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

'Left Hand' is excellent; it's no less subtle than 'Dispossessed' but I found the politics in the latter a little dry, the adventure in the former more gripping. I love every single Earthsea book; the first one is probably more 'for kids' than the rest, I'd at least give 'The Tombs of Atuan' a go as well. I know they're not the most acclaimed, but I love the last two, where after a long break she suddenly returns to Earthsea and examines it under a whole new light.

As for other subtle, clever SF: Stanislaw Lem's 'His Master's Voice' is very philosophical - also scientific, psychological, sociological, political - and with a very mature kind of world-weary pessimism.

In other news, a FEMALE CHARACTER has just appeared in Foundation and Empire.

^oh yeah this was another issue I had with the series...

goddamn female characters. It was going great and then he had to ruin it.

damn right ;)

On the covers of The Dispossessed.

nice - spanish cover is missing though, here it is:

http://www.scyla.com/biblioteca/751.jpg

i've recently finished the stars my destination (pretty hokey plot and character wise, but admirable world-building given its era), and the cyberiad (moderately amusing very inventive fairy tales for adults).

oh, and harrison's pastel city. slight, but not unpleasant, some memorable images, doing the same kind of 'post technological culture = fantasy' thing as the book of the new sun, but without all the arsing about with CLUES to an IMPORTANT TRUTH, or the wilful obscurantism.

Intending to give Wolfe another try myself but I know what ledge means.

Liked this from The Dispossessed link

And, finally, the original cover illustration. Like the first three covers, this cover could shill most Asimov-era science fiction -- it's got the planets, the diagonals, the orange nimbus. Some cover illustrator, somewhere, painted a hell of a lot of orange nimbuses in the '60s and '70s. I hope they sent their kids to college on those nimbuses.

"tell us what they are, xyzzzz"

'The Dispossessed' and 'Left hand of Darkness' are among them!

Finally picked up the Centenary Edition of the Complete Chronicles of Conan with the black cover today.

Now do I plunge straight into this or finish Zoo City first? The latter isn't really what I expected - for some reason I thought it was a cyberpunk thing, but it is more urban fantasy noir, which isn't what I was looking for tbh. Maybe it is a symptom of having to read it in bitesize chunks out of necessity or just because it has a noirish plot, but I have barely any idea what is happening in the story. It just won't stay with me for some reason. Every time I pick it up I can't remember what the hell is supposed to be going on. I am 75%+ of the way through though and I don't like to leave a book unfinished...

I can't count the number of half finished books i have staring at me accusingly from my shelves

Speaking of which - Aegypt by John Crowley. Got two-thirds of the way through and until the realisation hit me that the Giordano Bruno magic theme was being overwhelmed by the tedious divorce theme and that I was bored as hell. Or should I finish?

No spoilers please, for those of us who have a pile of unread John Crowley books, virtual or otherwise.

Oh, sorry - I'll keep mum.

@ GR: No. I finished the first two Aegypt cycle books, and realized I had gotten nothing, nothing at all from them. The plodding, atmospheric, New Yorker story scholastic parts only grow more prominent while the potential for magical-ness recedes into a deeper and deeper shade, and the characters grow more depressed and inert.

Love Crowley, but if it's not working for you after two books, I'd give up - one of those voices that gets to you or, just doesn't. If there was another Aegypt book to come, I'd be waiting for it.

Thanks Soukesian, and yes, that's pretty much what happened to me as well, remy. Still want to read Engine Summer tho.

Little, Big is probably his best. Without getting into spoilers, on finishing Aegypt I felt there were more than a few loose ends, but I was OK about it because, well, life's like that.

Appreciate that must really irritate the fuck out of people. For me, it feels like hanging out with a genial old hippie with a lot of interesting tales to tell. Which, admittedly, may not all entirely match up or reach a clear point. Following a tightly constructed story arc or any of that stuff? Well, maybe, maybe not. As I say, you like his voice or you don't.

Oh, and if you like the Giordano Bruno subplot, you should definitely read Frances Yates' book on him - absolutely fascinating writer.

Yeah she's amazing. I'd read The Art of Memory and her other book on him, and that kind of meant that strand was slightly less powerful than it might otherwise have been I guess. It kept on making me want to go back to her marvellous books. I was all for Dr Dee and the scrying glass, ascension through the spheres stuff. I was punching the air at that opening scene.

Thanks for the Little Big suggestion tho. I can feel a summer reading list coming on.

So I did persevere and finish off Zoo City. I really couldn't get into it unfortunately. It was well-written on a sentence/scene level, but the plot was all over the place and the attempts to capture some sort of youth zeitgeist I found to be incredibly excruciating (e.g. the following sentence: "But it's not rust. It's not rust at all. Perversely, the thought that flashes through my brain is 'I can haz murder weapon?'"). Not my thing at all.

That sounds like the kind of thing that will be amazingly dated in a couple of years time.

I am still thnking of reading Zoo City just so can be in with the young people.

cheezburger network really isn't 'youth zeitgeist' at this point

i am still reading tad williams! the third one is, so far, a lot better than the second

at the end of the first novel the central character has escaped some form of peril and wound up with the eskimo dwarf dudes who inform him "you may leave but your companions will stay FOREVER". they resolve this. they then find out they have to go to The Stone Of Farewell, which is the title of the novel. in another chapter the secondary main character finds out his bunch of people also have to go to the title of the novel. it dawns on the reader that they are going to take 800 pages just to go to point a from point b.

so the main character and companions resolve things with eskimo dwarf types. on the way they burn a hundred pages by finding brief sanctuary with some woman w/r/t which i. tad williams really starts letting his woman-hating creep show through at this point (and he'd been doing okay!) as ii. she starts with the "you are such a pretty thing why don't you stay FOREVER"

anyway blah blah action escape, main character wanders around lost in the woods for a bit, calls for help from elves, is taken to elf city by happening sexy young elves, only to find the elf elders react to this by saying "you are the first human to be allowed into the elf city in aeons and now you will stay FOREVER"

f u tad williams

cheezburger network really isn't 'youth zeitgeist' at this point

Agreed. Which is why a sentence like that has no place in any novel anywhere, particularly when it is used by a character who is supposed to be a trendy meme-wise internet scammer.

That sounds like the kind of thing that will be amazingly dated in a couple of years time.

Yep. There are all these horrible moments when they end up in various nightclubs and listen to made-up musical genres and artists. At another point these kids are playing Grand Theft Auto 5: Zootopia and it is just eugh, shut up, shut up, shut up.

Speculation on short-term pop cultural trends never, ever, works in SF. Ever. (Please recommend me something that proves me wrong though).

pattern recognition wasn't awful iirc

there was a charles stross novel about mmorpgs which had some potential but then wet itself

ok so had the person been killed by an anthropomorphic cat-person or

thomp: Williams' Otherland >>>>>>>>>>>>> his fantasy trilogy; also from what I remember there is a distinct lack of woman-hating in it

reading The R-Master by Gordon R. Dickson. a page-turner! don't know if i've ever actually read one of his novels before.

got some great hardcover SF the other day. and lots of paperbacks too. hardcover stuff i want to get to:

poul anderson - 7 conquests (story collection)

a bunch of terry carr Universe collections

poul anderson - mirkieim

a bunch of damon knight Orbit collections

john brunner - the jagged orbit

c.j. cherryh - the faded sun: kesrith (can't remember if i'm a fan or not of cherryh? kinda thinking what i've read reminded me of le guin and all the characters in her books have names like tsi'mri and shon'ai.)

the best of henry kuttner (don't think i even know who henry kuttner is. old-school dude. intro by bradbury.)

james blish - cities in flight

clifford d. simak - ring around the sun

gordon r. dickson - time storm (think i started this once and never finished it.)

burt cole - the funco file (don't even know if this is strictly SF. looks pynchonian actually. from 1969.)

poul anderson - twilight world

john brunner - total eclipse

poul anderson - the day of their return

burt cole - the funco file

I've never known anyone else who's read that.

is it good? it looks cool.

It's been a long time. It was inconsistent in being lighthearted and funny, with sudden unexpected chunks of emotional intensity and violence. Pynchon or the more whimsical Vonnegut may have been his model, but it was as if a serious-as-your-life James Jones took over the narration at intervals. I also remember that it didn't really end, just stopped. It gave a peculiar sort of pleasure. I filed it away as a curiosity. My suggestion is to read it on summer days.

Apparently the author's real name was Thomas Dixon, and he was born in 1930. I always want to write such people letters if they are still around.

They're making a movie based on Beyond Apollo!

the best of henry kuttner (don't think i even know who henry kuttner is. old-school dude. intro by bradbury.)

Does it have 'Fury' in it? That's the only Kuttner I've read. Surprisingly effective one-track-mind story about a guy determined to wipe out an alien species

I finally got round to reading issue 23 of Apex Magazine yesterday http://www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online/ . Good mixture of dark fantasy, horror, fairy tale, slipstream, magic realism type stuff. I particularly enjoyed "Biba Jibun" by Eugie Foster, a modern fairy tale set in Japan, and "Button Bin" by Mike Allen, a very dark Ligotti-ish horror story.

I've been a subscriber for a few months (12 issues for $10, although I think you can read most if not all of the issues online if you wait a month) and I've enjoyed most of the issues so far, even if it is sometimes a little slight and I'm not really into the speculative poetry. Generally, it's 3 short stories and 2 pieces of speculative poetry.

Online subscription magazines are one of the reasons I got my Kindle and they seem to suit the format pretty well. Does anyone else have any recommendations as far as short fiction magazines go (online or print), particularly ones that are more straight-up science fiction?

Print-wise as I'm in the UK, I'm already very familiar with Interzone (keep meaning to get a subscription), but I would be interested to hear thoughts on the big US ones like Analog (if it is it still called this?), if any are worth reading these days.

As far as online mags go, Lightspeed Magazine has tempted me: anyone read this? Thoughts?

Forgot to add in the link to Lightspeed: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/

IMBanks' Surface Detail is out in paperback. amazon says tomorrow but i saw it in smiths this morning.

I just started reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. I read Rainbow's End a few years ago and loved it, so I'm pretty excited. I'm already fascinated/obsessed with the Tines.

I remember practically nothing about A Fire Upon the Deep other than I read it in college and absolutely loved it.

Evil supercomputer and Medieval dog civilization.

The dogs are the only thing i remember. They were cool though.

It's got dogs in? Damn I'm there.

dan i can't tell if i would like otherland or not, it looks like it could be a fun romp i guess? but if it's as slapdash in construction as ms&t is it will probably annoy me

it seems like he has tried to write a trilogy three times, and each time it has ended up four books. that is not encouraging in terms of whether his others will be less of a mess.

anyway i think i'm done with this sort of thing for a bit maybe? & if not i have steven erikson's 4th & 5th hanging around and i should read them so i can get rid of them before i move house, i think

tbh Otherland is the polar opposite of a "fun romp"; that is part of what makes it so great

i think otherland generally shares the same structural problems that ms&t & his shadow/e series suffer from it has an interesting premise & strong, mostly well drawn characters but meanders a bit too much in the middle stages. i remember feeling like he was stalling w/ a couple of the middle books either because he wasnt quite sure how to end it or he just had too many ideas for worlds he didnt want to throw out but he def ran a couple of the plotlines too long

I don't disagree with that, but I do think he is better working in a SF milieu rather than fantasy; the core idea is much stronger in Otherland and that carried me through the lulls much easier than what was going on in MS&T and Shadow*

yeah otherland feels more prescient the more time passes but its also a p big commitment

I warmed to Foundation and Empire by the time it ended... I liked some of the SFnal touches and found the Mule character interesting, even if the closing twist was something that I could see coming a mile off (partly because Asimov prefigures it heavily).