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

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

And there are other covers for the shorter version (apparently re-packages of The Best of Cordwainer Smith), but the complete edition is the one from NESFA Press. The story you mention was the first half of his only science fiction novel, Norstilia, which I haven't read; the second half was first published as "The Underpeople," I think. The whole thing was put back together in the mid-70s. A psychogical warfare expert deep into early CIA stuff, real name Paul Linebarger. Wikipedia sea also published the thriller Atomsk under name of Carmichael Smith and two more novels, Ria and Carola, as Felix C. Forrest, never read any of those eihe

his novel is great!

I gotta read it
http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/images/r-Norstrilia.jpg

NESFA has the stories, a novel and even a concordance for completists. Feel like I keep bringing this up, but do you guys know about "The Jet-Propelled Couch"? It is a psychological case study of a government scientist who lives in an elaborate galaxy-spanning fantasy
world that is widely believed to be about Cordwainer Smith. I think you can find a slightly shorter version of it online in the Harper's magazine archive. You can also find an interesting discussion of it on his biographer's website

'starmaker'* by olaf stapledon

i tried, it was impenetrably dry for me but i have that problem w/ a lot of pre-modernist lit

i posted a huge thing about SCANNERS DIE IN VAIN somewhere else on ILX but i'm embarrassed to admit that its the only cordwainer smith i've read

where do i go next?

The Game of Rat and Dragon

Oh yeah, "The Jet-Propelled Couch" was a profile by Robert Lindner, from his collection The Fifty-Minute Hour. Haven't read that one, but his other stuff seems like a z-movie version of Oliver Sacks, really playing up the sensationalism (although he's talking about some pretty extreme cases, so even a sensitive description by the actual Sacks would look pretty wild). Also wrote Rebel Without A Cause, title lifted for the movie, but he's not talking about the young and the restless per se, he's studying psychopaths. "The Jet-Propelled Couch" was also made into a Playhouse 90, with Peter Lorre as the shrink, I think!

that sounds p amazing

i voted for cordwainer smith in the sf poll & tried to summarise a story - i forget which - the one where the guy sends a bomb full of genetically programmed cats back in time so they will evolve into a servant race to save him from homosexual turtle people - something like that

also, i read 'the underpeople' without realising it was the second half of 'norstrilia', which oops

reread cat & dragon in that damon knight anthology the other day. i feel like the cat stuff maybe bothers me a little about him.

This was the Damon Knight paperback revelation for me, in '63

The best Damon Knight book is Creating Short Fiction: The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction - probably the best book on writing that isn't filled with fluff, shovel ware, or class notes from your MFA classes. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Knight's Orbit anthologies are well worth the pennies you'll spend on this. This one was about as influential on me as the entire Dune series.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51f4GwM%2BxFL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

The best Damon Knight book is Creating Short Fiction: The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction - probably the best book on writing that isn't filled with fluff, shovel ware, or class notes from your MFA classes. Can't recommend it highly enough.

him?

What, you think Elvis is Damon? Well maybe the other Elvis is, since he and Damon have left the building, on a comet maybe. Thanks Elvis, I'l check that out and I do have some Orbits around, I got those after A Century of Science Fiction. Think it was an Orbit which xpost Silverberg was trying to hard to get into. Knight didn't just passively take in any ol' thing w a big name attached, unlike some editors.

Last summer I enjoyed his novel about a circus giant messiah which had been recommended by Martin S and Rock Hardy, The Man In The Tree

Get some whack stuff by googling The Man In The Tree. I'll have to check it out, thanks!

xp -- I'm glad you liked The Man in the Tree! Sometimes I distrust my own recommendations, but I stand by that one.

Knight didn't just passively take in any ol' thing w a big name attached, unlike some editors.

Ellison?

Ha, didn't Christopher Priest write a book about why the last Dangerous Visions would never come out?