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

Le Guin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are the ones I started with, and still seem like good places to start, re disciplined narrative development x idealism. Haven't read Lessing's full-fledged s.f. allegories, but (along with The Golden Notebook and some short stories) this novel, which goes from early 50s UK, still working its way through aftermath of WWII, to Anti-Communim, new prosperity, 60s weirdness, on to end of the century collapse (published in 1969), seemed a lot more observantly astute (when I read it my early 20s, duhhh), than this crank description on her site--she doesn't just love mental disorders, for inst-but it gives you the range:

This book concludes the five-volume series, Children of Violence, a major literary achievement which has been nearly twenty years in the workblock.

The series as a whole develops the central character, Martha Quest, from birth in Southern Africa at the end of World War One, through an adolescence, youth and marriage shaped by the savageries of the Second World War. With The Four-Gated City Martha is in London as the Fifties begin. This volume then is set in post-war Britain, and with Martha is integrally part of the social history of the time - the Cold War, the Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy; and the minuteness, the painful insight of Mrs Lessings treatment of her characters is, as always in her work, due to her vision of them as creations and embodiments of huge impersonal forces. The series virtually covers the twentieth-century: The Four-Gated City ends with the century in the grip of World War Three, a conclusion like space fiction. For Doris Lessing does not believe in our current mental habits which put "the novel", "the family novel", "space fiction", "journalism" and "autobiography" into separate compartments, and in this extraordinary novel, which is as unexpected as The Golden Notebook, she dissolves familiar categories.

This book is bound to create disquiet and controversy. For one thing, her view of recent politics is not everyones. And her view of the future is that it is the present: we are all hypnotised waiting for cataclysms that in fact we are living through now in the bloody end of an epoch. But this painful time is also creative: humanity is in the process of rapid evolution, we are mutating fast but cant see it - the chief characteristic of the race we belong to being an inability to see what is under its nose.

Relentlessly and acutely exposing facts and ideas which are often found too raw to face, Mrs Lessing takes on the medical profession, which she believes is destroying (recently through imprisonment, currently through the use of drugs) that part of humanity which is in fact most sensitive to evolution, those people we label as mentally sick or unbalanced: and, criticising the scientists who have created and perpetuate a climate in which "rationalism" has become a new God, she claims that everyone has "extra-sensory perception", in varying degrees, but has been brainwashed into suppressing it, and that schizophrenia is the name of our blindest contemporary prejudice.

No one can read this visionary, troubling, thoughtful book and remain unchanged by it.
This is book 5 of the series: Children of Violence. I really don't remember her being anti-psychiatry per se.

"For Doris Lessing does not believe in our current mental habits which put "the novel", "the family novel", "space fiction", "journalism" and "autobiography" into separate compartments, and in this extraordinary novel, which is as unexpected as The Golden Notebook, she dissolves familiar categories."

this - in a nutshell - is my problem with everyone who feels like they have to justify their writing of genre fiction. or something. as if none of these things - the family novel, space fiction, etc - had ever been combined before. and as if SF fans weren't already used to mix & match genres in a multitude of sf novels and stories.

"Relentlessly and acutely exposing facts and ideas which are often found too raw to face, Mrs Lessing takes on the medical profession, which she believes is destroying (recently through imprisonment, currently through the use of drugs) that part of humanity which is in fact most sensitive to evolution, those people we label as mentally sick or unbalanced: and, criticising the scientists who have created and perpetuate a climate in which "rationalism" has become a new God, she claims that everyone has "extra-sensory perception"

this, also, is the basis for sooooo much sci-fi of the 60's... the most paranoid mindwarped anti-everything decade there ever was.

admittedly, i'm REALLY oversensitive when it comes to this kind of thing. normal critics praising non-genre people for doing unprecendented things with genres that the critics aren't familiar with.

lessing actually is decently familiar with SF, tho

or was. i don't know. she was reading lem in the 70s.

yeah i'm not picking on her in particular. just that hyperbole above.

stuff like this:

"Relentlessly and acutely exposing facts and ideas which are often found too raw to face"

yeah, I shouldn't have posted that shit, just lazy. A crucial part of the main character's overview, in sorting through the welter of experiences, memories, media saturation, attempts to adapt as social norms write, etc., is when she starts reading science fiction==well, first she starts looking for what grains of sense she can find in all sorts of fringe "wisdom," the remnants of late 19th/early 20th Century mystic movements, practices, rackets--then delves into science fiction, and there's this bit about Cold War monitors getting all sorts of cool ideas from it too--or the government guy might read the same Scientific American article the s.f. writers are currently tripping on, but it's the latter who take the original nonfiction in a direction the gov finds titillating--as does Martha (and Lessing, of course). Lessing's also made some non-snotty references to s.f. as genre, unlike a number of other lofty types. Yeah, she takes dtuff from it, but I liked the way she went from what already (in mid-70s) seemed historical (as in done, son) to extrapolation, a fave s.f. word of mine. Like jazz.

"as social norms *writhe*," is what I meant.

Oh yeah, she finds those "grains of sense" in the old jive too!

that's cool. yeah, i'd rather hear you talk about her anyday!

lessing actually is decently familiar with SF, tho

Yeah, she has always been straight-up about her involvement in and interest in SF, she was never one of the Atwood-style deniers

The other main "outlier" source specified is Sufi fables, The Four-Gated City's title is based on one for inst. When she wrote it in the 50s and 60s, the Sufis apparently weren't well known in the West. Saw a thing from an early 70s Creem; by then they were becoming better known, but "The Sufis are the cocaine of the consciousness movement." Coke being an exotic luxury then, most people couldn't afford the good stuff, and Bangs warned not to take it when offered as a party favor (cause nobody would just give away anything decent). Coke, Led Zep, and Sufis, those were the status symbols! Weren't Richard and Linda Thompson Sufis for a while? If so, there you go.

sufism always kinda hip with the in crowd. kindler gentler drunken mystic visionary islam and all that. the feel good islam. rumi always big with hippies and post-hippies.

some of those fables she likes could seem pretty harsh.

lol this thread

'where are the dragons?'

eating the elves, I hope

i always forget about the fantasy part of the thread title. i don't read straight fantasy. if i get any fantasy it comes with sci-fi i'm reading. like the andre norton book i read last year.

What was the Norton, and what was it like? Hell I've never even read Tolkien. Did get into Farfhrd and the Grey Mouser, the New Sun books (not saying I nec. really got 'em, but got into), and Heinlein's Glory Road, narrated by Holden Caulfield, except now he's a wiseass badass veteran of nameless Southeast Asian conflicts (in the early 60s), also an amateur yet polished swordsman. He's recruited by a topless beauty w multiverse boots. Lots of imaginative action of various kinds, colorful intra/inter-cultural commentary, fractured fairy tales, etc. My fave RH, though haven't read any past the original Stranger In A Strange Land (later in an uncut edition)

I just read some good parodies of Heinlein and some other well-known sf authors in John Sladek's The Steam-Driven Boy. PKD apparently loved his parody so much that after he read it he was walking on air.

some foreign dude just bought my copies of the long sun stuff, which is good bcz i. i just made a week's food budget in postage ii. i was seriously starting to think about rereading the whole thing

the idea of reading heinlein's grownup novels appalls but i probably should at some point

Have you read Sladek's parody of my writing? It's so much better than anything that I can do. And I walked around and I was really off the ground. Walking on cloud nine, after I read the parody. And I wrote Ed Ferman, who is the editor of F&SF. This appeared originally in F&SF. And I said, I have talent, Sladek has genius. And Ed Ferman wrote back and said, fine, I'm going to buy a lot of stuff from Sladek. And he did. He commissioned eight more parodies. And they're all marvelous; a parody of Asimov. Sladek said I was the hardest person to parody.

I'll have to read that! Don't worry, Glory Road isn't too grownup.

is heinlein the most hated sf writer on ilx?

Thought it was more of an "I prefer your earlier work" thing

yeah maybe that's it.

But how many ilxors, how many anybodies have read his later books? I've been meaning to, ever since Spinrad described how his characters from early books were wandering through the walls and halls of later ones, engaging new characters, probably a certain amount of haranguing going on.I think of him sometimes when listening to Merle Haggard albums of the past couple decades (Merle's right there w the Cali wed though, RAH would've had to have it flown into Colorado Springs mebbe). He became a Reaganesque icon for the Analog-associated techno-hawks in the 80s re controversies, like after the actual Reagan made his prsss-tagged "Star Wsrs" speech on missile defense. As with Reagen the icon, his actual positions and deeds have been compressed and streamlined, for purposes of the real missile defense.

"Cali weed," that is (cough)

This review -- http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/numbeast.html -- is a good argument for the utter awfulness of late Heinlein

Wow.

So ansible is that guy's fanzine deriving its title from UK Le Guin whidh at one point had a little on-demand imprint co-edited with Christopher Priest which mainly published my new discovery John Sladek along with one other guy. Also he is in fact Jon Langford's brother.

Also he is in fact Jon Langford's brother.

Ha, I didn't know this!

I've also been avoiding later or even peak-of-fame Heinlein so I can continue to think of him as the guy who wrote "The Door Into Summer" (which I may only like because it has a cat in) and some fluffily inconsequential kids' books instead of any dubious sex scenes or rampant libertarianism. Should probably at least reapproach his 60s novels.

Yeah, the best argument for or against his later stuff might be actually reading it, no dis to fanzines.

Think I read one of those Lazarus Long books, Time Enough For Love, and that was all I needed to read. No "All You Zombies" was all that I needed to read, the other was more than I needed to read.

Just found this under the "Reception" rubric in Wikipedia:

John Leonard, writing in The New York Times, praised Time Enough for Love as "a great entertainment," declaring that "it doesn't matter [that] all his characters sound and behave exactly the same; it's because the man is a master of beguilement. He pulls so hard of the dugs of sentiment that disbelief is not merely suspended; it is abolished"

But how many ilxors, how many anybodies have read his later books?

i think the later ones are pretty well read.

when you're a teenager how could you give this one a pass??

http://www.alice-dsl.net/aymar/Reviews/Reviews_Robert%20Heinlein/Whelan/Robert%20A%20Heinlein_Friday_BEAN_Whelan%201.jpg

i think the only one that wikipedia lists as 'late' that i never read was 'job'.

i would not have expected that of you. how many of them can you remember?

looking through plot summaries, they all sound kind of familiar. of course heinlein makes it hard what with all the repeated characters, extended families, polygamous spaceship-communes peopled with variations on the same can-do character, etc.

probably even at that age i thought what i was reading was a not especially sublimated form of pornography.

my school library didn't have any of this stuff. it did have all 4,000 pages or so of stephen donaldson's 'the gap into power', or whatever that was called.

heinlein is trash

I'm embarrassed by how much I liked Time Enough For Love when I was in high school.

i still think those "fluffily inconsequential kids' books" mentioned slightly upthread are among the best things done in science fiction. i don't know much about him beyond 'starship troopers', though, i get the impression he had a bit of a dave simish life crisis

are those just everything pre 'starship'? i dont think ive read any of those

I do think The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is worthwhile, and would make a good film.

the first twelve listed here:

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

i wouldn't be surprised if the other half-dozen or so novels he wrote pre-troopers were readable too tbh

ive only read 'stranger' and 'starship' both of which i thought were ridiculous when they werent ugly

Yeah, didn't get into Stranger too much. Then there's Farnham's Freehold, from '64: Hugh and Grace Farnham are hosting their daughter Karen son Duke, and son's fiancee Barbara, with the assitance of young Negro houseman Joe, when Soviet missles come screaming toward Colorado Springs( also home of Heinlein and Air Force Academy). They go into Mr. Farnham's masterfully constructed fallout shelter, go through the lifeboat regime, come out and discover they've been bumped forward in time, when advanced descendants of Third World have cleaned, re-built etc nuke-ravaged North America.Mrs.Farnham enters the harem of the local ruler, son Duke is a mascot, they're both white slaves, basically. The Farnhams' black servant is given a place in the heirarchy, though Mr. Farnham lectures him and tries to get his son and wife back into his own camp (with the son's now ex-fiancee, who now has a child with Mr. Farnham)(think Heinlein usually referred to Hugh as Mr. Farnham). Lots of themes here...and I won't spoil the ending. Think this and Glory Road were the last not to strike me as somewhat ungainly, compared to Stranger (still not ready for the uncut edition!)

The right-wing stuff is much more cunning in this than in loudass Starship (though still some bluster in here,via Dad Farnham's retorts to younger males: son, ex-servant, local lord)

Should also say that he lectures "wolfish" son Duke re latter's racist reaction to new regime, also lectures ex-servant and local lord on reverse racism etc--Father Knows Best, except also gets to a point where "He tried to tell himself that no one is ever responsible for another person's choices...He did not entirely succeed."

i like heinlein for:

a)being personally quite kind to Phillip K Dick
b)writing 'The Puppet Masters' (really entertaining body snatcher alien invasion pulper) and 'Podkayne of Mars' (the best of his 'juveniles', imho)
c)for sending out this form letter to his fans:
http://kk.org/ct2/heinlein.php

always thought heinlein was a much better writer than asimov, at the simple level of the sentence