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

Somewhere I bought a copy of this and it's breaking me a little bit? The stories are weird and good and HEAVY, and each of them has to achieve its punch in so few pages, that I can barely keep up with what's happening, what world is being reconceived and hidden from me by the story right now until that key paragraph where you find out what they do with the babies or where the aliens are going, or why there are no men in this version of Earth or whatever.

I am a tireder and sadder Laurel after reading.

good lord I am so behind on this thread I give up

when i am looking for something of this variety to read i click show all messages and scroll to a random point until something catches my eye. great resource.

seeing this image brings me back to the hours spent in aisles of late 70s suburban NJ mall waldenbooks or b dalton booksellers... can't remember a damn thing about the book tho I know I read it.

apparently I was a big fan of foster's work cuz I went on to read his novelizations of alien, the black hole, clash of the titans, outland, starman, and, bizarrely enough, pale rider. hi my name is edward and I am a nerd

http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/1/1a/SOTME_Cover.jpg

"•Morality Meat - (1985) novelette by James Tiptree, Jr. [as by Raccoona Sheldon ]"

did not know this was a tiptree pseud! i've seen that name in collections i have and i always think its the coolest name.

Then you must not have read "The Screwfly Solution"

guess not! so much to read...

A LOT of the stories are about conception, and who gets to control it and the mechanics of it. They knew that would be the next battle--pitching it in the key of "science fiction" was substantially over-shooting the mark.

Either I've read The Screwfly Solution or I'm confusing it with a Sheri Tepper plot about...widespread infertility?

Just read Liz jenkins's new one, 'The Uninvited': rather good [looming apocalypse/contagious lethal violence in children/causality being fucked up]yarn

And by Liz Jenkins I actually mean Liz Jensen

i started the "demolished man" but it was late at night and i had a hard time w/ the cyberpunk language and multiple story lines

What? Start over. It's a pretty straightforward procedural. My mom read it and liked it. You'll like it too.

Surely you must be joking, mister the late great.

I have had a weird notion to read a few of those AD Foster late 70s-early 80s movie novelizations lately. Partly because they are in among a huge trove of dodgily OCRd SF I DLd while ago. Splinter, Krull, mebbe Black Hole.

Right now I am finally following through on long standing desire to read a few random Simak novels. First up, Shakespeare's Planet. A dude, a wolfman, a robot and Shakespeare walk into a bar uninhabited planet... loving it.

simak is the best. this is what i have discovered.

Also, the PKD poll inspired me to read some Dick for the first time in almost 20 years (having realized some of the best-regarded ones are among those I've never read). Ubik-- awesome and unexpectedly poignant. A Scanner Darkly-- as good as it says on the label. Even if you cut everything but the tweaker back-and-forth routines you'd have pure gold.

Scott tell me about you and Simak. He's kind of comforting! And gets to the fucking point!

oh i've just been reading him this year and really enjoying him a bunch. i like his ideas and i do like the comfort factor. he's one of those people who could have just as easily been a well regarded realist short fiction writer if he'd wanted to be. but i'm glad he decided to be one of the revered masters of sci-fi instead.

i haven't read anything that i haven't enjoyed yet. i keep buying more too. they are stacking up. but as noted above i am briefly off the SF.

I'm saving Way Station and City for later, ramping up to them as it were. I think after Shakespeare's Planet I might read A Choice of Gods. Or the Werewolf whatsamacallit.

wait! i lied! i'm actually reading this right now:

http://www.lwcurrey.com/pictures/129708.jpg

albert einstein?

They don't make covers like that anymore.

i couldn't really find a better cover for that book online. that was the most interesting one.

its about a secret world of romans living underneath england.

from an amazon review:

Land Under England was first published in 1935, when
totalitarian governments were on the rise, and is an
allegory of the first order.
This is the tale of a son who goes underground in
search of his missing father, who is obsessed with
the Roman Wall and the glory that was Rome. The father
has found a way to get under the ancient wall to look
for a lost Roman civilization. What the son finds when
he searches for his father is a nightmare world filled
with horrible beasts and even more horrible humans, who
have had their minds and souls murdered in the service
of the State.

more here:

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/reviews_pages/r41.htm#a41

A.E. was George W. Russell

it gets reissued from time to time so its not totally forgotten. james on here might have mentioned that he read it? i thought someone did when i mentioned a while back that i bought it?

That looks amazing!!!

has anybody read kingsley amis' "green man"?

opinions?

Friend of mine loves that one. Haven't got round to it myself yet.

green man isn't top rank amis k but it has its moments - obv the main character is something of an author substitute, and the stuff abt drinking and so on rings p true, unsurprisingly (the alteration, his alt history nov, is up there w/ man in the high castle tho')

There was a BBC TV apadation, seemed like a well done uncomplicated ghost story iirc but probably i do not rc. Albert Finney as the protagonist.

yeah that's what got me on to it was the michael caine vs albert finney etc etc thread

Green Man is very good black comedy/rural horror: fairly misogynistic, but then it is lateish Amis. But The Alteration is def better, as Ward says

just pimpin ma new breakaway thread
Dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial? Don't mind if I do (a weird fiction thread)

Green Man had been sitting on my shelf for an age, then I had a dream a couple of months ago that told me to read it, so I read it. I liked it, but didn't like it a lot - generically a bit underpowered, not much in the way of fright or rural chills, but I think that would have been fine if there hadn't been quite so much opinionating kingsley in there, felt like I was getting some man-of-the-world bs – the thing about women/how sex is/how to drink – thrown at me about every few pages (which is def the narrator speaking, and the book is about the narrator's fucked-upness, partic in those aspects, but all the same feels like KA can never resist dropping an opinion. A challenging opinion)

BUT all sorts of sharp sex/death things going on, and a nice theological turn.

I'm not sure it is that misogynistic really (homophobic though, yes) - it treats the female characters the main guy doesn't want to go to bed with fairly decently iirc, and elsewhere the confusion and sex is p crucial. It's on the same old KA men/women traintracks, but he's a sharp observer.

(I'd put it as middle Amis (69), rather than lateish fwiw.)

Haha serendipity-- simak represent!

http://io9.com/5924671/the-surprising-novel-that-got-kim-stanley-robinson-interested-in-science-fiction?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_twitter&utm_source=io9_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Haven't read The Green Man, but reminds me, I should give The Green Child another, less caffeinated shot--it seemed a little subtle at the time-time. The only novel of Herbert Read, highly regarded art crit:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--zNbo1jPFOg/T1kojWWtflI/AAAAAAAADm4/VG6PYcoslaw/s1600/greenchild.jpg

His more typical subject

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2010/7/1/1277982254325/herbert-read-ICA-006.jpg

that's an amazing cover

The Green Child has great spooky dank cold English countryside atmosphere.

do any nyc posters have a suggestion for a bookstore with a good selection of female authored sci-fi? the strand sucks in this regard...they only had 1 le guin book and 2 butler that i had already read (cool entire row of stephanie meyer's "the host" and half a shelf of pride and prejudice and zombies crap tho).

i did however pick up this
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/a9/81/062e90b809a080a1b18a6110.L.jpg

OK, this Simak talk has got me to read 'City'

Maybe you should try McNally Jackson on Prince, bg. They have a small section that is somewhat curated and may have what you are looking for.

xpost cool report back!

Shakespeare's Planet made me v happy, have now proceeded on to The Werewolf Principle. Was gonna do Mastodonia but my dodgy epub download of it is full of glitches :(

Really liked City. Wasn't sure after chapter 1--seemed a bit folksy and daft--but I'm a sucker for intelligent dogs and the slow vanishing of humankind, so this was right up my street.

Sounds quite like my cup of tea too!

Crappy old used bookstores, bell. Around. There's just not much of it compared to sf written by men, so it's thinner pickings.

Simak is the best! "Waystation" is my favourite of his, followed by "Ring Around the Sun", and I have a fondness for Catface or Mastadonia. Going to order "Time is the Simplest Thing" and "Goblin Reservation". Yeah, he doesn't faff about.

Also, Cyril M. Kornbluth is pretty good, shame he died so young. Would recommend "the Syndic" and quite enjoyed "Not This August".