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

And Saddam Hussein is a mob boss, and Osama bin Laden a powerful politician, and head of secret government black ops group Al-Qaeda.

Yeah, Saddam is sometimes said to have closely studied Mafia methods, esp. while in prison for trying to whack the Prime Minister of Iraq
http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/spring03/iraq/saddam.jpg

Apparently not just Photoshop; I've seen video of it too.

read Dick's The Skull yesterday, available as a free download lots of places. was quite fun.

Picked up my old copy of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin when I was home for xmas, and now I'm reading it for the first time since I was like 18. And wow, it's still fucking great! She can write a great sentence, and she's got so many good ideas. I may go on a binge of her stuff after this.

Yeah---the first and second Le Guins for me were Left Hand and The Dispossessed---very compatible.

Lathe of Heaven is also great, in quite different in themes/style

I need to read some of her short stories. those two big new collections look nice.

Didn't Scott or somebody link the 70s Public TY version of Lathe, when it was posted on YouTube maybe? Linked on this very thread? I'll check later, gotta go (but it may well have been removed from YouTube)

I recommended Left Hand to a relatively new acquaintance of mine, then I saw it in a second hand bookshop and decided to buy it for him on a whim. This was a couple of months ago and he still hasn't read it, every time we meet it is now a mostly lol but kinda sad thing between us.

Four Ways To Forgiveness is all-time for me. its later and less famous but i think it might have changed my life or something. i never wanted it to end.

i still haven't read any of the earthsea books and there are still other novels and collections i need to read.

omg get on to earthsea asap. four ways one of my faves too.

i will i will! i got a lot to get to...

Guys thanks for reminding me that Left Hand is on my to do list for this winter.

Reading "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" by Charles Yu -- a Christmas gift from my brother, who loved it. It's good, so far -- kind of Vonneguty, but more hard-science with the faux physics than KV ever got. (And full to the brim with canonical sci-fi references.)

Inspired by (iirc) this thread, have been reading a nice Pan edition of PKD's GALACTIC POT-HEALER that I inherited from Martin Skidmore (along with quite a few other of his PKD's that I'd not read before.) It's good fun - the blurb from the Scotsman on the back says "The Sunny Side of SF"! - and unsurprisingly there are lots of neat throwaway ideas (like the competition to write dreams for the world's population) but I think I prefer my Dick a little bit bleaker and scarier. Also, even by PKD's standards the female characters are horribly one-dimensional - ie beautiful but deadly to the male.

Ooh, I have HOW TO LIVE SAFELY and hadn't gotten to it yet.

Anyone read Redshirts? It was recommended by a friend and I'm wondering if I should bother

No but I just looked it up and it looks like pretty light reading, which is not to say that I wouldn't totally read it.

"pretty light reading" is kind of my raison d'être so that's a big plus

In that case you might also like READY PLAYER ONE.

I bought it in an airport because the cover is commercial in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones for this moment.

oh that looks awesome

OK, read that zombie story in the McHugh book and it turned out to pretty good

i really hated Ready Player One

aw

I have mixed feelings about it, yeah. It seemed to start out promisingly but ended up feeling like everything that happened was inevitable; it was, itself, like playing through a video game.

It didn't even really satisfy me on a spot the reference level

and all over his face broods a universe of rainbows, dingy and fat, which from the fat vapours of the pitch bringing forth rainbows, not rainbows of heaven, but, so to say, fallen angels, grown gross and sluggish. But, years ere this, I think, I had seen the bulrushes: for, soon after the volcano came, in roaming over to the left shore of the cataract's sea---the whole left shore is flat and widespread, and hath no high walls like the right side---I walked upon a freshet of fresh warm water, and after following it upward, saw all around a marsh's swamp, and the bush of bulrushes. This is where the oysters be so crass, and they be pearl oysters, for all that soil be crass with nacreous matter of some sort, with barrok pearls, mother of pearl, and in most of the oysters which I opened pearls; with a lot of conch shells which have within them pink pearls, and there be also the black pearl, such as they have in Mexico and the West Indies, with the yellow and likewise the white, which last be shaped like the pear, and large, and his pallor hath a blank brightness, very priceless, and so to say, bridal.

That's from "The Dark Lot of One Saul," by M.P. Shiel. Had heard of him as a xenophobe, racist, anti-Semite and indeed, it seems that he was as smitten by the Yellow Peril as much as his Elizabethan castaway was the yellow pearl, to say the least. Also wanted to deport the Jews to Palestine, thus "making him a Zionist of sorts"--mots juste, Great Tales of Science Fiction eds. Silverberg & Greenberg! But in non-shit-talking stories like this, he earns the crack in his pot, a la xp David Lindsay. Other goodies in here so far from Twain, Kipling, Wells; compatible though creakier Poe and Verne. Currently reading "R.U.R."; quite a contrast so far with Shiel.

This quote is is one of the tamer bits actually; hard to avoid spoilers.

Anybody read this? Wish it were bigger, but seems to encompass several elements of Shiel's perspective:
http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n0/n1176.jpg

I think I read it? I think [perhaps it was RIDICULOUS. Sigh. Sometimes I wonder how amazing it would be to remember things.

galactic pot-healer is really bleak!!

heh temporarily put GPH aside and only resumed reading this morning - the moment when the protaganist encounters his dead self underwater is extremely eerie, have high hopes for a rousingly desolate finale.

The Purple Cloud is fun in overwritten way. That is one ugly, ugly cover, though (sadly, it's the version I have too)

I know. I'm sorry. But there is this

http://www.digital-eel.com/blog/library/Purplecloudpage.jpg

...which turns out to be from the opening page of---the whole freaking thing??
http://www.digital-eel.com/blog/library/The_Purple_Cloud.htm

yeah, is 1901 so public domain now

that and three more here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2292

Thanks! Fairly wild profile here (with some spoilers) http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/shiel_m_p So far, He provides one of the few exceptions to the SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR theme of xp Silverberg & Greenberg's Great Tales of Science Fiction Not that most of these aren't fairly tongue-in-cheek, but I also appreciate the deviation of Mark Twain's cool reverie (no Disastrous Consequences energetically worked out): he goes to negotiate the sale of his soul, and immediately notices that Satan's lovely bod is made of radium.

"Alas, All Thinking" (eventually) proves unexpectedly involving, with the encounters of a not-yet-over-achieving scientist and a time-travelling recruiter of sorts (bring that phrase up, and she'd plop down to meditate for who knows how long...) sustaining one-to-one in the foreground makes it more effective than some of these other Great Tales. The author is Harry Bates, best known now for "Farewell to the Master" (basis of The Day The Earth Stood Still), also incl a hugely fateful, poignant one-to-one.

Shiel was the first literary King of Rodonda, the crown which has now passed down to Javier Marias

Thought that stopped when Shiel's successor passed on? According to that
xp http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/shiel_m_p But how did this new King arise?

Blaylock on steampunk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-p-blaylock/on-steampunk_b_2494561.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

So, Blaylock is my favorite writer of fantasy of the generations after Wolfe and Dick and Lafferty. But more because of his extraordinary body of contemporary southern california suburban magic realist novels, especially the holy handful of The Digging Leviathan, The Last Coin, The Paper Grail and All the Bells on Earth. His victorian novels were really great but not the engine of his greatness to me.

He always kept his distance from the steampunk thing until the last couple of years, when as far as I can tell he finally said to himself 'fuck it, I'd be a fool not to grasp this low-hanging fruit' and embraced the whole grandfather of steampunk thing. And lo and behold, he's got multiple new books coming out and reissues of the old ones. Good on him, I say. I'd probably have done no different.

But I'm here to tell you to measure your justifiable 'ewwww steampunk' reaction because Blaylock is the most amazing prose stylist and his work is jammed with the ineffable and bursting with heart. I love him madly.

I'll check out the Cali magic realism, thanks! Which of his steampunk novels should I start with? I really didn't like The Difference Engine, but not against the subgenre overall.

For his victoriana, get the relatively recent Langdon St. Ives omnibus and start with the first one, Homunculus. In print from Subterranean or cheap on Nook/Kindle.

Powers' Anubis Gates is probably the best of that whole strain, tbh.

thx---what about John Shirley?

I haven't read any Shirley. My only exposure to him is the lyrics he wrote for two late blue oyster cult albums! If I ever see his boc inspired novel Transmaniacon I'm gonna get it though.

Wow, didn't realize he was this involved with music, as writer and performer: http://www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley/jsmusic.html

But I'm here to tell you to measure your justifiable 'ewwww steampunk' reaction because Blaylock is the most amazing prose stylist and his work is jammed with the ineffable and bursting with heart. I love him madly.

Blaylock has written some of the best descriptions of food I've read anywhere. The California books are the best... The Last Coin and The Paper Grail especially.