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

Just finished reading Karen Miller's follow-ups to the Innocent Mage books, The Prodigal Mage and The Reluctant Mage; she is kind of a sadistic writer!

just had the first two patrick rothfuss books delivered to my kindle by my lil bro, something to look fwd to.

Re-reading of the wheel of time has progressed to bk 11, but that's another thread.

Dan, you slogged through those?? Christ, well done.

i liked rothfuss but on reflection they may not be very good

xp No, wait, that series is a bit trying but the GODSPEAKER trilogy is the truly sadistic material.

i liked rothfuss but on reflection they may not be very good

― remy bean, Monday, 11 July 2011 16:10 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah this is sort of how i felt about it

you can remotely gift people kindle books? i hadn't realised that + it is kind of exciting

how long do i have before i find myself inevitably reading george r.r. martin again

She (Miller) is possibly the most annoying dialog writer I've ever encountered and the ending of The Reluctant Mage was a little pat given the hell the characters went through to get there, but they were a diverting enough read. I kind of wish she could reliably find that third dimension on her characters, though.

enjoyable but not v good

vs

v good but not enjoyable

let's be honest here, in a sf reader's poll the former slays

re: kindle, i just got an email with a link to confirm acceptance. AWES

how long do i have before i find myself inevitably reading george r.r. martin again

i. i somewhat reluctantly preordered the new book last week

ii. i feel like you can sympathize with this but i HATE the fact that were getting another cover design revamp in whats only a 5 book series!

iii. i still havent got around to reading the final robert v.s. reddick book have you?

ii. i feel like you can sympathize with this but i HATE the fact that were getting another cover design revamp in whats only a 5 book series!

It's okay with me though because the covers have been ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE so far?

yeah but the newest cover design is THE WORST YET at least the stupid gradient background ones looked ok shelved next to each other!

otoh watching the covers progress from like 'cheesy fantasy art of knights' to 'design-by-committee' to 'now its a tv show' to 'jamespatterson_template.ai' has been p lol

xp

english hardback matches the current paperbacks. in fact i'm not sure they ever changed them, here. they're kind of shitty, though. oh, there's a new paperback of the first one, obviously. with sean bean on it, sitting on the throne. which seems odd, actually, when you think about it. i guess he couldn't be doing something that wasn't throne-related. for the tv viewers who aren't smart enough to be reading george r.r. martin already.

oh god it comes out tomorrow

errr i thought i had posted about the redick on here already! but it appears i have not. hum

Even more lollerskates, do you have any idea how often JPatt series get redesigned??? The MAXIMUM RIDE series is on at least cover concept #3 and it's just a trilogy (or a series of trilogies, or something I just don't even know anymore).

is the uk version the dark green gradient w/ a stylized dragon? #trueconfessions i checked both amazon.co.uk and amazon.com to see if their covers were the old versions just to avoid having to buy the new one (faintly marbled background w/'ancient' looking dragon coin/brooch/misc. relic thing & james patterson-style font)

anyway it's .. pretty good? i thought the second was really good because it made this sort of sudden shift to a wider view in the series' concerns whilst keeping the action even more confined to the boat than it was in the first book. whereas in the third there's no big surprises in scale, its a bigger book, they do a lot of adventure-y things

i still liked it a lot but the pacing is wonkier, it has some typical-seeming third-book fatigue things -- prose getting sloppier, Here Is The Continent I Thought About Least syndrome. and it does some things with the adolescents acting like adolescents i think are clever and some things i think are actually kind of dumb

xposts --

nah it's the coin-relic thing but the paperbacks are variations on that theme so whatever. i mean i'm going to sell it five minutes after i finish reading it i guess

just finished 'more than human' by theodore sturgeon...wow

it's great, isn't it? one of the few SF books I've managed to persuade another person in the real world to read

Cyril M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl - Critical Mass. Short story collection put together by Pohl after Kornbluth's death, not really great but anyway it gives me the chance to post this from his wikipedia page :

Frederik Pohl, in his autobiography The Way the Future Was, Damon Knight, in his memoir The Futurians, and Isaac Asimov, in his memoirs In Memory Yet Green and I. Asimov: A Memoir, all give vivid descriptions of Kornbluth as a man of odd personal habits and vivid eccentricities. Among the traits which they describe:

Kornbluth decided to educate himself by reading his way through an entire encyclopedia from A to Z; in the course of this effort, he acquired a great deal of esoteric knowledge that found its way into his stories...in alphabetical order by subject. When Kornbluth wrote a story that mentioned the ancient Roman weapon ballista, Pohl knew that Kornbluth had finished the "A" volume and had started the "B".

According to Frederik Pohl, Kornbluth never brushed his teeth, and they were literally green. Deeply embarrassed by this, Kornbluth developed the habit of holding his hand in front of his mouth when speaking.

Kornbluth disliked black coffee, but felt obliged to acquire a taste for it because he believed that professional authors were "supposed to" drink black coffee. He trained himself by putting gradually less cream into each cup of coffee he drank, until he eventually "weaned himself" (Knight's description) and switched to black coffee.

http://www.sci-fi-london.com/news/books/2011/07/gollancz-set-launch-sf-gateway

Read Solaris in one sitting. Lem really is a magnificently miserablist bastard. Don't know if I have appetite for either of the movies given that they allegedly barely bother with his central theme but will prob watch the Tarkovsky one out of curiousity. Also have Stalker kicking around on my hard drive but fancy reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roadside_Picnic first.

I would watch the movie first if I were you, ledge.

ok, why not. i have it to hand already after all.

(have just watched it. was less good than i was expecting.)

reading Wind Up Girl. not really enjoying it though. could do with being 50% shorter tbh.

i read rogue moon recently, which i think i posted the cover of the edition i bought, upthread; i am glad i bought it, because of the cover; it was not a very good book. otoh it was probably not helped by my inability to picture the leads as anything other than brock samson & dr venture of 'the venture brothers'. absolutely choice Vintage SF Descriptive Prose sentence:

"Barker had long arms and a flat, hairy stomach, and was wearing knitted navy-blue, European-style swimming trunks without an athletic supporter."

Haha, I recall raising an eyebrow at that when I read it. There is a germ of a good story in there but the characters and the cod psychologising are awful. As I've probably opined many times before.

yeahh the above-it-all psychology ends up being about the author and not the characters: i was hoping for a Big Dumb Object story, and read it with 3-4x as much pleasure whenever it turned into one of those for a page or three

i am now rereading the first glen cook, having ordered the next two. still good! however i still don't understand the end to the first chapter so obviously i am too dumb for them

My stubborn persistance with Banks The Algebraist almost paid off, it's proved to be an okayish read. I restricted it to train journey reading.

I've just picked up House Of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds. Pretty sure this is only my second Reynolds read (Pushing Ice was great)

Also posted in current reading thread...

Gardner Dozois' 'When the Great Days Come', a best-of story collection, which, again, was perfectly OK, but I was expecting AMAZING things from the reviews and things I've read about his work from other SF writers over the years. I'm guessing now that the fact that he has edited pretty much every SF writer in existence, and collected their work in numerous anthologies, meant that their gratefulness perhaps caused them to overhype his own work. Ah well.

Watched Stalker and read Roadside Picnic. You were right to suggest the film first, JR, the connection between the two is skeletal but the film only suggests what the book spells out. Actually I think the film tells too much, in all the Stalker's exhortations to stay on the path or else, without showing enough. The book otoh shows too much. Wasn't really down with the idea in the film of the Zone as alive, aware, capricious, but Tarkovsky's treatment of the wish granter is much more interesting than the book, and the actor playing the Stalker is incredible, with his strong reactions to the Zone from yearning and near infatuation to fear and oppression.

Just read the new Harry Dresden novel in essentially one day. Work is going to be painful.

Q. Honestly, do you believe that the fantasy genre will ever come to be recognized as veritable literature? Truth be told, in my opinion there has never been this many good books/series as we have right now, and yet there is still very little respect (not to say none) associated with the genre.

A. For me this is a great steaming shovel full of I don’t care. Good stuff will stick around. Not so good won’t. Some professor pulling his intellectual pud over it isn’t relevant. Jack London and Charles Dickens, Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, were all hacks. And they’re all in print today. And, for the most part, still scorned by the mutual masturbators of the literati.
From my seat high on the mountainside I think too many people associated with fantasy take the whole thing far too seriously. A failing of Americans in general. We all seem to be able to find a thing or two that we will insist on taking too seriously.

is there anywhere on ilx people talked about wolfe's book of the new sun?

i am on my second read through, so immense.

I love the fantasy genre, lots, and I want it to stop sucking (OR: recommend me fantasy stuff that does not suck) and ▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪ ILX ALL TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION VOTING THREAD & MARGINALIA ▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■ a little bit

also i bitched about it here:
THE ILX ALL-TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL RESULTS THREAD & DISCUSSION

pash is all over many fantasy threads repping hard for it iirc, must pick it up tbh

i don't like to look at "all time" lists on message boards, it always makes me froth at the mouth.

ours was pretty good, though i ended up kicking myself for not nomming "engine summer"

NPRs top 100 came out recently and it was fucking atrocious ... david eddings beat wolfe by like thirty spots (new sun placed somewhere around xanth!!)

i am reading new sun for the first time now. for some reason i decided i wanted to hate it before i started but it is blowing me away. i am realizing that this is the book i always wanted to write, and some asshole has already written it approx 10^28 better than i could ever have hoped to. so i do hate it, but differently than i intended.

ok, next purchase.

I've had it sitting on my shelf for a couple of months now. There is a bit of a queue though

after the first read i'd recommend the lexicon urthus. maybe not for the first read, though - big spoilers in it.

feel like last line of tedious glen cook rant I pasted in would make a good epitaph for gene wolfe

?

gene wolfe sux deal w/ it

lol lamp sux

one thing i appreciate about the book on the second reading is that it's actually very funny. i think some of what people might be mistaking for portentous mystery is the sort of humor that gets detective novels labeled "deconstructive" ... severian stumbles through a lot of the book, and makes a lot of stupid mistakes. he doesn't understand magic or technology, at all. he is really selfish and childish at points. the lectures he gets from his spiritual guides are hilarious to me in the way the master-student scenes in "kill bill" are hilarious. a perfect, loving send-up.

it's actually very funny (at times)

anyway i picked this up and re-read it on my recent trip to lake superior ... i had forgotten how charmingly sarah palin it is

never seen this cover before ... kind of weird if you ask me?

the boys are super-literal from the text, the martians and landscape are not, and willis looks hella faded

http://people.uncw.edu/smithms/Ace%20singles/s5N-series/71140.jpg

i never wouldve thought that of it as being a 'send-up' its a p tedious, faux-knowing 'deconstruction' if i read it that way tho, a self-awareness so oblique as to be pointless imo

the book's empty mysticism isnt really my problem tho its just wolfe's general sloppiness and the way he seems to cop a pose of aloof disinterest in genre conventions as a way of excusing his inability to execute

i'm confused. he seems to follow genre conventions pretty rigorously? it's not like reading "house of leaves", is it?