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

that book was weird

the stories in 'the last wish' are so entirely centric on geralt being a bad-ass that i thought that was going to be the point of the novels, too, but he's hardly in the first one; only the focal character for around fifty pages, and only briefly allowed to do any action type things, and the book ends with him bleeding out. it's way less men being manly and having sex with ladies than i expected; this is largely a good thing

ends v undramatically, with fifty pages on the adolescent girl who is more often than not the focus doing fifty pages of wizard training stuff that feels more like pages fifty to one hundred of some other novel. as far as writing adolescent girls go it's not carson mccullers but not embarrassing either, i guess

the politics/economics i am abstaining from remarking on for now

i think i liked or half liked or at least read and enjoyed and then quickly forgot those books, the way he coated the traditional medieval d&d campaign setting in this thin layer of grime and despair and mood of postsoviet decline was the best thing abt it. well that and the way it was like a video game i guess

ha i think i'd have liked them more if there were more post-sovietness about them

i thought there were more of them translated, i was actually briefly disappointed that i wasn't going to be able to go straight to the next one. otoh having looked at summaries of them all on the witcher wiki ( /: ) it doesn't look like they really continue to accentuate the elements that are interesting all that much

maybe i should just play the videogame

I have just started Hyperion by Dan Simmons for SF Book Club. I am liking it so far.

Am reading Joe Haldeman's lastest trilogy, Marsbound/Starbound/Earthbound (halfway through book 2)--not bad. As long as it doesn't have the awful, AWFUL copout-style ending of Forever Peace, I'll be happy.

Could someone remind me what that legit paid-for ebook site for classic SF was? Thanks!

(sorry, my search-fu is weak tonight)

This one? http://sfgateway.com/

That one looks like I remember, yes! Thanks very much. And within 2 minutes of me asking, too.

25% of way thru AlReynolds book and it feels more like gibson than his usual space opera stuff. this is probably due to language, setting and the big macguffin.

enjoyed a reynolds novella I just read, 'Troika', about cosmonauts investigating Big Dumb Object

re-read Viriconium Nights and In Viriconium recently. then i stumbled across this essay which is great:

http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/viriconium/

i found an 80s collection of those two a while ago (i read all of them in the gollancz fantasy masterworks collection, including the two earlier ones, a somewhat longer while ago) and they've now been, in that book, in a reread pile for what. four years? oy

those gollancz masterworks have included 'the female man' and 'dhalgren' this year, incidentally. which is awesome. to a very small group of people, including me.

Ted Chiang? Ted Chiang!

OMG. Ted. Chiang.

http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/fall-2010/fiction-the-lifecycle-of-software-objects-by-ted-chiang/

Such a good story!

I wish he was more prolific, but at least when he does put something out, it kicks 17 varieties of arse.

finally wrapped up "urth of the new sun"

would anyone like to do a "shadow and claw" reading club?

wow, thanks s.clover for that story. really great, possibly gonna ruin my day since i stayed up far later than i should reading it. i am now on my way to look for more ted chiang stuff !

The Merchant and The Alchemist's Gate is the one I know from a couple of anthologies. Only awards nominee I've ever heard of to turn down nomination, here's his bio in brief from goodreads:
Ted Chiang (born 1967) is an American speculative fiction writer. He was born in Port Jefferson, New York and graduated from Brown University with a Computer Science degree. He currently works as a technical writer in the software industry and resides in Bellevue, near Seattle, Washington. He is a graduate of the noted Clarion Writers Workshop (1989).
Although not a prolific author, having published only eleven short stories as of 2009, Chiang has to date won a string of prestigious speculative fiction awards for his works: a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990), the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992, a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for "Story of Your Life" (1998), a Sidewise Award for "Seventy-Two Letters" (2000), a Nebula Award, Locus Award and Hugo Award for his novelette "Hell Is the Absence of God" (2002), a Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007), and a British Science Fiction Association Award, a Locus Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Exhalation" (2009).
Chiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story "Liking What You See: A Documentary" in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted. [1]
Chiang's first eight stories are collected in Stories of Your Life, and Others (1st US hardcover ed: ISBN 0-7653-0418-X; 1st US paperback ed.: ISBN 0-7653-0419-8). His novelette The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate was also published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

I have just finished "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Attwood, an enjoyable piece of apocalyptic-dystopian SF.

Not SF! /attwood

"Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that"

see also Jeanette Winterson, who wrote a book about androids and clones and other planets set in the far future, but it wasn't sci-fi, you see, it was a FABLE

You gonna read the sequel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Flood

o canada

so much to answer for

tbf, we just write the stuff, you're the ones that buy it

morelike year of the butt amirite???

currently reading kameron hurley's 'god's war'/'infidel' which are p good but not great, i guess. there arent very many ideas but lots of exciting things happen

atwood is OK with the term speculative fiction. seems like a silly distinction to me.

finished this yesterday

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/130/317774979_a9a7abd30f_z.jpg?zz=1

What did you make of it? I thought it a bit... arbitrary. I suppose the second section could be an attempt to portray a form of life completely alien to ourselves, but it doesn't touch Lem in that regard.

thought it was a really fun read, i like how the second third takes so long to get back to electron/positron pump from the alien marital drama stuff but when it does it's so perfect

i read that when i was ... immediately preadolescent? it seemed very peculiar

what wouldn't

found used a copy of m. john harrison's 'the pastel city' and read it in the break between papers. better than i remember! under less pressure to be Importantly About The Genre to me than it was when i was 17

had one or two moments that bugged me like when grrm called something 'stygian', there was something 'cochineal' and i thought what do they make food dye out of insect-bugs in fantasyland

turns out the poems tegeus-Cromis writes are a riff on pound's cathay; this was unexpected

Glad you've finally got that sorted

You gonna read the sequel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Flood

Yes. Probably.

I liked Oryx and Crake while I was reading it, but my SF book club pals mostly did not - so now I am wondering if it is actually not that great.

was a semi-decent slashdot sci-fi reading thread recently...

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/03/07/0056225/ask-slashdot-good-forgotten-fantasy-science-fiction-novels

what do ppl think of theodore sturgeon

he had the worst story in dangerous visions; otherwise i have not read him

I love almost everything I've read by him. (Godbody was an exception.)

working my way through david louis edelman's jump 225 trilogy. basically imagines a 5-6 century jump forward into a world where constantly connected nanomachines inside the body enhance every aspect of human life, and apps can make any change imaginable. into this world comes a paradigm-shifting technology called "multireal" that allows people to choose the reality they want to live in.

the first book "infoquake" is kinda neuromancer by way of the boardroom, the second book "multireal" is looking more like high politics. interested to see where it's gonna go and what the third one will look like.

re Sturgeon, More Than Human is great

not heard of edelman--sounds interesting

i'm pretty sure i've read 'more than human' but ages ago. i always get him confused with a.e. van vogt, which is not really right. i'm reading 'venus plus x' which is ... something

Herb picks up the can of liquid detergent and looks at it, pursing his lips. 'We never get this any more.'
'Whuffo?'
'Plays hell with your hands, Lano-Love, that's what we get now. Costs a little more but,' Herb says, ending his sentence with 'but'.
'"Two extra lovely hands for two extra little pennies,"' says Smith, quoting a television commercial.

This is a pretty great introduction to Sturgeon...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51N6QF5FP2L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

I'll have to get that. I know I've read several, but the only one I really remember is "The [Widget] The [Wadget] and Boff"--may not have done that right, but pretty close. ETs doing secret experiment on Earthling inhabitants of boarding house. The ETs don't understand all of what they're doing 'til the end. Their subjects are variously messed-up products of America, like Depression WWII Cold War standards of normal, incl sexual. One of them is a toddler, though, and his perspective keeps some sweetness (for perhaps otherwise-nervous editor?) between the neurotic adults' POVs, and those of the aliens, who are increasingly irritable (concealed, all in each others grill etc.) I read this when I was like 11, and got it all (I think). May well have been the best age to read it, like a lot of Cold War SF magazine fiction-- a lot of SF and fantasy overall, I suspect.

he is one of the leading candidate in the 'science-fiction writer who looks like a dan clowes character' contest

http://www.theodoresturgeontrust.com/Images/TedANQ.jpg

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldv7p6ZlYa1qbl8c9o1_400.jpg

p sure i have that, but i never get around to reading single-author short-story collections. rn i am working my way thro d knight's mammoth 'a science fiction argosy' which concludes w/ 'more than human' so i may have more thoughts after that. what i thought was weird with the bit from 'venus + x' upthread was that for a second it seemed like it was being written by tao lin