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

ted was way hip. and way more rewarding when all is said and done then uh i dunno jack kerouac or someone dreary like that.

its funny how you get received ideas abt certain authors - like, all i know abt simak is that he's the 'pastoral' sf writer, wld that be fair/accurate?

Tell me about it. I received the idea that Barrington Bayley and Bob Shaw were stodgy stalwarts swept away by the New Wave but apparently that was unfair characterization. They deserve another chance

that would be fair and accurate, ward. if you are a fan of the state of Wisconsin you shoulc check him out. but he had all kinds of neat/weird ideas about time and time travel and metaphysics. there is still a TON i haven't read by him. but i just find him so soothing and enjoyable. maybe "soothing" isn't a great recomendation, i dunno. he wrote a lot. worth reading i think.

ty scott, iirc 'city' is meant to be a good'un, will check it out

Poul Anderson's Tau Zero was his most respected, by my science/math-savvy friends anyway, never read it myself. Scott's cover sequence is awesome!

That's the one where they go faster and faster thereby experiencing greater and greater relativistic effects. When I read it in high school found it a hard sf bore

But I thought the same of Mission of Gravity so you might not trust me.

mission of gravity is like watching someone work something out on the back of an envelope for 200 pages

bob shaw was a stodgy stalwart swept away by the new wave, except that the new wave didn't really sweep anything away

bayley was a mate of moorcock's so he went on publishing and anthologising him whatever, insofar aict

You know who loved MoG, of all people? Tom Disch

early poul anderson is pretty straightforward. in a good way. i've always thought.

i don't think i've even read any of his 80's stuff. like a lot of the old timers he wrote SOOOOOOOOO much. just an endless amount really.

wasn't it you who said something about sf writers and graphomania?

Oh yeah, here it is ᴥᴕᴥᴥᴕᴥᴥᴕᴥ THE ILX ALL-TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL - NOMINATIONS & DISCUSSION THREAD ᴥᴕᴥᴥᴕᴥᴥᴕᴥ

is there any genre that can compare with sf as far as output goes? mystery/crime would be the closest and i don't think its even that close.

Yeah, mystery writers seem to proceed in a more orderly fashion, and the most prolific writers, like A Lawrence Block or even Joyce Carol Oates, if you want to count her, are not a patch on the pants of an Isaac Asimov, production-wise.

Oh, I forgot, Asimov wrote mysteries too.

He also had all this stuff like Asimov's Guide to Shakesspeare, and many other subjects. In his Asimov's Magazine column, he mentioned a "colleague" at MIT, where he sometimes went to his office, watching him copy stuff out of another reference book. "Why, you're just plagiarizing!" The Good Doctor patiently explained to him why this was not the case. But for most people, SF really didn't pay so well, so they had to make up for it in VOLUME VOLUME VOLUME, like in the old TV commercial. Seems like I read re the 50s and maybe later, a "paperback original" novel-ish length might get just a flat fee, a couple thousand bucks, no royalities. A couple thou in the 50s wasn't necessarirly anything to sneeze at, but considering urban/urban sprawl cost of living in New York or Southern Cail, still you'd have to keep pounding the keys, esp if got a family. When ownership might revert to author, I dunno. I doubt there are many full-time SF writers who don't have to grind out these days, most of 'em prob teach etc.

And I suppose even Asimov might've felt it actually necessary to turn out so many books.

VOLUME VOLUME VOLUME, like in the old TV commercial.

Sadface time--I really liked Mission of Gravity and Tau Zero! If you want "someone work(ing) something out on the back of an envelope for 200 pages", try recent Greg Egan (only make it 400 pages, and not an envelope but some quantum computer thingy). It's sad--Egan used to do great mind-blowing SF, now he does near characterless theses.

i haven't read those. maybe someday! finally finished After Doomsday. it is just comfort food sci-fi but like i said that's my kind of thing. and 50+ years later people are STILL writing books like it. dude was one of the template makers.

still looking for something to really get sucked into for a while. i loved that ben bova exiles trilogy. i want something like that right about now. though next up is simak's Ring Around The Sun. i will report back!

math and physics types are huge fans of egan's recent stuff as far as i know. to folks with sufficient background, apparently, that sort of really hard stuff is very compelling.

James, I think it was a men's clothing store or brand, sold so very affordably: "How do they do it? VOLUMR VOLUME VOLUME" Needs to be put out to pasture now though. re bottom-rate economics of xpost paperback originals and pb re-prints of magazine fiction, just bought flea market copy of John W. Campbell's The Moon Is Hell, from 1951, which by-the-by incl "bonus novel" The Elder Gods, from 1939. And this twofer was published in 1973, so they were still doing that ol' pulponomics at least that recently.

although the bonus novel did get its stand-alone edition, with a better cover than my twofer
http://arthursbookshelf.com/sci-fi/campbell/covers/elder2.jpg

In some ways I'm more interested in the backstories such as the one about New Worlds than I am in actually reading the stuff these days, which is why I am looking forward to Becoming Ray Bradbury.

Review here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/jonathan-r-ellers-becoming-ray-bradbury-reviewed-by-michael-dirda/2011/08/15/gIQAuTgzLJ_story.html

Sutin's bio of PDK is pretty good, though of course the Maestro talked about himself quite a bit from the 70s on. Pretty good entry on crusty John W. Campbell Jr. here http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/

Here's the exact link, lest anyone start at the beginning and never come back to us
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/campbell_john_w_jr

Ahmed Khaled Towfik: Utopia--Egyptian dystopian SF. Really bad, gave up at p50

Enjoyed the Bradbury xpost thanks. Think he mentioned Poe as an early inspiration. Intriguing about Christopher Morley, never read him. Anybody read that James Tiptree Jr. bio?

I own it and flipped through it but, as is so often the case, haven't sat down and actually read it yet. Seems really good though.

hey scott you said you mostly read female authors, is that true for sf too? any recommendations? i <3 <3 <3 le guin and have lessing & butler on my to-do list.

you know, that isn't really true of SF. though i'm always looking for someone i like as much as le guin and wilhelm. i did finally read some andre norton last year and enjoyed what i read. but, as written above, the sheer AMOUNT of what she wrote can make it a flip of the coin as far as WHAT to read. i need more butler in my life! i think there is a thread for her. i'm a relative newby to SF. only really started reading in earnest in the last 5 or 6 years. and there is a ton of stuff i still need to get to. which is why this thread is good.

oh and you can't go wrong with james tiptree. she was the coolest. i'm always trying to track down novels of hers. i mostly read her stories in old anthologies.

i've got a copy of The Female Man by Joanna Russ on my to-read-pile, meant to be THE seminal seventies feminist SF nov

Other female sf auths, tho admittedly not on the level of LeGuin and Butler, but then, who is?

Connie Willis
Nicola Griffith

I'll think of more.

Margaret Atw...nah

nah.

Just tried a Connie Willis, Doomsday. I did like the middle ages part but her future oxford was extremely lacking in prescience, and the most of characters were identikit self-centred monomaniacs, in the service of some kind of 'confederacy of dunces' style farce that really doesn't appeal to me unfortunately.

Like I mentioned xpost, based on a couple of Year's Best stories, would like to check Vandana Singh's collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet. This ain't the cover, it's a Hubble pic from the author's site
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2007/16/images/h/formats/web.jpg

i remember female man being outstanding, but it has been a while

i just finished 'more than human' in that anthology and i am reading frederick pohl's 'gateway' for a second time

surprised to find the latter is from '76: in its ethos it seems earlier than that - a bit of what i think of as the good old space beagle spirit

but i guess the Typographical Experimentating is in some vague way a reaction to the new wave, as is (mb) the 'interiority' of framing the narrative as a guy's set of conversations with his analyst

which is a computer

er

more than human also has an analyst section come to think of it

i had a whole thesis about psychoanalysis and realist narrative earlier while i was sitting on the toilet but i have since forgotten about it

Ever read "The Death of Doctor Island"?

no, actually

w/r/t wolfe i have read new sun and long sun and the fifth head of cerberus, and i think that is it. they have copies of the uggglyyy gollancz fantasy masterworks new sun in the £2 bookstore in the same edition i already bought and read and threw away a decade ago and i am tempted to buy it and reread it because now it is in a slightly smaller format, i don't know why this seems to make sense to me

I haven't come across much of Wolfe's shorter fiction, but this is the best so far. Doctor Island is a therapeutic environment; his/its sessions with a certain poster child are pretty strenuous.

there's a 'definitive retrospective' of his short fiction which seems to draw heavily from 'the island of doctor death and other stories and other stories', which includes 'the death of doctor island' and 'the island of doctor death and other stories' and also 'the doctor of death island' but not 'the death of the island doctor'

He got the idea from being at Hugo or Nebula or Something Awards, and "The Island of Doctor Death" was announced as a winner. By the time Wolfe made it to the stage, the announcer realized his error (should've gotten there faster, Gene). Massive waves of contrition and sympathy; a friend told Wolfe he was a shoo-in next year, even if he wrote "The Death of Doctor Island." Which came true. But good story on its own, though never would have happened otherwise.

Back to female writers: I need to read some more Leigh Brackett, and Margaret St. Clair, also in this issue

http://www.coog.com/mogozuzu/images/Startln3.jpg

What about her husband?

I confess I just thought of Edmond "World-Wrecker" Hamilton as getting trapped in his space opera pioneer persona, not adaptable as Brackett. This goes back to xpost A Century Of Science Fiction, which presents "What's It Like Out There?" as Hamilton's fanboy-rejected move into a more thoughtful mode. The narrator can't tell the folks about on Earth about what it's really, really like out there, because he perceives that they don't really--really want to know and/or would be totally bummed out, like the fanboys. "So I went back to world-wrecking." But Wiki say this is actually (eventually) his most widely anthologized story, and that he did re-establish himself via "unsentimental, realistic" sf. So there's another one I need to catch up with.

pertinent link:

http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/02/books/women-and-science-fiction.html?scp=2&sq=vonda%20n%20mcintyre%20dreamsnake&st=cse&pagewanted=1