fantasy novels.

the hint is the bitten nails and the beard.

...maybe he saw William Dhalgren!

And I don't think he even had the beard yet back then?

Consider:

http://www-as.phy.ohiou.edu/FORUM/s98/images/delany1.jpg

i guess it says more about my reading of the book / mental image of delany that i just assumed it was meant to be him in that scene ...

blurb cribbed from the back page, beneath the fantastic heading "The Last Story in the Annals of The Human Race!"

"a world of the remote future. the scoiety is very rich, very decadent, and the population is small. the story centers on the schemes and conflicts of a group of bizarre men and women - The Duke of Queens, Lord Jagged of Canaria, the bitter giant Mongrove, My Lady Charlotina of Below-the-Lake, Mistress Christia (the everlasting concubine) and the Iron Orchid, mother of the central character, Jherek Carnelian.

when Jherek meets Ms Amelia Underwood, a lady time-traveler from 1896, he determines to possess her and finds himself being plunged backwards in time to Victorian London...

An Alien Heat is set in a world of crazy, jeweled cities with ripe rotting technologies. it is an example of teh mighty imagination of michael moorcock at its most magnificent"

...

i LOVE these novels, particularly the first. i'm rereading them from the beginning because i just recently found the third volume, "the end of all songs", after reading the first two about ten years ago, and spending all the intervening time in suspense about what happens.

combines the best parts of elric (wildly overstuffed, fantastical, absolutely purple characters and creatures and magics) with the best parts of the cornelius novels (zinging social critique, madcap situations, speeded-up narrative) without the depressing cynicism of either. these novels are genuinely funny and - a word i use so rarely - even sweet! they make me happy to be a reader!

just finished bishop's 'the etched city', which had some good bits and some bad bits and lots of "oh i have so lost patience with this kind of thing" bits, particularly in descriptions of the city, which i doubt are bishop's fault, although they might be. spoilers to follow. (god i hate that word.)

i think i might have lost the patience for the 'subcreation' bit in fantasy novels: i mean, i don't CARE what kind of names for deserts you can think up..

the entry of magic into a world where it hadn't been was an interesting strand (and uh probably relevant to stuff i am thinking about with my novel, god help me). but it made the whole creating-a-world bit seem rather excessive, considering the world created was in terms of what can go on, magic-wise, sort of identical to ours. (if-i-remember-correctly plisskin on the other thread suggested the changing of the world is sort of metafiction. which sort of makes sense.) and the mental states of the two lead characters (one a total cynic, one morally worn down and incapable of wonder, i guess) seemed to force me into a kind of detached stance of my own in reading the whole thing, which i'm not sure how i feel about. i will read her next novel unless it is about stuff going on in one of the other deserts or something, in which case i won't.

now i am reading harry fucking potter.

i laughed when gwynn's horse started talking to him. but when the woman arrived in the plot it became much more of a chore to read, bcz their dialogue was the WORST, until the last scene together, and bcz long descriptions of art are getting to be something of a personal bugaboo. (tho better than long shots of art in films, generally.)

the stuff with the priest's backstory towards the end was probably the point i was most affected, and it fit interestingly with the otherwise non-supernatural history of the world. (my angle on their continuing debate was along the lines of: well, this would be a rather sophomoric thing to have running in a novel operating in a world bounded by the laws of reality: so there's going to be some kind of payoff, isn't there) (it wasn't just my favorite bit because i was basking in the satisfaction of being proved right, though that helped.)

jordan: the viriconium books are all interesting, in different ways (not to oversell them or anything - ), and available in a convenient omnibus. said convenient omnibus does print everything in a stupid order but you can't have everything. i never got around to reading the centauri device or the non-genre stuff. never even found climbers, in fact.

also here is a notion to play with:

the quest narrative is of course a CLASSIC. and it seems to be a pretty big staple of the elf-trilogy style of fantasy. (or seems to have been when i was 18.) could you somehow try to define this kind of fantasy by what it does or fails to do with the quest narrative? in contrast to other genres? (e.g. in certain kinds of crime fiction or detective fiction where people have read out of the crime reconstruction or motive-questioning or clue-finding all sorts of assumptions about the nature of modern identity, or rational control by society, or whatever.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncton_Wood

imagine tryin to convince someone how much these books will wreck you

they out of print? trying to find new copies don't see any...

Following ilx discussion of Alan Garner a while back, I just now finished reading The Owl Service for the second time in the past week, which never happens---second time was much quicker, though mainly because the whole thing was still lodged, incl. what I couldn't quite remember or forget, to near-quote one character on another, sympathetically and not: that's just how it is these days, in the book and out, to some extent---but mainly, I knew and kinda knew, with a squint sometimes, what had happened, was happening still, is happening still, anywhere and anytime I open the book, the real and modern and fantasy and ancient, recurring and mixing---I found that I did understand it/take it in (incl. class and English and Welsh and gender and generational and generative and other identity markers, clashes, proximities) a bit better for having read it the first time, also recognizing again and moreso the questions that will never be answered: my struggles somewhat mirroring/aping those of the characters, although they have it worse, or most of them do.
Enjoyed the author's afterword as well (btw, he mentions the TV adaptation, filmed in the valley of his inspiration---any of you watched it?), reminding me of enjoying Lethem's afterword to We Have Always Lived In The Castle, another rec if you want to take it as fantasy, personal mythology.

TV version seemed underwhelming to me, they didn't capture the atmosphere of the book very well and the casting was odd.

There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elidor#Television_adaptation
And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Shift_(novel)#Television_adaptation_and_popular_culture

neither of which I've seen. Elidor quite infamous in the UK for scaring the shit out of any kids that did see it though, in true British style.

Plus these, although The Moon of Gomrath doesn't seem to have been adapted at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weirdstone_of_Brisingamen#Adaptations

is the owl service the one that takes a lot from the Mabinogion? that keeps cropping up here and there to the point where i feel i should read it.

(yes - The Owl Service interprets a story from the Welsh Mabinogion, namely, portions of the story of "Math Son of Mathonwy.")

strangely, published in the US as "Maths son of Mathsonwy"