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

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?

Yeah -- I have a copy around here somewhere. Ellison threatened to sue him but never followed through.

I think it is not readily available because of that threat.

Huh...I wonder if existing copies go for big bucks.

Twenty-five bucks at the low end although somebody wants one seventy

Considering it's just a cranky rant of the sort that was perfected later by Everyone On The Internet, I'd gladly give mine up for $35-40.

HA

"..about why it would never come out.Ellison threatend to sue but never followed through." Zing! Truth is the best punchline. He wrote a whole book about it? Wotta Priest!

But I wasn't thinking of Ellison re passively publishing any ol' thing with a big name attached, more like the last Dozois-edited Best of I read, from two-three years back, put me any subsequent volumes. About half of it was up to his usual (slightly damp) standards, then suddenly veered, even Robert Reed with an endless story about watching his doggie waste away--could possible have been good, but it was all sniffle sniffle sniffle sniffle sniffle. I like DG Hartwell's anthologies when he's on his own, but the Year's Best SF series co-edited with Cramer aren't so dependable.

Also, what's some good New Wave science fiction?

philip jose farmer's short stories

j.g. ballard

Never seen a collection of Farmer's short stories, rarely see the novels anymore (The Lovers was his early noteworthy, right?) Ballard's Of The Sun was vivid but somehow made less impact than I'd expected, maybe too autobiographical for his usual conceptual momentum? Not that I've read much else, which of his should I look for?

Empire of The Sun, sorry.

i think the awesome PJF is an early short story collection called "strange relations"

Also, what's some good New Wave science fiction?

Start at ground zero...

http://www.sfsite.com/gra/0502/nwlg.jpg

octavia butler's xenogenesis series is fantastic

Farmer's full bibliography doesn't really fit neatly in the New Wave, but he was prolific enough that a lot of his stuff was New Wave-esque, especially the work that dealt with sexual themes. "Riders of the Purple Wage" was very NewWaveish, but it's kind of a choppy mess -- it was so long and had to be cut so severely for Dangerous Visions that the outtakes were assembled into another story, "The Oogenesis of Bird City." One of my favorites of his is "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod," a dumb/hilarious answer to the question "what if William Burroughs, not Edgar Rice Burroughs, wrote the Tarzan stories?"

Selling my Farmer collection (nearly complete when I sold it in 1986) is one of the most boneheaded things I ever did.

Another vote for "The Jungle Rot Kid."
A litle while back I overheard a guy in a bar saying Vonnegut wrote Venus on the Half Shell. When I corrected him he looked at me like I was nuts

"The Jungle Rot Kid On The Nod" sounds very promising, thanks. Somebody should do it as a song. Shifting gears, any other Stephen Baxter worth checking out? How are his collaborations w Arthur C. Clarke?

what is actually in that new worlds anthology?

new wave stuff i think of as vaguely canonic: pamela zoline's stories 'the heat death of the universe' and 'a holland of the mind'; jerry cornelius stuff, but don't ask which; thomas disch, 'camp concentration' and '334'

brian aldiss's 'report and probability a' and 'barefoot in the head' worth looking at in a bookshop to see what kind of responses people were having who were trying to keep up? not really v good though

j.g. ballard, i guess 'the drowned world' & those other early novels? & the story 'the assassination of john fitzgerald kennedy considered as a downhill motor race'

ha, that anthology samples most all of that

Yeah, a lot of stuff was in that mag. Here's Gollancz crowing about and linking their titles on recent Locus Rec Reading List
http://www.gollancz.co.uk/2012/02/gollancz-titles-on-the-locus-recommended-reading-list/

they sure have a whole bunch of sequels

i can NEVER find disch stuff in used book stores anymore. used to see it everywhere, and now that i want it all....nada.

I apparently told yall wrong about Lindner's book study of psychopaths: he's foregrounding one person, and though I could swear I've seen it as the original work titled Rebel Without A Cause, pre-dating the movie, I found it this afternoon as Without A Cause. Also Theodore Sturgeon's collection, Sturgeon is Alive And Well, from 1971. I'd heard he had writer's blcok, and he confirms this right away in the prologue. Living way under a rock til a redheaded woman got his mojo rising (sorry, I was just reading about Greil Marcus' Doors book on the What Are You Reading thread). So he wrote all these stories (and a novel) in the previous year, 1970, not one of the more springs-eternal years otherwise. All but one, the first story, a novelette from the early 50s, perfect lead-off, re agents of the muse, in this case seeking out a blocked painter who may also be a blocked knight of olde. Easy to see where this is going, but appropriate novelties keep appearing at just the right moments, spinning around the throughline. A little too neat (yet not quite adding up) toward end, but not too much considering the requirements even for hipper magazine SF in early 50s, or later. On the way home, I sat down in the park and read this long and sometimes dense (forsooth, that knight) yarn from beginning to end. This never happens. When I raised my head, still plenty of dark green cool daytime, at 7 p.m.

http://covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/6705129-L.jpg

at home for easter weekend i have turned up copies of two collections: 'the dreaming jewels' and the more troublingly titled 'e pluribus unicorn'

Ha. Think I owned one or both of those back in the day but I remember nothing but the titles

Yeah, I've got reservations about unicorns, but at least it's not angels or elves, in the book's title anyway. James, cover of The Dreaming Jewels is posted a little ways upthread, may jog yr memory.

that title approaching piers anthony level of awfulness