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

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

This was the Damon Knight paperback revelation for me, in '63
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41syPcSuwnL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

The blurb is playing it safe: we also get flashbacks to Sir Francis Bacon etc., thence to the 1860s, incl. Fitzjames O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens" (I think).

i feel like i should know more about knight but i also feel like he's probably a p boring writer

the argosy is weird bcz there's a lot of stuff which is only by rather broad terms sf. -- there's also like three versions of 'faust - but IN SPACE'

He ran and/or appeared at writer's workshops w wife Kate Wilhelm, also had a rep as challenging editor, even of the biggies. Silverberg said he knew he could go pick up his chump change plus from so-and-so, just cos he was Silverberg (I'm paraphrasing a little), but dammit he wanted it from Knight. Haven't read Argosy, but just started a collection of Knight's own yarns, Rule Golden and Other Stories Re three versions of 'faust--but IN SPACE,' the first and title story has equally generic high concept: hard-boiled newsman meets alien who brings salvation for Cold War Earth. But the salvation is radical empathy: "Be Done By As You Do." If you kill another human, you'll die; plus, mass breakdowns among slaughterhouse workers, resignations from penal system, the "war in Indochina" (1957) goes even further off the rails. Mainly what's effective is the hardboiled newsman (editor!) is the expertly modulated narrator, experiencing his own increasingly anguished, though always prefesssionally second-minded, two steps ahead version of extreme empathy--manipulated by the alien, who himself doesn't entirely--well, there are twists in empathy, a certain slipperiness even as things get resolved (kind of), Shit that don't quite add up adheres fairly pleasingly to Uncertainty Principle and genre plotting potholes, keeps it a bit rough. Second story, abut an actor from the "realies" sent forth to to trade techno-trinkets to the Muckfeet hordes, so they will empathize w besieged New Yorkers, not eat them etc, pretty cool so far, already better than the first.

iiiinteresting

wikipedia reminds me he wrote the quite-annoying 'to serve man', which i have read somewhere recently. possibly in that thing at the top of the thread.

Skimming through all his linked stories on wikipedia, the only one I recall reading is The Country of the Kind, which I rated as a youth but now strikes me as a bit douchey.

This one on the other hand - wow. Just wow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shall_the_Dust_Praise_Thee%3F

The plot summaries make most of them seem like twilight zone episodes written by a clown.

Don't forget he grew Gene Wolfe up from a bean

"To Serve Man" was a Twilight Zone, another one to check when you're ten and/or a bean.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/29/arthur-c-clarke-award-christopher-priest

Having read almost all of the books tipped for the prize, Priest concludes that 2011 was "a poor year" for science fiction, and that judges decided to play it safe. "We have a dreadful shortlist put together by a set of judges who were not fit for purpose. They were incompetent. Their incompetence was made more problematical because the overall quality of the fiction in the year in question was poor. They did not know how to resolve this. They played what they saw as safe," he wrote. "They failed themselves, they failed the Clarke award, and they failed anyone who takes a serious interest in speculative fiction."

things we find following links from there:

- m. john harrison has a blog now! huh.

- the full version of that line on stross (who is rubbish) is much more damaging: "Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet. "

- actually, christopher priest turns out to be much better at insulting other novelists than he is at writing novels: "Of Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three (Gollancz) there is little to say, except that it is capable in its own way, and hard in the way that some people want SF to be hard, and it keeps alive the great tradition of the SF of the 1940s and 1950s where people get in spaceships to go somewhere to do something. In this case, the unlikely story begins as the interstellar spaceship arrives somewhere. The paragraphs are short, to suit the expected attention-span of the reader. The important words are in italics. Have we lived and fought in vain?"

MARCH 16, 2012

As of today you can also find me @mjohnharrison on Twitter.

Filed under barely believable
Tagged as the disaster

The m. john harrison blog has been linked to from here before. Chris Priest's comments will no doubt get him into more trouble than Harrison's "worldbuilding is the clomping foot of nerdism" (which he took down from the blog). Which of his novels do you base your opinion on, thomp?

Note that the review section on his own website consists chiefly of devastating pans from Martin Amis.

So you can't say he is humourless, can you?

a dream of wessex, the prestige, one other i forget

i don't know - i don't think he's bad per se, but they've struck me as competent exercises in the Slightly Weird, neither giving me any real genuine charge of surprise or wonder, nor the sort of for-its-own-sake amusement i get from reading workmanlike pre-60s stuff. but this is perhaps just as much because i've never read anything of his in a particularly good mood, or before i was sixteen, which tend to be important for me, for sci fi, i guess

haha who do we think ole emjohn is talking about here:

http://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/kidults-2/

if ever i write my fantasy epic it was most definitely feature a wizard called Emjohn

thomp/ others, I need a rec on a new, longish sci/fi one-off. Something cerebral but not boring and/or soapboxy (ie early mieville vs. late) and not militaristic. I'd reread lathe of heaven, but I just reread it. PKD would also be okay, buy I've read all of him. Fantasy is also okay, but I'd like something newish.

i'm no good with newish sf, i sort of tend to hate all of it after the 80s or so

remy theres a bunch of recommendations on new sf/f on some other thread - 'i want fantasy to stop sucking' or similar - but 'cerebral' idk

CP is not the sentence by sentence stylist that, say, the Exiled Lepidopterist is, but I think he is pretty amazing at structural stuff, creating some kind of everyday humdrum world, then overlaying some weirdness a little at a time, ultimately leaving you stuck at some midpoint within the weirdness and the everyday from which you cannot escape. The Glamour, The Affirmation and especially Inverted World were all mind-blowing.

I read Amis' bitchy review of Inverted World and it spoiled the ending

The true winner of the award, the writer of the best book of last year, will never be known, because he or she is not on the shortlist.

decent writer, terrible logician

He's just some kind of posh outrider.

finished the collection of ted chiang short stories. across the board awesomeness. they're all gimmicky to one degree or another, both in terms of concept, and in terms of emotional payoff. but they're all good, and two or three are really amazing. Story of Your Life is really impressive -- I mean the idea that you could do something with the variational calculus is clever enough, but the fact that he gives it that much emotional heft... seventy-two letters also v. v. good.

That's a pretty good description of his stuff

The Glamour, The Affirmation and especially Inverted World were all mind-blowing.

Yes, yes, triple-yes!

XP Also the same to Chiang. I wish he was more prolific, but I've never read a bad thing by him, so if slow pace is what is needed to maintain that, I guess I'll let it go.

remy how about Evolution by Stephen Baxter? A novel covering 600 million years! Does what it says on the tin! I can't remember how 'militaristic' it gets in the future part - or much else about that part tbh - but i remember enjoying just the huge scope and the speculative anthropology.

'starmaker'* by olaf stapledon sounds similar.

* or do i mean 'last and first men'?

disclaimer: i have read none of these books, yet.

my standard recommendation: alastair reynolds (revelation space, pushing ice...)

Starmaker is great too, a much higher level experience - focuses on species and worlds, and non-human ones; Evolution tells humanity's story through individuals. Haven't read Last and First Men.

Was about to rec Chiang to Remy, definitely. Also, based on reading Vandana Singh's "Infinities",in Year's Best SF 15, I want to check the her collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet. So far, her writing has the same appeal as Chiang's--she seems well-educated, in many ways. re that slashdot link (which is more than "half decent"), I also want finally to get the complete (in one volume) short fiction of the inimitable Cordwainer Smith, who's a must for all PKD, Bester and early Delany fans, to say the least.

I have not read all of the Ted Chiang collection yet bcz I am bad at reading things which are not the internet, but the bits I have read are very good

the first story winds up pleasingly Borgesian, but people who hate such comparisons should note that (I think?) the collection is in chronological order, so each new story so far is a little more his own style, and at that rate of progression I am pretty excited for how the later stories turn out

(but apparently not enough to go and read the damn thing instead of ILX)

Maybe we can flatter him into posting on ILX, if he doesn't already. Meanwhile, this is tagged as an homage to Cordwainer Smith, and gets his vibe better than any book covers I've seen so far
http://www.paleologos.com/mankind/nncreation2.jpg

I read Cordwainer Smith's "The Planet Buyer" as a kid and liked it and didn't realise it had a second half. I don't remember much about it now so I'm making a mental note to look out for the combined edition of that + its sequel. Any other Smith recommendations?

This one
http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/images/ROM2a.gif

This one has the same title, and a cool cover, but not the complete stories
http://www.goldenageofscifi.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/the-rediscovery-of-man.gif