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

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.

that all sounds really good--i must get a copy

finished the first volume of Ballard's short stories. favourite 3 stories being Chronopolis (time is illegal), The Subliminal Man (advertising) and Thirteen to Centaurus (generational ship). i think volume 1 finishes around 1963.

have started Vonnegut's Sirens Of Titan which is great so far.

has anyone ever written a fantasy novel about christopher marlowe

Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age, about Marlowe living in the Faerie realms after his supposed death.
Nat Cassidy's The Reckoning of Kit & Little Boots, a "metaphysical buddy comedy" about Marlowe and Caligula.
Steven Savile's For This Is Hell, depicts Marlowe as involved in occult practices as a wizard. 2012 (Novel)
Deborah Harkness's 2012 novel Shadow of Night features Christopher Marlowe as one of the story's antagonists. In addition, the School of Night of which Marlowe was reportedly a member, is a major factor in much of the story's plot.

those sound like they suck

don't be so judgmental, i'm sure a "metaphysical buddy comedy" about Marlowe and Caligula could be hilarious.

Yeah. Marlowe was a piece of work, and if we gotta have bromance, which apparently we do, judging by the DVDs at my esteemed library, then a "metaphysical buddy comedy" about Marlowe and Caligula looks like the way to go.

"metaphysical" edutainment, hell maybe I'll do a library request, for real.

bought a book by jack mcdevitt today. don't know if i've ever even heard of him. on the cover stephen king sez he's the logical heir to arthur c. clarke and isaac asimov. which is probably a good thing, i guess. book is called Chindi.

also got The Visitors by simak which i don't think i have. nice hardcover too.

think i was actually more excited by the 1st edition of louis auchincloss's The Embezzler i found though. 25 cents! and margaret bourke-white's autobio which was also 25 cents and which looks great and it has a million of her photos in it.

right now i'm reading O Pioneer by frederik pohl.

Cool, I've wondered if Mad Men's writers haven't picked up some pointers from Auchincloss. Haven't read McD., been thinking about it, seeing his tomes at Friends of the Library's shop. Science Fiction Encyclopedia's John Clute sez: He composes ostensibly positivist tales..,for readers looking for release, as demonstrated in his light-fingered ease with Time Paradoxes in Time Travelers Never Die (2009); but the contemplative reticence underlying his work should never be ignored. He is perhaps the most adult of all writers of adventure sf. Or perhaps not, but seems worth a shot.

Chindi's got some good stuff in it, but also some colossal failures of imagination. Can't say more without giving away some of the fun Big Ideas in it, though.

Started Nicola Griffith's 'Ammonite' last night: this is great! It's from 1992 originally. Best SF novel I've read in a while: a bit of Tiptree gender shenanigans, a bit of le Guin anthropoligical/weird human biology shenanigans, a touch of 'Alien/Aliens', but lots of other cool things too. And really nicely written, too.

This is only vaguely relevant, but I had a bit of a mind-boggling science-fictional moment today. My wife is pregnant, and our daughter is gue in Jan next year. According to the doctor, the life expectancy for a white Australian female born in the next 12 months has now hit 100 years--so, assuming we avoid the inevitable collapse of human civilisation, she could well still be alive in 2113. I feel like my wife's going to be giving birth to a time traveller.

congrats on impending life form! and yeah babies will make you ponder all sorts of astral and metaphysical questions. 100 yr. avg. is pretty insane too. you guys must really be seeing the benefits of all those roo burgers.

only 513 years to 2525!

I've rarely been much impressed w Bruce Sterling, but maybe I've missed a lot. "Black Swan", in Year's Best SF 15 (Hartwell & Cramer, eds.) is the payoff for a lifestyle he describes as "dividing atemporal time-zones among Austin, Turin, and Belgrade, and his alternate global identities as Bruce Sterling, Bruno Argento, and Boris Srebro." This is one of his Bruno Argento stories, which originally appeared in Italian as 'Cigno Nero' in the Spring 2009 issue of ROBOT Magazine. The title refers to the concept behind Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan: The Impact of The Highly Improbable." But not one of those rip 'n' write, fumbling-the-Big-Ideas pawfuls moldering in many an anthology (elsewhere in this one, for inst). A freelancer and his equally ravenous source go drinking and stressing though several Italys (same bar and sector in each), really gamey in every sense. Try to wrap my brain around its pulpadelic plot twists, which wrap themselves around my brain instead, then get whisked away like a used towel. It's crassly cunning and yet somehow more (or maybe I've finally met my match, like these guys do [not a spoiler, cause it can't be pinned down like that, at least by me]).

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

― the late great, Sunday, 2 September 2012 20:24 (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did it improve? (for you)

Winners of British Fantasy Awards:
http://www.omnivoracious.com/2012/09/2012-british-fantasy-award-winners-include-jo-walton-lavie-tidhar-joe-hill-and-the-weird.html

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/help-from-heinlein.html

My God, what a fountainhead (no libertarian joeks plz) of generosity. Can't imagine what it was like to be Sturgeon reading it, in his situation and time to boot (a hundred dollars in 1956, just for one thing). All those ideas, and in a conversational, oh by the way--he wasn't only being considerate as hell, he evidently really did miss tossing ideas and impasses w Boucher and those guys, maan Boucher alone always seemed so astute, the first editor I was ever aware of, in my childhood nirvana of s.f. and mysteries. Good to know Hein himself had a shrewd eye on symptoms of life, incl. his old mentor Campbell and L. Ron as well.