fantasy novels.

Deconstructionist philosophy to the extent they deal with the dawn of history, the birth of codified language, when signifiers were freshly coined, and so as yet not "suffering" from slippage with the signified. Also, they stpries are quite meta-, the narratives self-deconstructing at times, if I'm remembering correctly.

J.D., are Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass and The Little Prince children's or adult fantasy? What about Rushdie's fantasies, Grimus and Haroun & The Sea of Stories?

i should look up the neveryon books. (isn't there a science fiction one of his meant to be "about" deconstruction too?)

what about 'midnight's children', which is about superheroes?

This could apply to almost all of his fiction, but probably most to The Einstein Intersection, Babel-17 and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.

The Neveryona series is really good, even for people like me who've never studied deconstructionism and barely know what semiotics is.

stars in my pocket... is like pure wish-fulfillment for the academic-left - as well as being a beautiful love story, and great literary fiction. but i don't think it makes strong statements about literature / reading the way dhalgren does, or at least it's not the point of the book.

dhalgren is about an amensiac named "the kid" who travels to an american city called bellona. bellona has been afflicted by a terrible, unnamed disaster. it is mostly deserted, but has become a gathering-place for misfits. something has ruined the flow of time and space in bellona - streets and buildings change location unexpectedly, roads lead different places on different days, people experience time differently. you may leave overnight, when you get back, a week may have passed for your friends.

several identities are proposed for "the kid", none of which are confirmed. "the kid" eventually becomes de facto leader of the street gangs and nomadic hippie tribes of bellona. this is because he writes a book of amazing poetry. though later, we find out he may not have written the book after all - he may have found the notebook. or was he the owner of the notebooks, before his amnesia? as events speed up towards the climax of the book - which may or may not be the original disaster that "deconstructed" bellona - "the kid" exchanges identity several times, before finally dissolving into ... what?

ok, the novel's not as heavy-handed as you might think from reading my synopsis - except when it is, like the scene in which the kid puts on a sci-fi shapeshifting suit, looks in a mirror, and sees - i kid you not - SAMUEL R DELANY. OMG WTF !!!

no really, though, i found it absorbing and compelling over the length of it's approx 2,000,000 pages. sometimes i was like "this is the best scifi novel ever" and sometimes i was like "this is the worst scifi novel ever". i am really glad i read it, though.

rec'd to everybody!

(same w/ stars in my pocket... and triton, though i didn't like or "get" nova, and ballad of beta-2 and his early shorts (collected in aye, gomorrah aren't all that distinctive - w/ lots of them you feel they could easily have been written by a sexually liberated, hipped heinlein or van vogt or even cordwainer smith or somebody ... but w/ triton and stars and dhalgren he really works the academic/theory angle hard, it really shines if you dig that stuff)

MORE SPOILERS

The aspects of Dhalgren that gave me the worst karates (that's a good thing) were the circular structure and the fact that the novel had happened before to the female sculptor he meets on the way in, and was going to happen again to whoever it was he met on the way out. The unbreakable cycle is kinda heartbreaking to me.

I would describe Dhalgren more as a fantasy novel than SF, personally.

i think the one i meant was 'stars in my pocket'. i had been putting off dhalgren until after i read finnegans wake i.e. more or less never. (i've only read delany's easy books and the autobio and some of the criticism) (i feel moderately shamed over this)

has anyone read a princess of roumania, by paul park?

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/21/a-princess-of-roumania/#comments

"I’ve a theory, which I suspect is hardly original to me, that the magic in really good children’s fantasy draws its resonance from a child’s perception of what it must be like to be grown up. When you’re a child or a pre-adolescent, the adult world seems an attractive and terrifying place. Adults have power, but are driven by forces and desires that a child can only dimly understand; wild magic. Thus, for example, when Susan rides with the daughters of the moon and the Wild Hunt in Alan Garner’s The Moon of Gomrath, she’s glimpsing for a moment what it will be like to be a woman. In contrast, the magic in mediocre children’s fantasy is all too often domesticated, rationalized, and stripped of its real force."

right on.

has anyone else read Mick Farren's DNA Cowboys? it deserves some pimping

Did Delany say this? I missed it if he did.

Wait, I don't remember this at all, was I asleep during this part?

the hint is the bitten nails and the beard.

...maybe he saw William Dhalgren!

And I don't think he even had the beard yet back then?

Consider:

http://www-as.phy.ohiou.edu/FORUM/s98/images/delany1.jpg

i guess it says more about my reading of the book / mental image of delany that i just assumed it was meant to be him in that scene ...

blurb cribbed from the back page, beneath the fantastic heading "The Last Story in the Annals of The Human Race!"

"a world of the remote future. the scoiety is very rich, very decadent, and the population is small. the story centers on the schemes and conflicts of a group of bizarre men and women - The Duke of Queens, Lord Jagged of Canaria, the bitter giant Mongrove, My Lady Charlotina of Below-the-Lake, Mistress Christia (the everlasting concubine) and the Iron Orchid, mother of the central character, Jherek Carnelian.

when Jherek meets Ms Amelia Underwood, a lady time-traveler from 1896, he determines to possess her and finds himself being plunged backwards in time to Victorian London...

An Alien Heat is set in a world of crazy, jeweled cities with ripe rotting technologies. it is an example of teh mighty imagination of michael moorcock at its most magnificent"

...

i LOVE these novels, particularly the first. i'm rereading them from the beginning because i just recently found the third volume, "the end of all songs", after reading the first two about ten years ago, and spending all the intervening time in suspense about what happens.

combines the best parts of elric (wildly overstuffed, fantastical, absolutely purple characters and creatures and magics) with the best parts of the cornelius novels (zinging social critique, madcap situations, speeded-up narrative) without the depressing cynicism of either. these novels are genuinely funny and - a word i use so rarely - even sweet! they make me happy to be a reader!

just finished bishop's 'the etched city', which had some good bits and some bad bits and lots of "oh i have so lost patience with this kind of thing" bits, particularly in descriptions of the city, which i doubt are bishop's fault, although they might be. spoilers to follow. (god i hate that word.)

i think i might have lost the patience for the 'subcreation' bit in fantasy novels: i mean, i don't CARE what kind of names for deserts you can think up..

the entry of magic into a world where it hadn't been was an interesting strand (and uh probably relevant to stuff i am thinking about with my novel, god help me). but it made the whole creating-a-world bit seem rather excessive, considering the world created was in terms of what can go on, magic-wise, sort of identical to ours. (if-i-remember-correctly plisskin on the other thread suggested the changing of the world is sort of metafiction. which sort of makes sense.) and the mental states of the two lead characters (one a total cynic, one morally worn down and incapable of wonder, i guess) seemed to force me into a kind of detached stance of my own in reading the whole thing, which i'm not sure how i feel about. i will read her next novel unless it is about stuff going on in one of the other deserts or something, in which case i won't.

now i am reading harry fucking potter.

i laughed when gwynn's horse started talking to him. but when the woman arrived in the plot it became much more of a chore to read, bcz their dialogue was the WORST, until the last scene together, and bcz long descriptions of art are getting to be something of a personal bugaboo. (tho better than long shots of art in films, generally.)

the stuff with the priest's backstory towards the end was probably the point i was most affected, and it fit interestingly with the otherwise non-supernatural history of the world. (my angle on their continuing debate was along the lines of: well, this would be a rather sophomoric thing to have running in a novel operating in a world bounded by the laws of reality: so there's going to be some kind of payoff, isn't there) (it wasn't just my favorite bit because i was basking in the satisfaction of being proved right, though that helped.)

jordan: the viriconium books are all interesting, in different ways (not to oversell them or anything - ), and available in a convenient omnibus. said convenient omnibus does print everything in a stupid order but you can't have everything. i never got around to reading the centauri device or the non-genre stuff. never even found climbers, in fact.

also here is a notion to play with:

the quest narrative is of course a CLASSIC. and it seems to be a pretty big staple of the elf-trilogy style of fantasy. (or seems to have been when i was 18.) could you somehow try to define this kind of fantasy by what it does or fails to do with the quest narrative? in contrast to other genres? (e.g. in certain kinds of crime fiction or detective fiction where people have read out of the crime reconstruction or motive-questioning or clue-finding all sorts of assumptions about the nature of modern identity, or rational control by society, or whatever.)

Following ilx discussion of Alan Garner a while back, I just now finished reading The Owl Service for the second time in the past week, which never happens---second time was much quicker, though mainly because the whole thing was still lodged, incl. what I couldn't quite remember or forget, to near-quote one character on another, sympathetically and not: that's just how it is these days, in the book and out, to some extent---but mainly, I knew and kinda knew, with a squint sometimes, what had happened, was happening still, is happening still, anywhere and anytime I open the book, the real and modern and fantasy and ancient, recurring and mixing---I found that I did understand it/take it in (incl. class and English and Welsh and gender and generational and generative and other identity markers, clashes, proximities) a bit better for having read it the first time, also recognizing again and moreso the questions that will never be answered: my struggles somewhat mirroring/aping those of the characters, although they have it worse, or most of them do.
Enjoyed the author's afterword as well (btw, he mentions the TV adaptation, filmed in the valley of his inspiration---any of you watched it?), reminding me of enjoying Lethem's afterword to We Have Always Lived In The Castle, another rec if you want to take it as fantasy, personal mythology.

TV version seemed underwhelming to me, they didn't capture the atmosphere of the book very well and the casting was odd.

There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elidor#Television_adaptation
And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Shift_(novel)#Television_adaptation_and_popular_culture

neither of which I've seen. Elidor quite infamous in the UK for scaring the shit out of any kids that did see it though, in true British style.

Plus these, although The Moon of Gomrath doesn't seem to have been adapted at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weirdstone_of_Brisingamen#Adaptations

is the owl service the one that takes a lot from the Mabinogion? that keeps cropping up here and there to the point where i feel i should read it.

(yes - The Owl Service interprets a story from the Welsh Mabinogion, namely, portions of the story of "Math Son of Mathonwy.")

strangely, published in the US as "Maths son of Mathsonwy"

Blurb for this edition:

In his earlier novels, The Weirdstone of Brisingstone, The Moon of Gomroth and Elidor, Garner used the sucesssful formula of the spilling of the twilight world of ancient legend into the present day. Here he uses the formula again, with an added depth, and even more compulsive terror-haunted beauty.

i pulled the trigger on the first three mole books. etsy was the only place i could find a good deal for the first three books! someone should really reissue them.

enjoy

they are pretty dense, iirc, you wont blitz through them too quickly

What other Garner should I read? All of it?

Yes, there's only nine novels (ten if you include The Stone Book Quartet which is four interlinked stories) and none of them are long. Plus what I've read of the short fiction is equally good. Haven't read anything from the 'Other Books' section from the link below, I'm guessing they're mostly for younger readers? Plus Where Shall We Run To? is a memoir.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Garner#Works

Thanks! Am I ready for Red Shift---?

Emma Donoghue recalls reading Red Shift as a teenager: "It looked like other Garners I had read: a children's fantasy. But Red Shift, with its passionately bickering adolescent lovers and vertiginous plunges through the wormhole of time, shook me to my core every time I read it, and still does... Garner makes the past numinous, terrifyingly real: anything but passed."[42]

Finished Red Shift six months ago and still have it on my desk because I'm convinced I'm going to solve the cipher.

i pulled the trigger on the first three mole books. etsy was the only place i could find a good deal for the first three books! someone should really reissue them.

― scott seward, Saturday, 5 October 2024 23:03 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

enjoy

they are pretty dense, iirc, you wont blitz through them too quickly

― tuah dé danann (darraghmac), Saturday, 5 October 2024 23:12 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

can scott do a mole book reax thread where he shares his trauma and everyone who read them earlier relives their own trauma

Stroke it Mole

you guys are scaring me!

looking forward though.

W-what are the---mole books---?

one who must ask has not yet achieved stoneness

(duncton books, William horwood)

kirstein (the steerswoman) (trilogy, I think?)

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Wednesday, September 18, 2024 5:57 PM (three weeks ago)

It's planned as 7 books and she has written 4. There hasn't been a new book in two decades and her next book is not in that series.

i dont want to come across as harsh but that should be prison time tbh

I was discussing the other day that this sort of thing isn't uncommon at all. There's tons of writers who've had an ending for their series in their heads for decades but demanding day jobs, right issues, depression, illness, other book series and many other things get in the way. If anyone should be punished it should be editors who keep asking for trilogies, quartets or more and don't allow the writer to complete them if the early books sell poorly.

otm

i said what i said

That's a lot of dead people in jail.

I think it comes with the territory, if series epics are what you like to write then there's a very high probability that you won't finish them all, or even one of them.

It seems like there's quite a lot of writers who do series that consist of standalones and their fans don't know how many further books were intended. I just found out that Gormenghast was planned as at least 5 books.