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

A new Culture novel is always grounds for major celebration

http://evanlaar2012.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/celebration2010.jpg

not sci fi?

iin't the culture kinda goofy? like delany meets lensman written by a spastic like niven (best) or brin (worst)

it's absolutely goofy, yeah. but super fun and my idea of a utopia so i'm always happy to spend time there. and banks is a perfectly decent writer iirc.

i'm reminded of how good a writer banks is in general every time i read an alastair reynolds

that's fighting talk.

second acclarke novel of the week just turned up from amazon - hammer of god on wednesday, childhood's end today. both mentioned in some (slashdot?) list of sf with unhappy endings.

i aways mean to read more banks. i've only read the non-sf ones and the bridge. the bridge is kinda sf. sorta.

Whatever Peace is, might be a good time for me to re-read it, having finally gotten to A Visit From the Goon Squad, The City and The City, and 2626 this year. Egan, Mieville, and Bolano are in the SF Encyclopeida Online. Also, from John Clute's massive entry re Wolfe (stopping before possible spoilers, although w Wolfe it's sure not just what happens but the way he tells or doesn't tell it)
Peace (1975), an afterlife fantasy set in the contemporary middle USA, is, word for word, perhaps Wolfe's most intricate and personal work; though not sf, it is central to any full attempt to understand his other novels; his sense of the great painfulness of any shaped life--

I've read three Elizabeth Hand novels, I think. Every time going in it's like wow this is right up my alley but then... nope.

Would try again tho.

hmmmm...

what happens?

some things are better in theory of course.

i dunno just something in her tone didn't sit with me. I seem to recall that ppl in her books are 'cool' in a way that bugged me. Coolness in fiction is a slippery slope. (obv i mean cool in its non-thermal sense)

Jack Vance is 96 today.

teh bonarhnuters

read childhood's end over the weekend. cheery!

Another unwritten essay. The 20th Century English Cosmical View: Stapledon, Clarke, Dyson.

got my copy of golden summer!

So I was all set to read Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, I thought, but didn't realize it's what happens after dealing with climate change in this century, looks like I better check these first, anybody read 'em? Descriptions from Science Fiction Encyclopedia Online:
he Science In the Capital sequence-comprising Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007) – again faces the Near Future directly, in this case at a point when Climate Change has begun – it would seem undeniably – to transform the world as the Gulf Stream fails, Washington is drowned, and weather patterns world-wide become hugely turbulent. The sequence focuses on America, on American Politics, on right-wing American Climate Change Denial, and ultimately on some radical Technological fixes for what seems to be an irreversible series of Disasters. There is no clear sense that the solutions offered here will work – even if the American government manages to attempt to implement them – but Robinson's perpetually active protagonists struggle on: hoping to make the story of technological fix come true

sounds boring technocrat stuff

little bit of ice-9 will solve it, don't worry

I really liked the climate change trilogy: clever, funny, quite touching. My only complaint is that the disasters are constantly imminent, but never quite happen on-page.

Cool, I just ordered Forty Signs of Rain (good title for a song too)

DragonCon 2012, via CBS Atlanta--my neighbors are there:
http://wgcl.images.worldnow.com/images/1767362_G.jpg

Doctor Living Stone I presume

http://wgcl.images.worldnow.com/images/1767379_G.jpg

oops this is the one I meant that caption for

http://wgcl.images.worldnow.com/images/1767373_G.jpg

golden space is turning out to be a bit of a slog

i understand the future is meant to be placid and staid because everyone is immortal and has no reason to rush around doing shit but it also feels like i am reading about someone's six hour afternoon where they do shit but sit on couch and sip tea

it's heating up toward end of first chapter though so maybe it will get better, i just remember it being more thought-provoking .... i guess it *was* my first exposure to transhumanist sci-fi

what is that black thing (not cat woman)

was reading The Hammer Of God* and missed my tube stop. and the one after it.

* specifically the marathon towards the beginning

started reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Door_into_Ocean but gave up after 60 pages, was obviously going to be an insultingly simplistic story of arrogant young male gradually learning the ways of and being accepted by peaceful harmonious non-violent superior female culture.

started http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_Moon, gritting my teeth through the first few pages of "it was the season of pwiddle in gwimmle kibble and the flittles and spizzles and tribbles were all in bloom"

finished the bonehunters. was far more into it than i expected to be. wish i actually remembered some of what had happened to these people in the other books, oh well.

Syree Johnson followed the shuttle trajectory on the bridge displays. Automatically her mind reviewed the planetary data. Point six nine AUs from its primary, a G8 emitting .48 of Sol's energy per unit area. Maximum energy reaching the planet at intensity .66 micrometers, roughly the same as Earth. Point seven three Terran mass, 5,740 clicks in radius .9 Terran gravity on the planetary surface. Rotation of 26.1 Terran hours, period of 213 rotations, inclination to the ecliptic of 3.2 degrees. One major almost-circumequatorial landmass plus coastal islands, some of them large. Unremarkable composition, except for some strong radioactivity in the second-highest mountain range, identified by the flow of neutrinos registering on the Zeus's detectors.

None of it mattered

NO SHIT SHERLOCK

LOL

the awful gobbledegook i complained about before:

All morning Enli rode steadily. It was Am, that luscious season, and the larfruit was ready to harvest. Villagers swarmed over the orchards, singing and picking. Between the villages and orchards lay long lush stretches of uninhabited road, glorious with wildflowers. Shade-blooming vekifirib, yellow mittib, the flaming red bells of adkinib. The warm air smelled sweet as shared reality, and in the sky the sun burned clear orange. Enli passed few bicycles or handcarts, and made good time toward Rafkit Seloe. She could be there by noon.

But then, just a few miles shy of Rafkit Seloe, she turned her bicycle off the main road, toward the village of Gofkit Shamloe. Suddenly, desperately, Enli wanted one more look at Tabor.

But it's ok because there's wormholes and a Mysterious Alien Artefact and it's only 200 pages.

i understand the future is meant to be placid and staid because everyone is immortal and has no reason to rush around doing shit but it also feels like i am reading about someone's six hour afternoon where they do shit but sit on couch and sip tea

I suspect this is why Iain Banks made the wise decision, in his Culture novels, to write about the edges of that civilisation--where placid,staid, infinite energy society meets angry, "uncivilised" alien species and tries to co-opt them with black ops

All morning Enli rode steadily. It was Am, that luscious season, and the larfruit was ready to harvest. Villagers swarmed over the orchards, singing and picking. Between the villages and orchards lay long lush stretches of uninhabited road, glorious with wildflowers. Shade-blooming vekifirib, yellow mittib, the flaming red bells of adkinib. The warm air smelled sweet as shared reality, and in the sky the sun burned clear orange. Enli passed few bicycles or handcarts, and made good time toward Rafkit Seloe. She could be there by noon.

But then, just a few miles shy of Rafkit Seloe, she turned her bicycle off the main road, toward the village of Gofkit Shamloe. Suddenly, desperately, Enli wanted one more look at Tabor.

this sounds like chapterhouse: dune!

is that gobbledygook or future autechre track titles?

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-08/30/save-the-sci-fi

^ bookshop in brooklyn tracking down and republishing OOP SF (very slowly)

Just read "the Goblin Reservation" by Simak - wished it was longer, it was great.

Borrowed Cordwainer Smith's "The Rediscovery of Man" from the patient/staff library at the hospital I work at. Great to have a dusty room full of books, compared to the library which I 'run' which is full of textbooks and computers. Lots of Harry Harrison books, RIP!!

Lawyer Ash Kalb, musician-anthropologist Cici James, stylist-writer Jamil V Moen, and former Gawker media community manager Kaila Hale-Stern are the intrepid crew behind the Brooklyn-based bookshop.

stylist-writer?

fashion blogger

who sometimes directs photo shoots for friends in exchange for blogging about their boutiques

just a guess

I certainly wish them well. Also awesome to imagine discovering Cordwainer Smith while in the hospital, as patient or staff...Just read Steel, previously uncollected stories by Richard Matheson. Mostly from the early 50s, the last two from 2009/10. Title story was also a Twilight Zone, about the robot or android boxer breaking down, so his place in a fight is secretly taken by the boxer's owner, a contendah 'til humans were banned from the ring--too inhumane, of course. The flesh guy may can get away with it, even if he's beaten to death, because the artificial pugilists are designed to provide each gory detail of a satisfying conflict. So we get a good example of RM's early pulp combo of the obsesso protagonist with some social overview (human perversity, inside and out). Plus the suthor's eye for detail: the real android boxer can't move his eyes around that much, which gives the human stand-in more of a shot.
But it's not really that a good a story on the page, better on the Twilight Zone. Ditto, maybe, the one about tracking down the source of dirty jokes, which very eventually became the basis of a Family Guy episode. Haven't seen it, haven't made it through any ep of The Family Guy, just seems too elbow in the ribs, like most of these stories. Maybe it's just a matter of taste. I do like "Descent", about preparing to go underground, to avoid the Atomic Bomb ("we'll only be down there about 20 years," the scientists assure Americans). And my favorite, about one of his seeming favorites, a pissy-obsesso writer: this one, in "When Day Is Dun", may be a survivor in spite/because of hisself. Also likeed "A Visit From Santa Claus," about a guy who's taken out a contract on his wife, now he's going back and forth about it, natch. That one, from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, doesn't bother with elements of the "fantastic", yet is Matheson as hell. But start with The Shrinking Man , AKA The Incredible Shrinking Man, and I Am Legend (or Legend: the last non-vampire becomes a marauder in a world of vampire normalcy)

http://magicmonkeyboy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/drink-my-red-blood-by-richard-matheson.html

^my fave matheson short story, which deeply affected horror-obsessed-young-me when i read it as a boy. the whole treatment of vampirism seems very similar to the vibe that george a romero was going for w/ his movie martin, and i know romero admitted that matheson was the primary inspiration behind NOTLD. you can see why stephen king is such a big matheson fan, too - that 'naturalistic'/everyday treatment of the supernatural. again, this story reminds me v much of parts of the tobe hooper tv movie of salem's lot - vampirism as teenage yearning/disaffection

Holy shit! That blows away most of the stories in Steel, but as always we get the Mathesonian obsesso vs. convention (and why is there such a nasty shack in the nice normal town) vs. the truly sane, if that's what the author and reader are. Glad I did not read that as a child or teen.

He seems to have some empathy for everyone, measured via his sense of justice, both pretty down to (dark) earth. Could imagine him as a priest who's heard it all (in confession, in his head, other places). Don't know that much about him except through reading, though Fritz Leiber once mentioned in an interview that he didn't share Matheson's sense of "occult doctrine" (or maybe it was Leiber's sense of Matheson's sense, don't know how well they knew each other)

On to the next block: Ward mentions George A. Romero's mention of Matheson: i know romero admitted that matheson was the primary inspiration behind NOTLD. And I just finished (my first reading of) Colson Whitehead's Zone One, about removing zombies from Manhattan real estate values, to help civilization make a don't-call-it-a-comeback (we've been here all along). Romero deals with zombies' connection to consumer conditioning (here I'm thinking more of Dawn of the Dead than Night of)by swooping through and glancing off the advancing wall of socially significant others, as a tiny-bucks-hemorrhaging director and all zombie-removers had better. But Whitehead and his obsesso protagonist keep shuffling back: the zombie plague is a mutation, they're a leap but not a stretch from our sad, immortality-thoughe-consumption-chasing pre-afterlives, I get it already. Still, Whitehead and his POV guy, nicknamed Mark Spitz are monster movie consumers since childhood: they know just when to jump back into the fray--Spitz, the dedicated B student survivalist, whose sense of ID is "sort of a template", also knows when to run like hell. Plus, gear-shifting is required: the zombies, referred to as skels here, are either the ravenous hordes, or the strangely appealing stragglers, who just hang out, entranced, apparently, by "the outline of a shadow of a phantom" of something that once meant so much to them, when anything did. A place where something happened, or a place that reminds them of that place, that face, etc. And all the survivors are stragglers in a way, in their own ways, not too similar to the other kind, the terrible trendies. Main prob, seems like, there's not enough gaps for the reader to fill, digesting what's just happended: Whitehead describes the action very well, then explicates (some of) the implications. Fortunately, he's got a charged, nuanced precision of vision for extending our world and swinging the wrecking ball. It's eerie, funny, creepy, grand, off-hand (sardonic 50s s.f., Catch-22, V. also come to mind. Lke persons of authoritah say here and in Night of the Living Dead: "They're all messed up."

"sardonic" like working cit-soldiers gotta be, but necessarily tuned-in/out too, picking up the sound of trouble, comradery and audible to the reader thren-oh-deee.

James Tiptree Jr's Up the Walls of the World. Starts out v much like Clarke's The Gods Themselves, with a human story and an alien story and a thin thread between them, although in this story the aliens are only from another planet not another universe, and the thread is psychic not physical. And there's a third part to the tale, in the shape of the enormous galactic entity threatening both species. It's an easier read than the Clarke because the aliens are less alien, despite being giant flying telepathic manta rays that hear light (plus a nice bit of gender reversal where the male aliens look after and protect the children, because they're stronger, duh); and the human characters are more likeable, especially Doctor Dann, where the slow reveal of the empathetic powers he is ignorant of is very nicely done. But it all ends up in a very different place, more like Stapledon than Clarke in its grand conception and vast staging.