ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

Turn back in time, you poxy fule!

my oldest kid is turning 13 in december. good grief! you can blame him for ILB. home with babby all day...

got Ballard's "Complete Short Stories" from the library over the weekend. hooooooly shit. Even having read a a fair chunk of his output, a lot of these stories are new to me, and it's crazy how almost fully-formed he was right out of the gate. I have the "Vermilion Sands" collection, which iirc is from 1971, but for some reason was unaware that a bunch of those stories date from the late 50s.

Would have been seriously put off if Vermillion Sands had been the first stuff I'd come across. Everything else is next level, those are dreadful.

That wasn't the first Ballard I read (I'm not sure what the first was, maybe Concrete Island?), but I don't think they're dreadful at all. A lot of his themes are already there, fully formed - the dreamlike, wasted landscapes, the group dynamics of cultists, the psychological unraveling of various unstable protagonists, etc.

this Ballard book continues to reap prodigious rewards, damn.

er reap return

Wish you had been liveblogging.

I'm only a little over halfway through it there's still time

I just read Concrete Island. Funny!

your one-word review will not satisfy Aimless

I've had the first volume of the Ballard short stories on my shelf for years but never touched it. What's a good one to start on?

book is pretty short too

like, what's a good story to start on? idk um "Mr. F is Mr. F"? "The Illuminated Man"? "The Concentration City"? "Prima Belladonna"?

manhole 69

that's a good one

for some reason it's the abiding memory of the collected short stories for me. I got it out the library in 2007 or something and I didn't read all of them but that was a creepy and enigmatic one

I bring that one up one whenever a new wall appears out of nowhere- it happens!- as at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament a few years ago.

Yeah that's one of the best. Also would recommend Track 12, a perfect little revenge fantasy and the mysterious and paranoiac The Watch Towers. Some of the longer ones are pretty similar, lonely scientists obsessed with deep time and playing strange power games - The Waiting Grounds gives a good example of their highly oblique but hypnotic tone.

I remember your favorite from this thread, ledge: best story in the penguin science fiction omnibus, 1973

I like everything I have read in the Ballard Collect Short Stories but just sort of chip away at it now and then rather than reading systematically or plowing through.

your one-word review will not satisfy Aimless

Heavens!

finally up to the mid-70s w Ballard collection, omg @ "The Ultimate City", so eerily perfect in composition.

reading them chronologically it's also interesting how there are often minor details that carry over from one story to the next - a variation in premise, a character name, etc.

Have never really gotten Ballard. He seems admirably dry (admirable because of the nature of the material he writes about in that dry style?), but that's about it. I don't think I ever finished Crash, but I have read a few of his stories, at least.

His style is a very unusual combination of clinical and poetic. I can't say I really like Amis' description of it as "creamy" lol. "Crash" is a singular achievement but it is also (not unsurprisingly) puts the reader in a mental space that is def not pleasant to occupy.

uh not surprisingly

that'll teach you to use the "not un-" formation!

i think crash is his best work of his that ive read - a few of his novels and a reasonable amount of his short stories - reads like a mix of pornography, a technical manual, and topographical description. also has the plus point of being "relevant" through its "prescient" exploration of celebrity culture

I haven't read all of his novels, such as the early "disaster" ones, but most days I actually think "Hello, America" is my favorite. It's got a lot of his usual tropes - obsessed/insane cult figures, dissections of mass media imagery, strange aircrafts, desolate landscapes and deserted cities - all wrapped up in a tidy bildungsroman.

I loved concrete island

I'm not sure what to say per se about Ted Chiang except he should absolutely be mentioned on this thread.

Arguably one of the best authors of sci-fi short stories ever, certainly the most consistently amazing.

Here are two of my favorite recent ones online:

http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang

http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang

(I think about the latter pretty constantly)

(i know he gets discussed on occasion on ILB -- I don't know if we've had convos on him that go beyond "holy heck that's good" or even if there's a good way to have them)

He's done so little he's easy to forget, unfortunately. Agree he's a superior stylist.

not just a stylist. the way his later stories use technology as a way to think about memory and communication is really subtle and insightful.

Allegedly 'Stories of Your Life' is being Hollywood moviefied. Just reread it, and can't see how it won't be fucked up.

I cant see that getting made. Not a franchise + zero name recognition.

It's definitely being made (I think Vintage is reprinting the collection as a tie-in, I saw some ARCs at a local bookstore last month), but I don't know what kind of audience it'll find.

I know he has been mentioned here several times because I read whatever I could find of his about six years ago after seeing him rated very highly by a few ilx0rs.

just checked IMDB, it's in post-production and stars Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. This does not seem like a success in waiting.

We are talking about the story itself right. It's so well done, he has kind of an amazing controlled but not controlling tone to go with the emotional issues he is dealing with- in this story and others (what's the one about the guy finding out he can divide by zero?)- feel like the movie machine moguls of today will have to amp it up and set the pendulum swinging with tender waterworks alternating with big rescues from fiery buildings, but hey stranger things have happened.

yes, just the specific story. Though now I'm imagining one of those anthology films derived from his stories.

whatever they've made of that story is going to be nothing like the story, whether it's a horrible film or a good one

lifecycle of software objects would make an amazing film in the right hands.

I like this recent piece by Chiang, the only nonfiction of his that I've seen:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/if-chinese-were-phonetic

he has kind of an amazing controlled but not controlling tone to go with the emotional issues he is dealing with
This is the appeal of all the TC stores I've read. The kind of disciplined self-(and-other)-searching which may be why he's such a quality-over-quantity guy, unusually enough in SF and fantasy.

and other genres etc.

I've only read the two upthread and The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate and the latter is without question the best time travel story ever written. It doesn't fuck around with bullshit physics, incomprehensibly tangled causal loops or alternate timelines, and although it's ostensibly (sf&) fantasy it is, even more than the two upthread, purely and transparently about the human heart. So yeah I really should seek out more of his stuff.

Working my way through Stories of Your Life and Others, finding it fairly so-so tbh, not really feeling the emotional resonances; Tower of Babylon is neat, Seventy-Two Letters feels like a weird solution to a question no-one was asking. Then I got to Hell is the Absence of God, holy shit. Like a stand up routine that ends with the comedian jumping off the stage and punching you in the stomach.

Tower of Babylon is the one that's stuck with me the most for some reason. central imagery is v memorable I guess

*don't bump*

oh, wait.

I thought I had escaped this Charybdis of a thread.