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

Decades ago at the sci-fi convention mentioned six years ago on this thread, science fiction., I overheard a brief conversation about TL in which an elderly woman who I seem to remember as resembling Tweety Bird's grandmother said

"My query:
Tanith Lee
Perplexeth me.
Might she be
A Romany?"

http://www.soulculture.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/JIMI-HENDRIX4.jpg
Right now I'd like to do a little thing by Tweety Bird. That's his grandmother over there

Sorry. Carry on. As you were.

yeah i mentioned upthread that i got 3 women of wonder paperbacks. haven't read all three yet but i think they are all worth getting just cuzza who is represented. plus i think all the long introductions are really essential. especially in the first book which is a fairly comprehensive history of women sci-fi writers. really interesting and it will definitely make you seek out even more stuff.

also, is Tanith Lee any good?

She wrote one of the all-time great episodes of Blake's Seven, didn't she? I always feel that I should explore her work more.

Now that yall mention it, I finally notice some Tanith Lee at my local library, the Secret Books of Paradys, The Secret Books of Paradys, both are all (?) in one volume each. I should check those out, right? bookflap descriptions seem promising.

Oops one of those should have been The Secret Books of Venus

Thought it was like naming an album Peter Gabriel or Chicago or Caetano Veloso, except that the author's name wasn't The Secret Books of Paradys.

From Fantastic Fiction site

Paradys--the city--was a place of decadence and decay, of luxury and lasciviousness, and, after the revolution, a graveyard peopled by the insane and the dead . . . and by those who preyed on both. The strange and the tormented dwell in Paradys--prowling its dark streets and twisted alleyways, passing the endless hours in the city's elegant mansions and smoke-tarnished inns, wandering in moldering graveyards and the stark surrounding countryside. For the land here is bound by a timeless, soul-chilling magic, and that power has cast its spell over all who have ever lived in this foreboding and dangerous place.

All who came to Paradys were forever touched by its dread magic. The City was not one place but three, bound together by a labyrinth of ice yet separated, perhaps by time, perhaps by some long-forgotten enchantment, into Paradise, Paradis and Paradys--each cursed in an entirely different way.

Relapse Records artists to thread!

These omnibus editions I found aren't actually complete, or the Venus isn't, anyway here's one of the latter series that
http://www.daughterofthenight.com/tla78a.jpg

i highly recommend Land Under England by the way. it really is kinda hg wells + bf skinner circa 1935 but that doesn't do it justice. its a trip. and totally mind-bending. i think werner herzog could make a great movie out of it. half of the fun is just trying to picture everything in your head. you are totally there in this earth underworld. i kinda loved it there but by the end you REALLY want come up for air/sunlight.

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1222825996l/920941.jpg

Will have to look for that. Somehow reminds me about Mark Sinker in Wny Music Sucks remembering a forever lucky fellow schoolboy who found a land or anyway source of great archaeological interest under England one day when they were cutting class, and instead of raising a flag there,(didn't have one handy), Mark's bro took a shit.

"The Island" by Peter Watts (Year's Best SF 15, Hartwell & Cramer, eds.)---The narrator, a female-identifying entity, awakens once again on outward bound ship/portal, where things long since post-human pass through. A cosmic cloaca, and Damon Knight would dig this take on how a Galactic Empire would really work, esp. with centuries of suspended animation so often an unexamined given in today's s.f. She's ready to get back into her eternal feud with the Chimp, derisive name for the ship's hard drive (they need each other, she hates him/it, even more for being so detached). This time, she soon encounters her son, a perhaps mentally challenged human grown from the Chimp's secret stash of narrator's and her long-dead lover's materials. It all gets pretty harrowing, somewhat tragic, also could be titled "Angry Candy" or "Psychocandy." Gotta check some more Watts--apparently he's set all his stories adrift on the Web.

cosmic cloaca??

Women of Wonder surprisingly good so far (apart from the one i read yesterday, about a fat camp)

am interleaving it with JG Ballard Short Stories which contain a lot of ideas i've never read before. halfway through Chronopolis in which time is illegal. (there's a PDF of the entire 2 volumes available via a quick google)

All Peter Watts work is free on his website: http://www.rifters.com

Someone hated Watts--Lamp, maybe?

The Rift trilogy is pretty brutal. I think I may have bogged down and not finished the third book.

i'm finally nearly finished with the patternmaster series and need to pick up something new. butler is a hell of a storyteller.

Read a small John Crowley collection. 'The Great Work of Time' is pretty good, not great. Brilliant overall theme and the more 'realistic' Cecil Rhodes stuff is excellent but the fantasy aspect, the world of lizards and the forest at the end of time, is too obviously handwavy for my liking. Probably worth a re-read to figure out some of the plot nuances though. 'The Nightingale Sings at Night' is a straight-down-the-line fable, and who writes those these days? 'In Blue' is aiming for some kind of Ballardian psychogeographical headtrip but falls short, and 'Novelty' is just idk whatever some kind of inconsequential trip into the headspace of a writer, of possible interest only to other authors imo.

Little, Big is still commonly considered his best, far as I know. Think there's a Crowley thread on this board or ILE, Only read his shorter stuff, which indeed can go from brilliant to handwavy. Occasionally solemn x tremulous, more of a prob.

"Meeting My Brother"--another from xpost Path Into The Unknown, The Best of Science Fiction, no ed listed, intro by Judith Merril, US pb '68. Russian as hell, a moment-by-moment track of several time lines, topographies, can pratically hear Borodin or Shostokovich for that matter. Good oontrast of contemplation and acerbic exchanges. As usual, Merril's somewhat frustrated by the translation, but also says this story is " a romance<" pretty sure she means in the late 19th/early 20th Century sense of "a scientific romance, " as Wells tagged his. Also, "The central emotional problem involves elements which did more to shake my own preconceptions (especially about the regimentation of private life in the U.S.S.R) than anything I have read in a long time." Well,this is from the mid-60s apparently (anybody ever read the Soviet-era SJ mag Novy Mir? Is it still around?) Stalin was considered really really dead enough by then, that many years after Khrushchev's speech, acknowledging Stalin's "mistakes."

It's a great story. The idea of the real life impact of time dilation is a simple but powerful one. What are her problems with the translation though? There's no intro in my edition.

Read Women of Wonder and More WoW. About a 50% hit rate in the first one, would happily read any of the second again but my fave is the first Le Guin: Vaster than Empires and More Slow. I haven't read The Word for World is Forest yet but Vaster... seems like an obvious forerunner. The Judith Merril story otoh is pretty bad, doing absolutely nothing to move away from the image of women as irrational creatures solely designed for childbearing.

Sorry ledge, she didn't find fault with the translation of "Meeting My Brother" (by Vladislav Krapivin, have to look up some more by him). She was was talking about the two stories I prev mentioned, "The Conflict" and "Robby", both by Ilya Varshavsky--the ones preceding "Meeting"-- and the one that comes after it, "A Day of Wrath, " by Sever Gansovsky. Haven't read that one yet, but don't see what her prob was w the Varshavsky translations. She doesn't indicate actually knowing Russian, but maybe the anonymous translator's English irritated her editorial eye. No editorial credit for anybody in my edition, but I mainly know her as an editor, the earliest I've found to mix contemporary (50s/60s)genre and non-genre,just whatever seems to work.

just finished Women Of Wonder myself. yes, 50% is about right. now reading the introductory essay and that seems like a good source of leads but i wonder how many of those things mentioned are available.

this one is 8)

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/ciu/fe/09/8d41017b42a0c95e7ecd0210.L._AA300_.jpg

Reminds me a little of Simak's A Choice Of Gods, which I just finished. Native Americans are basically the only positive force in its world.

hm. is it good? what's good about it?

Like all the Simak I've read, it is soulful and humane and somehow patient yet right-to-the-point. Setup is pretty great: at a date a couple centuries in the future, everyone on Earth suddenly disappears except for the people within one small zone of the midwest (basically one family in a country house and one small tribe on a nearby reservation). All the robots on Earth also remain. People and robots do a bunch of thinkin' and evolvin'. Then stuff happens.

Simak is a nice counterweight to some of those SF dudes of his generation who were sort of hardcore materialist/libertarian blowhards or w/e.

oooh that sounds great! is it kinda like delany w/o the genderbendery?

He is not as relentless in following up the evidence as Delany, I'd say. Simak oft content with ~it is a mystery~

hm! i will look for it.

isn't "city" by simak? how is that one, i think it's on my shortlist w/ "stand on zanzibar" and a couple of others.

City's pretty cool--the first chapter/story was a bit dodgy, but it really kicken in after that. It's the history of the world from the near to the far, far future, as told in folktales remembered by the hyperintelligent evolved pacifist vegetarian dogs that are now (along with robots) Earth's dominant species

KICKED in, I mean

simak = love

yeah i'm going to go buy both of those NOW

Really enjoyed The Golden Space. Didn't find it 'drab', nor full of 'talky belaboring' (per review upthread) - she's telling a story not dryly outlining a theory. Characters were really believable, she did a great job of getting into their heads, with a Le Guin like sensitivity and compassion.

Didn't find it 'drab', nor full of 'talky belaboring' (per review upthread)

i think this is the lamest criticism of any book. indeed, "drab" is the dumbest. "this olive green jeep is so drab". "this book about eternal life becoming limbo is so drab".

anyway yeah that's what i recalled! i got it from a free library dump in, uh, maybe 90-95? i lost it but i always think about it, esp when i read stuff like "elementary particles" etc

are you hanging onto your copy? how much did you get it for?

If I like books I hang on to them, so yeah! I got it for yer average second hand price, £5 inc postage. There's plenty on abebooks.com from US sellers.

Is elementary particles any good?

terrible cover though (of the golden space). "hmm the characters have young bodies but are really old. i will draw a young person with a really old hand."

it was the era of MJ tbf

anyway just ordered it along w/ the inevitable first of enginer summer (happy b day to me)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/02/EngineSummer.jpg

i plan to get that. i know you compared it to the book of the new sun and we er didn't react in the same way to that, but i'm still intrigued.

xp yes the sci fi chapters are good, death by anal parts not so much

kinda like the sci fi version of irreversible or something

it's the backwards of new sun and anyway i think the comparison is obvious

not to say you're not picking up on the obvious but

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7c/Wolfe_shadow_%26_claw.jpg/200px-Wolfe_shadow_%26_claw.jpg

contenderizer should read that engine summer one as should all the other "science of mind" goons

rest in peace! just read this...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/books/harry-harrison-a-prolific-writer-of-satiric-science-fiction-dies-at-87.html

really enjoying roadside picnic. anyone read that geoff dyer book about stalker etc?

harry harrison was a g, bill the galactic hero and its many sequels were major for young me.

Yeah, I remember being hooked on the DEATH WORLD books
http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327944642l/2037559.jpg http://spire.ee/shop/images/harry_harrisson___deathworld_2.jpg http://spire.ee/shop/images/harry_harrisson___deathworld_3.jpg

Really liked A TRANSATLANTIC TUNNEL, HURRAH, too