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

Single-handed.

Because, you know, the other hand fell off.

(sorry)

Having avoided Jeff Vandermeer for years (something always gave me the impression of forced whimsical surrealness of the 'I'm so ZANY!' variety), I'm enjoying his new one, Annihilation, about a group of four women exploring a sort of Roadside-Picnic-style zone of weirdness.

His publishing company being called 'Cheeky frawg' didn't help

Yeah, I kinda had the same impression of Avram Davidson--based on what, I dunno; prob haven't read him since middle school---revived by the opening of "The Woman Who Thought She Could Read." But it's a set-up for pathos, somewhat scarey (irony in there too,one of life's cruel joeks). It's no masterpiece, but what other Davidson should I check?

This is included in the previously mentioned Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, where even J.M. Barrie snaps a final punchline shut on my rosey fingers; Osbert Sitwell's "Jack and the Beanstalk" demonstrates boy enterprise (not quite boy gorge); Rudy Rucker's playthings do cunning stunts; Suzette Haden Elgin's good wife struggles to cast off unbidden, most conspicuous sainthood (nasty deeds don't compensate as much as you might think); Isaac Bashevis Singer's "The Parrot" maybe keeds Flaubert; Margaret St. Clair's "The Man Who Sold Rope To The Gnoles" borrows honorably from Lord Dunsany, but isn't up to the standards set by other St. Clair/Seabright I've read. Also the impetus for xposts re Lucy Clifford's "Wooden Tony" and that L. Frank Baum--R.A. Lafferty--Tiptree subset, with ETA Hoffman, Graham Greene, John Brunner, William Morris etc., to come. Some of this is kind of weak, though: I'll figure the percentages after reading the whole thing. (DG Hartwell ed., with some assistance from K Cramer; for them, it's remarkably consistent.)

I've heard good things about, and so bought, The Adventures Of Doctor Eszterhazy by Avram Davidson -- it sounds as though it's meant to be a Hungarian novel, which is my kind of thing anyway. Not yet read, though.

TOR did an avram Davidson treasury a few years back, he's a short story/novella man so that ought to be a good rx

I'll check those out, thanks. One more (well two, counting the short sharp weregirl grind of George MacDonald's "The Grey Wolf") from that Hartwell/Cramer: I thought George RR Martin's xpost Dangerous Womencontribution had put me off dragons forever, before got to this collection's Patricia A. McKillip story, "The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath": every sentence, or damn near, slips in another image that further facets and fuels thee momentum's rippling tale, aarrrghhh (no pirates, just enthusiasm). Helps that there's no chop-chop, plenty flames and unexpected tactics, though. Ending's kinda Le Guin, Melville too. Better than the actual Le Guin included here, "The Darkness Box", although that's okay.

Been meaning to try mckillip forever...

Me too. This is appealing: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mckillip_patricia_a A little more in their Encyclopedia of Fantasy section.

Don't know why the hell they don't have a link to Encyclopedia of Fantasy on sf-encyclopedia's rail; it's this seeecret place:
http://sf-encyclopedia.co.uk/fe.php?nm=mckillip_patricia_a

i've only read riddlemaster but it's pretty grebt iirc

No love for Keith Roberts? His 'Pavane' is unbelievable.

He apparently damaged his own standing in the community of SF & fantasy writers by being a dick to people, but that book is so great. It's set in an alternative modern-day England over which the Spanish Armada and catholicism triumphed in the 16C, giving rise to technological stasis and decay, civil unrest, belief in the (folk-based) supernatural, and so on... Can't recommend it highly enough.

the first riddle-master book is good, the other two seemed pointless recapitulations, i'd forgotten ever reading them

i thought 'pavane' and 'bring the jubilee' were the same book for ages and only after i'd read the latter did i differentiate them. i also realised the other day that i've been confusing 'point break' and 'zabriskie point'

i'm reading a gollancz leigh brackett collection entitled 'sea-kings of mars and otherworldly stories', the title of which i keep wanting to repeat the word 'other'

Always meant to read her, but hardly ever had the opportunity; please keep us apprised. Will keep an eye out for Pavane. Just finished "Lila The Werewolf," pungent enough that I may not read any more stories for a while (nah). Could be wrong end of the telescope, or just one more fantasy etc. writer dropping the ball, but the degree of distancing, with glimpses of her torment and danger (eventually converging) is perfect: Lila's another restless young late-60s chick with a hang-up, man, happening to Farrell the habitual boyfriend, collector, muso. (Never see him playing, but he's always got a little money; she goes to work, no matter what). Suppose it helps that I recognize these people, as people go (so far not as far as the were thing, but far).
It's in the Hartwell; can also read it here:
http://www.bestlibrary.net/fantasticfiction/Lila_The_Werewolf/

Got a copy of Pavane a while back, but only ever read the first story, The Lady Margaret, which I enjoyed, It has lots of big-time supporters, including Anthony Burgess, who included it in Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice, Kingsley Amis, who I believe gives its a nod in his own alternate history book, The Alteration, and at least one old-school ilxor, the much-missed Martin Skidmore, who recommended some other Keith Roberts books as well.

I used to be semi-obsessed with Burgess' list and wanted to collect every book in 99 Novels, including all the multi-volume series like the C.P. Snow and Anthony Powell entries. Pavane was out of print in the US at the time and that always made me so bug-eyed mad. I haven't looked in the last decade or so to see if everything could be easily acquired.

You can buy used copy of Pavane pretty easily, or even an ebook now.

Among Keith Roberts fans/defenders/boosters are two others who were associated with New Worlds and then fell out, Christopher Priest and M. John Harrison. Here is the former on Roberts: http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/essays-reviews/contemporaries-portrayed/keith-roberts/

My friend works in a bookshop and has been consorting with Christopher Priest of late. They have been chinwagging about Mr Roberts a lot.

Cool. Hope his latest, pretty awesome book is selling well.

Here for future reference is a writeup on the first story in Keith Robert's The Grain Kings, "Weihnachtsabend," which I have yet to read: https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/reprint-weihnachtsabend/#more-716

Looks like sf Gateway is coming out with an omnibus featuring that one, The Chalk Giants and another Martin Skidmore favorite, Kiteworld.

brackett is very much That Kind Of Thing, it turns out

The screenwriter?

Does that book have any of her Mars stuff? Last I checked only thing readily available here was post-apocalyptic agrarian The Long Tomorrow

Oh I see it has Mars in title suppose it must

it seems indiscriminately martian and venusian

is there, like, sustained world-building to encounter here? because the two mars stories were both about A Glorious, Now Gone Martian Past but were afaict dealing with entirely separate glorious now-gone martian pasts ...

Don't think world-building per-se. Believe her take was influential on Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles , where there are all kind of variations of the theme of The Old Weird Mars that are consistent vibe-wise but not straining to be so in some other more literal way.

Anyway, does that book have the often anthologized The Last Days of Shandakor?

Anyway, apparently a lot of that, both her Venus and Mars stuff as well as Bradbury's, appeared in a magazine called Planet Stories. Do a google image search and you will see some classic What Mad Universe style covers

Yep, and some appealing comments on and by her here:
http://io9.com/they-mocked-her-science-fantasy-then-she-wrote-empir-489586578 Of course, a lot of people talk a good game. But I'll find something by her, see how it goes.

Thanks for the link. That Planet Stories anthology looks pretty good. Cheap too.

Don't know if you she ever wrote anything as good as her friend C.L. Moore's "Vintage Season" but if she ever even came close that is good enough.

Also, that exchange with George Lucas is all-time.

It does have 'The Last Days of Shandakor', yes. There's four hundred pages between me and it, though; I may not make it.

Little bit more about Keith Roberts here: http://news.ansible.co.uk/a160.html, from right after she passed away.

Thanks! Great tales. Hope that site & the rest of those writers are still alive (of course they're still with us, eternal Cloudwise). Thoggery or not, I think • 'She pouted, her lower lip projecting like the bottom drawer in a chest of drawers which has jammed open on account of too many clothes being stuffed inside.' (Mary Scott, Murder On Wheels, 2000) is good zing to sexy pouts (which I'm a fule for).
Meanwhile, in the Hartwell/Cramer fantasy-wonderbook, close encounters of the re-read L. Frank Baum/RA Lafferty/James Tiptree Jr. kind now hook up with Estimated Time of Arrival Hoffman for eco-hijinks. It is surely the way of Nature, with seeming refinements as set-ups.

Another big shoutout to Pavane from me, too. His short story collection, the Grainkings, has 1 or 2 stories set in the same world, too.

Gollancz SF masterworks put out a huge collection of brackett's pulp shorts a few years ago, and just rerelease The Long Tomorrow.

"Be disloyal. It's your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it's the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living, boy, and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent, and never let either of the two sides know your name. The same applies to women and God. They both respect a man they don't own, and they'll go on raising the price they are willing to offer. Didn't Christ say that very thing?...The obedient flock didn't give the shepherd any satisfaction or the loyal son interest his father.
People are afraid of bringing May blossom into the house. They say it's unlucky. The real reason is it smells of sex and they are afraid of sex. Why aren't they afraid of fish then, you may rightly ask? Because when they smell fish they smell a holiday ahead and they feel safe from breeding for a short while."
...I think Javitt was glad to have me there. Surely he could not have been talking quite so amply over the years to Maria who could only quack in response, and several times he made me read to him from one of the newspapers. The nearest to our time I ver found was a local account of the celebration for the relief of Mafeking. ("Riots," Javitt said, "purge like a dose of salts.")
..."Listen, " and I heard a kind of rumbling that passed overhead and after that a rattling as little cakes of mud fell down around us. "That's a motor-car," he said, as an explorer might have said, "That's an elephant."
I asked him whether perhaps there was another way out...he made his answer, even to that direct question, ambiguous and general like a proverb. "A wise man has only one door to his house."
What a boring old man he would have been to an adult mind, but...I thought I was learning about the world and the universe...still to this day I wonder how it was that a child could have invented these details, or have they accumulated year by year, like coral, in the sea of the unconscious around the original dreams?
from "Under the Garden" by Graham Greene, Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, "compiled David G. Hartwell, with the assistance of Kathryn Cramer"

The framing story is the real killer, though.

Graham Greene wrote a couple of other SF stories. One about the last Pope in history, which was OK, and one really excellent and sad post-apocalyptic story the name of which I forget.

That one by E.M. Forster is kind of interesting

Yeah, he wrote one s.f. story that I know of, "The Machine Stops," and two collections of fantasies. So, I'd been missing Omni Science Fact/Science, a good ol' glossy 'til it went to All UFO And Related Revelations All The Time, in the heyday of such hysteria. Also wondering if I should re-read Dune, which I don't remember very well from Analog serialization, though the art was boss.
Turns out Omni is back, with new fiction (Rucker, Di Filippo, Sterling are the only ones I recognize, but that's fairly typical of me), new articles (incl. by Glenn MacDonald; dunno if he's the ilxor), a lot of back issues (trouble loading on my middle-aged computer, though may be impatient), and---the aforementioned original Dune illustrations, which still look good to me (links to their other stuff on this page too)
http://omnireboot.jerrickventures.com/archives/dune/

"Science Fact/Science Fiction," that is.

So, after Brunner's deliberately knotty "The Things That Are Gods" (the author seems like he might be a schoolmaster who also coaches wrestling), Fitz-James O'Brien's droll, jaded yet energetic "The King of Nodland and His Dwarf" (kind of an animated editorial cartoon, though some farcical melodrama too, intentionally icky),Jack Vance's cheeky "The Seventeen Virgins" and "The Bagful of Dreams," starring his antiConan, the resourceful Cugel, Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder goes out with a bigger bang, via William Morris's "The Hollow Land."
Science Fiction Encyclopedia says that his early works actually weren't escapist enough, lacking committed development (of course SFE wants story stories, dammit), but still,"Morris created the literary equivalent of Pre-Raphaelite paintings: romances of febrile charm and phthisic delicacy." Yeah, well this here story (which SFE calls "confused" in passing)taps and caps the fever, rills stills the chills, swinging delirium out into northern lights revelations, with their own kind of clarity. Yes, now I can follow to and through the hollow, more than once, but never too much of "Oh, *that's* what it means," with a slightly deflated, slightly irritated satisfaction, like I had with the Brunner---though that may be more on me than him---but there's
something satisfyingly rebellious about the Morris tale.
He gets medieval on us, but not pious in any too-Victorian way (although the Pre-Raph bit is the launching pad here, but I ended up thinking more of William Blake, re the rebellious cosmic etc.)(Okay, the spasms of self-reproach can seem Victorian, but they're something the antihero has to go through, and not just for their own neurotic sake, or even *just* to catch a sanctified Scooby snack).
Also, the initial asshole-vs.-asshole thing (which I mentioned re that RR Martin slog in Dangerous Women) soon provides enough shifting of moral high ground to keep things challenging. The deployment of imagery I praised in the McKillip really gets a run for its gelt here: can see how he might've inspired her, and all other practitioners of heroic fantasy, maybe incl. overtaxers of inspiration as well (Should I re-read The Book of The New Sun, h'mmm). The end implicitly harkens back to the beginning, though not like the explicit loop of---oh well I won't spoil that. Anyway, this collection is by far the most reliable Hartwell-Cramer evah, despite a few ho-hums here and there.

"rills *and* stills the chills," I meant.

finished Canticle for Liebowitz. It was okay, I doubt it was the best sci-fi book that year but whatever. Got really tired of all the Catholic doctrinal handwringing (omg does the two-headed lady have TWO souls? who gives a fuck), and wasn't really surprised that it went for the super-bleak apocalypse ending (this is a Xtian book, after all). It is well written and constructed, for what that's worth, but I can't imagine reading it again, none of the ideas are particularly novel or inventive.

and now on to The Age of the Pussyfoot and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol 1.

I only have #3 of James Gunn's "Road to Science Fiction" anthology series, but it's so good I'd like to find the others.

― what made my hamburger disappear (WmC), Wednesday, June 1, 2011 9:34 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah that looks like a decent selection, albeit with a few old perennials on the anthology circuit. Will look out for Gardner Dozois, and for Scott's, if he remembers the name :)

― England's banh mi army (ledge), Thursday, June 2, 2011 4:43 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

Just came across Road To Science FIction in a search, Volume 4, I think. Looks like the introductions are really informative. Maybe a bunch of stories are anthology warhorses, but there is plenty of other underseen stuff.

OK, looking at the contents here on Wikipedia plenty of the earlier volumes are kind of stuffed with the obvious choices. Still like to read the interstitial material though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Science_Fiction

Wonder what Gunn's own stuff is like. Never read any.

Just read that Michael Shea passed away recently.