, it doesn't really compare to the book with it's more impressive landscape. And the packs of wolves at command!
Murnau and Coppola kept Dracula as the driver but seemingly nobody kept Dracula as Jonathan's daily chef or briefly wearing a straw hat. These might seem to undermine his aristocratic bearing but Stoker's Dracula prefers to take whatever he can into his own hands.
How about the woman demanding her child back?

I was wondering a lot about what a more decadent Bram Stoker would have done with his "this man belongs to me" dream.
And the idea of Henry Irving's acting being grotesquely over the top is quite tantalizing; Stoker going into a hysterical fit during a performance.

For all the fame of the book I've hardly seen much discussion of so many aspects.

Although decadents, foreigners and New Women might have inspired the vampires to an extent, I think it's a boring way to view classic vampires as simply misunderstood liberals being hunted by conservatives.

There's some very interesting takes here and I like the idea of Mina being a compromise or concession to liberals. Very very good reviewer I discovered recently.
https://johnpistelli.com/2019/10/17/bram-stoker-dracula/

I think the aristocratic element has been commented on a fair amount. Guy Maddin leaned hard on this by focusing on the idea of foreign wealth and deliberately cast Dracula as an east Asian dancer.
Holmwood/Godalming uses his own aristocracy extensively and Mina praises the power of his money to help them all. Again, these things never seem to get re-used, partly because they are so long and convoluted; Holmwood/Godalming is probably the least interesting character.

I after reading so much about it, I think it's clear that it cant just be about one thing above all else, there's a lot going on. I think that's usually true of things with lasting power.

Or perhaps just things that last for a wide audience who like different aspects of the thing. Maybe simple yet powerful things hold a smaller audience but for just as long.

The guy flying on the We Who Are About To cover reminds me of 2000 AD's Tharg.