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

wth is that picture of?

found it. i guessed right. wow.

er, what is it

james: gateway ends with the narrator's robot analyst telling him how much he envies his being alive. - this is after i guess what is meant to be the triumphant conclusion to his analysis, which doesn't really work. the other odd thing about it is that the narrative in flashback has him being less and less successful and acting less and less under his own agency as he goes on. / and being kind of a spectacular asshole to a degree pohl maybe didn't mean.

us/mexico border fence.

haha, wow

OH oh oh Scott, read China Mountain Zhang!!!

okay. i read the zombie story that starts that collection. the link to the review has links to two stories by her. i liked it. always feel like scifi writers deserve better copyeditors/proofreaders though. even if its a story on an online site. i've learned to ignore it. i've read books by GENIUS SF writers that are loaded with typos and misspellings. not the writer's fault, that's for sure. i've never seen this in crime novels or mysteries or horror. i've never read westerns or naval carrier red october cold war thrillers, so, don't know if it happens there as much. burt it happens a lot in SF. maybe they just make so much SF that they can't afford to hire really good proofreaders.

Anyone read any Lessing? 'Canopus in Argos' has yet to grab my interest. A strange mix of sf, fantasy, mysticism, and vague allegory.

Yeah I think I should have investigated more on wikipedia before starting this. I mean it's always good to read outside of one's comfort zone but A reviewer of the book in the Los Angeles Times said that Shikasta is a "reworking of the Bible", hmm. Well, I'll carry on.

i read the first two. they were so awful. i might have been too young - i am intrigued/repelled by the idea of attempting to read them again. i mean, i only read The Marriages... out of sheer obstinacy, because of how much i hated Shikasta. it was like reading the phone book, but less coherent.

'the making of the representative' - can't remember the whole title, the fourth one - is a really good little book. i think lessing's approach to doing SF is interesting and good, but i think shikasta is kind of a hot mess.

One day Canopus instructs them to build a huge wall, to exact Canopean specifications, right around the girth of the planet. The construction takes the inhabitants years to complete, and when it is finished, Canopus tells the planet's representatives, leaders of each of the planet's main disciplines, to relocate all settlements north of the wall to the south. Canopus informs everyone that unfortunate interstellar "re-alignments" have taken place and that Planet 8 will soon experience an ice age.

these canopus dudes sound like incredible arseholes tbh. or to more helpfully relate it to lessing's religious interests, in the face of the evils of these interstellar re-alignments they must either be malicious arseholes or incompetent arseholes.

yeah that's the point! it's about the eradication of an entire race in the face of a bureaucratic snafu

but done better and differently than a lot of SF writers would do it, but without the annoying poetaster attitude to SF that a lot of slumming would-be nobel laureates would adopt

i've looked at the massive combined volumes before and there is no way in hell i could read that thing. it looks like punishment.

i don't know why i've never been interested in lessing. i've looked at many of her books over the years and i never want to read any of them. as far as sf/fantasy/mysticism goes give me le guin or give me death. as a present i gave my mother-in-law one of le guin's most hippie new age earth mother books and the cool thing about it was that the book came with a tape of original sf new age songs related to the people in the book!

lol which one? is it 'always coming home' bcz that i have a copy of that i pick up once a year and go 'maybe next year'

i STILL think about Four Ways to Forgiveness by le guin. all the time! i never wanted those stories to end. i need to read all the hainish books.

x-post - i'll have to look up the title.

Filk has been defined as folk music, usually with a science fiction or fantasy theme, but this definition is not exact. Filkers have been known to write filk songs about a variety of topics, including but not limited to tangentially related topics such as computers and cats.

yes, that's the one. always coming home. i've never read it either!

"A box set edition of the book (ISBN 0-06-015456-X), comes with an audiocassette entitled Music and Poetry of the Kesh, featuring 10 musical pieces and 3 poetry performances by Todd Barton. The book contains 100 original illustrations by Margaret Chodos."

"The book weaves around the story of a Kesh woman called Stone Telling, who lived for years with her father's people—the Dayao or Condor people, whose society is rigid, patriarchal, hierarchical and militarily expansionist. The story fills less than a third of the book, with the rest being a mixture of Kesh cultural lore (including poetry, prose of various kinds, mythos, rituals, and recipes), essays on Kesh culture, and the musings of the narrator, "Pandora". Some editions of the book were accompanied by a tape of Kesh music and poetry."

xp - yeah it sort of makes sense in that ACH's back half is a faux-anthropological dossier abt the kesh, so why not

wouldn't want to offer odds on whether the m. and p. of the k. is any good though

i mean it is very heavy metal. Stone Telling! stoner metal. i admire the effort. even if i've never felt like reading it.

i STILL think about Four Ways to Forgiveness by le guin. all the time! i never wanted those stories to end.

u know there is another story in the series in the 'birthday of the world' collection?

yeah that's the point! it's about the eradication of an entire race in the face of a bureaucratic snafu

thing is i think lessing's interpretation of 'bureaucratic snafu' is a lot less generous than mine.

a lot MORE generous.

u know there is another story in the series in the 'birthday of the world' collection?

(it's a bit of a downer though)

check out my joined-up thinking.

did you read the book? i think it's clear that canopus are being dicks on a cosmic scale -- i don't know, though, i read that ages ago and when i read shikasta more recently that was a thing that i had trouble with. that lessing of all ppl you'd expect to seem a lot more overtly troubled by how colonialist the logic of it is. there seem to be glimpses of that but i might have been willing them to be there.

have only begun shikasta, i will prob finish it but go no further. my impression is it's a kind of theodicy, canopus as a soft sf surrogate for god, benevolent but not omnipotent, doing their best to help their charges through a period of suffering they're unable to prevent. Yr view would be more errrr misotheism, which doesn't seem to chime with ahem what i read on wikipedia this morning.

that's a good word, that is

yeah, i don't know. from errrrr the jacket copy bks 2, 3, and 5 which i have yet to read are more along the lines of allowing other readings than the 'religious colonialism would be great if only we were as awesome in our religious feeling as canopus' one which it's hard to not see shikasta as endorsing, most of the time. -- i think i prefer the reading where lessing is doing something more interesting, even if it's not actually what she was aiming to do, i guess ...

aye well if i stop worrying about her intent and just appreciate the massive dickishness of the canopeans i might enjoy it more.

Le Guin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are the ones I started with, and still seem like good places to start, re disciplined narrative development x idealism. Haven't read Lessing's full-fledged s.f. allegories, but (along with The Golden Notebook and some short stories) this novel, which goes from early 50s UK, still working its way through aftermath of WWII, to Anti-Communim, new prosperity, 60s weirdness, on to end of the century collapse (published in 1969), seemed a lot more observantly astute (when I read it my early 20s, duhhh), than this crank description on her site--she doesn't just love mental disorders, for inst-but it gives you the range:

This book concludes the five-volume series, Children of Violence, a major literary achievement which has been nearly twenty years in the workblock.

The series as a whole develops the central character, Martha Quest, from birth in Southern Africa at the end of World War One, through an adolescence, youth and marriage shaped by the savageries of the Second World War. With The Four-Gated City Martha is in London as the Fifties begin. This volume then is set in post-war Britain, and with Martha is integrally part of the social history of the time - the Cold War, the Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy; and the minuteness, the painful insight of Mrs Lessings treatment of her characters is, as always in her work, due to her vision of them as creations and embodiments of huge impersonal forces. The series virtually covers the twentieth-century: The Four-Gated City ends with the century in the grip of World War Three, a conclusion like space fiction. For Doris Lessing does not believe in our current mental habits which put "the novel", "the family novel", "space fiction", "journalism" and "autobiography" into separate compartments, and in this extraordinary novel, which is as unexpected as The Golden Notebook, she dissolves familiar categories.

This book is bound to create disquiet and controversy. For one thing, her view of recent politics is not everyones. And her view of the future is that it is the present: we are all hypnotised waiting for cataclysms that in fact we are living through now in the bloody end of an epoch. But this painful time is also creative: humanity is in the process of rapid evolution, we are mutating fast but cant see it - the chief characteristic of the race we belong to being an inability to see what is under its nose.

Relentlessly and acutely exposing facts and ideas which are often found too raw to face, Mrs Lessing takes on the medical profession, which she believes is destroying (recently through imprisonment, currently through the use of drugs) that part of humanity which is in fact most sensitive to evolution, those people we label as mentally sick or unbalanced: and, criticising the scientists who have created and perpetuate a climate in which "rationalism" has become a new God, she claims that everyone has "extra-sensory perception", in varying degrees, but has been brainwashed into suppressing it, and that schizophrenia is the name of our blindest contemporary prejudice.

No one can read this visionary, troubling, thoughtful book and remain unchanged by it.
This is book 5 of the series: Children of Violence. I really don't remember her being anti-psychiatry per se.

"For Doris Lessing does not believe in our current mental habits which put "the novel", "the family novel", "space fiction", "journalism" and "autobiography" into separate compartments, and in this extraordinary novel, which is as unexpected as The Golden Notebook, she dissolves familiar categories."

this - in a nutshell - is my problem with everyone who feels like they have to justify their writing of genre fiction. or something. as if none of these things - the family novel, space fiction, etc - had ever been combined before. and as if SF fans weren't already used to mix & match genres in a multitude of sf novels and stories.

"Relentlessly and acutely exposing facts and ideas which are often found too raw to face, Mrs Lessing takes on the medical profession, which she believes is destroying (recently through imprisonment, currently through the use of drugs) that part of humanity which is in fact most sensitive to evolution, those people we label as mentally sick or unbalanced: and, criticising the scientists who have created and perpetuate a climate in which "rationalism" has become a new God, she claims that everyone has "extra-sensory perception"

this, also, is the basis for sooooo much sci-fi of the 60's... the most paranoid mindwarped anti-everything decade there ever was.

admittedly, i'm REALLY oversensitive when it comes to this kind of thing. normal critics praising non-genre people for doing unprecendented things with genres that the critics aren't familiar with.

lessing actually is decently familiar with SF, tho

or was. i don't know. she was reading lem in the 70s.

yeah i'm not picking on her in particular. just that hyperbole above.

stuff like this:

"Relentlessly and acutely exposing facts and ideas which are often found too raw to face"

yeah, I shouldn't have posted that shit, just lazy. A crucial part of the main character's overview, in sorting through the welter of experiences, memories, media saturation, attempts to adapt as social norms write, etc., is when she starts reading science fiction==well, first she starts looking for what grains of sense she can find in all sorts of fringe "wisdom," the remnants of late 19th/early 20th Century mystic movements, practices, rackets--then delves into science fiction, and there's this bit about Cold War monitors getting all sorts of cool ideas from it too--or the government guy might read the same Scientific American article the s.f. writers are currently tripping on, but it's the latter who take the original nonfiction in a direction the gov finds titillating--as does Martha (and Lessing, of course). Lessing's also made some non-snotty references to s.f. as genre, unlike a number of other lofty types. Yeah, she takes dtuff from it, but I liked the way she went from what already (in mid-70s) seemed historical (as in done, son) to extrapolation, a fave s.f. word of mine. Like jazz.

"as social norms *writhe*," is what I meant.

Oh yeah, she finds those "grains of sense" in the old jive too!

that's cool. yeah, i'd rather hear you talk about her anyday!

lessing actually is decently familiar with SF, tho

Yeah, she has always been straight-up about her involvement in and interest in SF, she was never one of the Atwood-style deniers

The other main "outlier" source specified is Sufi fables, The Four-Gated City's title is based on one for inst. When she wrote it in the 50s and 60s, the Sufis apparently weren't well known in the West. Saw a thing from an early 70s Creem; by then they were becoming better known, but "The Sufis are the cocaine of the consciousness movement." Coke being an exotic luxury then, most people couldn't afford the good stuff, and Bangs warned not to take it when offered as a party favor (cause nobody would just give away anything decent). Coke, Led Zep, and Sufis, those were the status symbols! Weren't Richard and Linda Thompson Sufis for a while? If so, there you go.

sufism always kinda hip with the in crowd. kindler gentler drunken mystic visionary islam and all that. the feel good islam. rumi always big with hippies and post-hippies.

some of those fables she likes could seem pretty harsh.

lol this thread

'where are the dragons?'

eating the elves, I hope

i always forget about the fantasy part of the thread title. i don't read straight fantasy. if i get any fantasy it comes with sci-fi i'm reading. like the andre norton book i read last year.