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

Da!

I'm reading The Fellowship of the Ring, for the the first time in over a decade. I read Tolkien annually as a kid before the movies sort of put me off. I didn't realize how much I'd missed it. It satisfies some craving for contemporary myth like practically no other book.

Of course it could just be the warm nostalgic feeling of rereading one's first favourite book.

what year did you first read it?

Maybe '95? I can't remember. I was 9 or 10.

from a random amazon recommendation:

"Throughout the forties and into the fifties, "SLAN" was considered the single most important science fiction novel, the one great book that everyone had to read."

SLAN? never heard of it. (A E Van Vogt)

anyway, am currently re-reading Reynolds' The Prefect, which isn't the book i remember it being (the book i remember it being is the middle bit that starts about 100 pages in and finishes about 70 pages from the end and is more like Rama meets Towering Inferno).

The Best Of Robert Heinlein 1939-1942 has just arrived, in a different (worse) cover from the one in the listing, which annoys me. but, hey, was 1p + p&p and contains The Roads Must Roll.

dow what is in the soviet sf book, it looks great

'slan' is about secret chosen people with tentacles in their heads that are above and beyond the muggles iirc

(it's "Path Into The Unknown", which has been mentioned on this thread quite a bit)

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5290556-path-into-the-unknown

must get back into reynolds.

The Prefect ties in with the revelation space universe, pre melding plague. which i had forgotten.

i could read Revelation Space all over again (5th time?) but think House Of Suns is probably next on the pile for re-reading.

Yall prob know all about this, but please don't tell me how it ends: The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta. On October 14, about three years ago so far, all kinds of people, doing all kinds of things, suddenly vanished. The resulting post-10/14 culture is all about dealing with absence of all kinds--sure, you'd miss your mamma, or your best friend's daughter, but that weird nerd kid you haven't seen since 8th Grade--why is he now your Special Someone, secret meme, so viral in your head?. Post--9/11 crises, solutions, strawmen are all absent/leftovers, so far. Omniscient narrator's keeping most of the varied points of view, fairly local so far. And, although he's gradually explaining a lot of stuff, he leaves enough to speculation--plus. the characters don't explain every damn thing to each other, or us (yay for third person!) esp what just happened, current motivations, subtext: this isn't like too many movies, and most TV.

i don't like tom perotta. or the books i've read anyway. they all read like film treatments. i think i even started a thread on here about that very subject. books where you are reading and simultaneously wondering who they will get to play the character in the movie. i mean, i get it. people want to make money. nothing wrong with that. he's good with characters though. he should just write screenplays.

Good with characters, and the basic premise is not one I've encountered before.

I enjoyed The Leftovers, I have to admit, though with reservations which i won't discuss because I don't want to spoil anything for dow

Thanks, I eventually had some reservations too, incl. the very end, though it does invite more speculation. Speculative fiction, like it says in this thread's title: what would happen if the Author inserts or whisks away the one viriable He's just created in our world. Something in the world as we know it has followed the departed. Everybody adapts, some in weird ways, and very much of an ongoing process, involving the leftovers' own chosen or compulsory inner/outer flight paths. As in xpost Whitehead's Zone One, no prob w seamless back and forth of funny, sad, scary, tender, brittle.

"variable" that is

Speaking of Russians, I read this long ago, really dug it

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n0/n1572.jpg

Now I want this!

http://drytoasts.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/strugatsky1.jpg

and this--anybody read these?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/Roadside-picnic-macmillan-cover.jpg

Roadside Picnic is really, really, really good.

It's v different to Stalker, much less existential. But yeah I dug it. (Worrying suspicion there's a post of mine upthread saying it's way inferior to Stalker.)

"They put on their vacuum suits directly on top of the protective suits. Then they made their way back to the chartroom through the long gloomy tunnel with black walls which used to be the corridor. The walls of the tunnel were undulating slightly." Yes, because the walls, like the rest of the ship, incl the light fixtures, are covered with black eight-legged flies, stowaways from a recently visited planet. That's the Strugatsky Bros' "Ab Emergency CaseP", another one from xpost Path Into The Unknown. You can see the advantages and disadvantages of the translation here. I like how the walls undulate, but just slightly, quite enough. You also get to consider whether the biologist is more enlightened than his shipmates (very pragmatic they are, though one's sardonic as hell, another is spacey, if helpful). Seems like some 60s ambiguity re progress etc. sneaks through what Merrill's intro calls "s typical mid-Forties Astounding -type puzzle story and a 'pamphleteering' message against xenophobia."

Weird--"An Emergency Case", that is.

The translation's awkwardness mainly comes through towards the beginning of this story, ditto in some others.

Pretty intriguing description of Stalker here, as filmed by Tarkovsky (I enjoyed his take on Solaris, posted an image from it upthread)
SF Encyclopedia Online's main Strugatsky artice says they gave him 11 diff Stalker scenarios.
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/stalker

"Yorkshire lass born and bred, that's me," said Katriona's hologram. "Born in Whitby, spent a few years on a farm in Dentdale, but came back — suck my flabby tits — to the coast when I married my husband. He was a fisherman, God rest his soul. Arsewipe! When he was away, I used to walk along the coast and watch the North Sea, imagining him out there on the waves."
So speaks a hacked hologram from her memorial bench, where a cyborg has just sat down, taking a break from celebrating his new body on the eve of his departure for the stars. He's been cavorting all along the cliffs overlooking the sea (a climate change-fucked terrain he's leaving behind, along w family etc). You can imagine how this goes from here, but every sentence counts---I mean, they always do in published short stories--but some I really 'ppreciate here, without getting detoured by wannabee-poetic effects. Oh yeah, sorry: should've said this is Ian Creasey's "Erosion", just re-read again in Year's Best SF 13. It's in other anthologies too.

"Yorkshire lass born and bred, that's me," said Katriona's hologram

!

the new robert redick is pretty good thus far

What is it? Don't know his books.

The Handmaid's Tale. I was vaguely expecting it to be set far in the future, in a society that had regressed far into the past, so to find it contemporary was almost shocking. I don't think her dystopia was particularly convincing, especially the way people simply rolled over into totalitarianism - although similar things have perhaps happened elsewhere - but the voice of the main character was very good, her impotent fury, and despairing resignation. It wasn't very exciting though. I daresay it wasn't Atwood's intention to write a thriller. Maybe it should have been.

Atwood can't do convincing social change. She's good at coming up with interesting future societies, but absolutely shit at trying to explain how we would reasonably go from now to that future. Handmaid's would have been more convincing if there'd been a couple of generations between the fertility crash and the weird patriarchy.

atwood can't do a lot of things

i never read the book the handmaid's tale. the movie was pretty hot though. aidan quinn/natasha richardson surrogate sex. hubba hubba. plus, elizabeth mcgovern at her sassy best.

Iiiii just started Ilium and it is INTRIGUING!!!!

About to reread Ilium and Olympos as I've only read them the once (and really enjoyed them) whereas I probably reread all the Hyperion/Endymion books every couple of years.

In my memory (it's been 22 years) I hate Hyperion and its sequel. But I intend to give Simmons a whirl in his new life as a horror novelist.

He wrote horror and mysteries along his Sci Fi since the beginning. They're hit and miss, as is all his stuff. I liked Ilium and Olympos despite some serious problems, but I think The Terror is the best thing of his I've read.

Yeah that's the one I'm gonna check.

It gets dodgy near the end, but until then it's a cracker.

I keep seeing Drood on the shelf and ignoring it. Is that a mistake? I don't really like horror anything though. I am enjoying Ilium/Olympus although starting to kinda wonder where it's all going.

I didn't finish Drood. How big of a Dicken's fan are you? I'm not, and that meant I didn't care for the basic conceit.

All horror gets dodgy at the end. Well, 98% of it. I am very forgiving in this respect; after all, human beings get pretty dodgy at the end too.

I'm also getting hella annoyed with sci-fi without women. Or without believable women who are not just men speaking. It's starting to take the enjoyment out of books, a LOT of books.

I've never read any Dickens tbh--I am a disgusting savage.

aieee!
"We know very little about dark energy but one of our ideas is that it is a property of space itself - when you have more space, you have more energy," explained Dr Matthew Pieri, a BOSS team-member.
"So, dark energy is something that increases with time. As the Universe expands, it gives us more space and therefore more energy, and at some point dark energy takes over from gravity to end the deceleration and drive an acceleration," the Portsmouth University, UK, researcher told BBC News.
The discovery that everything in the cosmos is now moving apart at a faster and faster rate was one of the major breakthroughs of the 20th Century. But scientists have found themselves grasping for new physics to try to explain this extraordinary phenomenon.
A number of techniques are being deployed to try to get some insight. One concerns so-called baryon acoustic oscillations.
These refer to the pressure-driven waves that passed through the post-Big-Bang Universe and which subsequently became frozen into the distribution of matter once it had cooled to a sufficient level.
Today, those oscillations show themselves as a "preferred scale" in the spread of galaxies - a slight excess in the numbers of such objects with separations of 500 million light-years.
It is an observation that can be used as a kind of standard ruler to measure the geometry of the cosmos.

so i'm trying to read Red Mars again; first time was around 15 years ago when i was in high school. interesting colonization ideas but the characters and dialogue are seriously lacking. is maya supposed to be a sociopath? is nadia trying to get someone to draw someone out of her shell by asking her about the science of rocks intended to be funny?

Dunno, I'll get back to you when I read it, got some other Kim Stanley Robinson worldgrooming up first. Meanwhile, more newly revealed Science Fact w Science Fiction appeal: "Super-Earths">"Squishy Worlds"--eeeuuuuuwww
http://news.discovery.com/space/exoplanet-super-earth-pressure-heat-metal-121122.html

i've got a big stack of KSRobinson books thanks to you guys but i haven't read any of them yet. they all LOOK really cool.

i'm still reading this and its okay and entertaining but its taking me too long to read it so i must not love it. it shouldn't really take more than a day or two. early simak. and you get the silly early 50's stuff like a world 6000 years in the future where everyone still talks like its the early 50s and acts like they are in a noir novel of the 50's. and the history of everything is so vague. but, like i said, entertaining enough.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8435/7823994658_1db376c709.jpg

i like that later farting cover.