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

This fanzine website has some potentially interesting interviews, here' one with Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett for starters: http://www.tangentonline.com/index.php/interviews-columnsmenu-166/1270-classic-leigh-brackett-a-edmond-hamilton-interview.

I have two words for you: I, Asimov

Thanks for the interview; I've really gotta track down several of their own stories and others they mention. "Saurian Valedictory"! Turns out it's by Norman L. Knight, published in the January 1939 issue of Astounding Stories. That's all I've found about it online, though Google Books shows it in the index of Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. Science Fiction Encyclopedia's site says he was a Dept of Agriculture scientist who only published 11 stories, and is mainly noteworthy to them for collaborating with Blish on A Torrent of Faces.

That's about all I could find out about him, too. "Saurian Valedictory" indeed.

Think Edmond Hamilton wrote a lot of old school space opera that can read a bit dated,such as http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/1401403190/1401403190.htm. Leigh Brackett was more versatile and adept at different registers, she could write her poetic planetary romance as well as hard-boiled, interested to read No Good From a Corpse

Not sure if this was linked yet. Interesting stuff about her working with Bogart, Hawks and Faulkner on The Big Sleep. http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue250/brackett1.html

Would also like to say that the anthology Sense of Wonder edited by Leigh Grossman, contains many of the same authors and stories as a subset of its vast contents. Perhaps more importantly, it contains genuinely interesting and informative accompanying articles from scholars and fans, a welcome change from the kind of jokesy, folksy "Defensive -Who Me?" intros that plague the genre.

I neglected to put BOOKS! in the 50s part of my terse timeline.

For instance, this guy has an article about the Baroque in sf: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0601/monstrous.htm

Really enjoying this---although bugs me a little, after so much about Moore, that he refers to Kuttner as the (sole) author of "Vintage Season." My local library's ancient copy of Stories For Late At Night,the Hitchcock anthology where I found it,credits her---though a later edition lists both as authors, and it seems to have been originally published as by Lawrence O'Donnell, their collaborative pseudonym. Must find Lucretius' True History!

To Kuttner? Alone? That seems like a major mistake. Haven't actually read beyond the beginning of that yet. At least he knows that she wrote "Shambleau" in his other article.

Oystein I'd be interested to hear what you think of The Book of Skulls, I found it unbearably misogynistic

Sorry though I was posting on this thread yesterday Best Story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964 (Unabridged Version)

But since don is already on this thread

12. Some dispute exists over whether Kuttner is the sole author of this story; the anthology, The Best of C. L. Moore (1975), edited by Lester del Rey, attributes "The Vintage Season" to her. It originally appeared, however, under Kuttner's by-line. (back)

Which is what you said. Never mind.

Why is it misleading? In Moore's foreword she basically says the novel was almost all his?!?!?

Attributing "The Vintage Season" to him solely seems very weird to me. O'Donnell generally meant it was written by both, but %s might be a fools game here.

I don't know why about Fury, that's all it says. I don't have a copy with that intro. Maybe they mean "not 100%."

Yeah most of their stuff was collaboratively rewritten or at least edited, but she makes it clear that at most she contributed an 1/8 of the work on Fury.

Figure whoever's name is on there is the majority writer and don't worry about the % like you said. Too bad about the misattribution because otherwise that guy's reading of the story is right on. I guess when he wrote it he didn't figure on three "Vintage Season" fans from the future coming back in time to factcheck.

Oh, I see. Maybe he couldn't get ahold of the original issue of Astounding from 1946 and so looked at the toc of Spectrum II edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest from 1962.

dudes!

ANCILLARY JUSTICE

anybody else on board with this shizz??? i just ate this up, didn't want it to end

saw that listed here and thought it sounded the most interesting...

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/18/sf-shortlist-arthur-c-clarke-award-newcomers-science-fiction

I vote for The Adjacent.

Alex is Fury a sequel to "Clash By Night" or an expansion/reworking?

This sorts it all out, to a reasonable extent: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/moore_c_l The authors of this entry seem pretty sure she was the main, perhaps sole author of Fury and Vintage Season (haven't read the former, but VS seems like hers in terms of emotional dynamics, imagination and lyricism; maybe he helped her keep the plot and dialogue in focus, which always seemed like his strongest suit, although he had his own sense of texture). Good comments here too: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/kuttner_henry Just get all their stuff. (James, you were trying to find Kuttner's "Piggy Bank": my local library has it, and Poul Anderson's "Brain Wave," in Vol. 2 of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher. Maybe your library has it too?)

Ha,here's a good description of both volumes, preceded by just a bit of good geekin' re Boucher (cool as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction too; anybody read his own fiction?) and a few other anthologists. Right that it was a staple of The Science Fiction Book Club for many years, so still likely to be in libraries; also right that some of the stories are hard to find elsewhere: http://www.philsp.com/articles/anthopology_101_07.html

xxp sequel.

Moore is generally credited with Vintage Season alone. Fail to understand why anyone would give her primary authorship of Fury when in a foreword she basically says it was Kuttner's book, but whatever.

maybe they're wrong, I dunno: Kuttner may have been the primary user of the Padgett name (for details of which, see his entry), but the O'Donnell stories were more often Moore's. These include the remarkable Keeps sequence – comprising Clash by Night (March 1943 Astounding; 1952 chap) and Fury (May-July 1947 Astounding as Lawrence O'Donnell; 1950; vt Destination Infinity 1956) – which was collaborative (though it has been reprinted as by Kuttner alone, Moore signed copies of the book);

credit so that's not wiped, hopefully: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/moore_c_l

Of course she might've "signed(autographed?)copies of the book" just cos she wrote *some* of it, and she was the only living co-author by whenever she signed (he died in 1958, at 43).

No one is saying Kuttner didn't write Fury. It was put forward as one of the exceptions to the rule that "O'Donnell" was usually primarily Moore. The wording of the sf-encylopedia simply seemed to be a concise way of saying "attributing it to Kuttner only is misleading since Moore no doubt wrote a little of it, or at least helped out in some fashion or another, which bears pointing out, in case you didn't know." The bizarre thing was that in an otherwise interesting article about "Vintage Season" the author attributed that story, "Vintage Season," to Kuttner, based on it originally appearing under his name, which makes no sense since everyone else says it appeared under "O'Donnell," unless you hypothesize that he made an erroneous assumption based on an earlier misattribution by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest in a 1962 anthology. What this whole mess really needs is a time-slipped Twonky repairman to come back to fix it.

And while he is at it let him tell us which of those Arthur C. Clarke nominees will stand the test of time, apart from The Adjacent of course, so we can read it.

A tremendous amount of their work was collaborative. The sentence implies the O'Donnell stories were more often hers and then gives two examples which are basically marginally so (again given that they both rewrote/edited the other's stuff I fail to see point). The addition of the Moore signs them now just further confuses more. Anyway original point was its not misleading that the novel comes out under his byline. He largely wrote it ACCORDING to Moore herself.

I think the takeaway is that in parallel universe where I am writing scholarly articles on this stuff I will be sure to avoid this issue by the following type of formulation "this story originally appeared in Weird Tales, 1943, under the byline *looks at copy of original magazine on desk* Lewis Padgett, pseudonym of the writing team Kuttner and Moore. For a discussion of a more detailed attribution I refer you to the literature."

Probably the safest course.

Oystein I'd be interested to hear what you think of The Book of Skulls, I found it unbearably misogynistic
Overall I thought the book was OK, though I'm still not sure why it's marketed as science fiction. I guess it could be marketed as fantasy as a way of hinting to readers that "y'know, this immortality racket *MIGHT* be real!" Guess there's a big discussion one could have about what labeling something as a certain genre even means.

I didn't think of it as misogynistic when I read it, but I did find it hard to read about the way these kids saw women, and their (to me alien) promiscuous attitudes. I guess that's not too different. Tbh, I thought that was more about my hangups than the author's, but I have a tendency to assume it's my fault when I don't like something like this in a book. Maybe the author had a reason for it, but I couldn't really tell.

Since it's all told from these guys' perspective, you can always argue that it's just the characters being misygonists, not the book! But then why's it there? Some of the stuff about homosexuality was pretty weak as well.

Still, there was some fun to be had in seeing how all these characters saw and judged one another, and I did think it picked up halfway through once the damned roadtrip and introduction of the characters was more or less done.

Wonder how those fuckers at the temple would've handled it if one of the kids who showed up had been a woman, given one of the idiotic trials they had to go through. It will be some time before I'm up for reading any more Silverberg, I think.

(sorry that this is so messy -- I'm about to leave work but figured I'd try to at least say something)

I haven't read that one but it doesn't sound particularly representative of peak Silverberg imo

For me that peak would be "Mugwump 4"

Haven't heard of that one; still want to read his Dying Inside, which has been described to me as somewhere between prime Philip Roth and PK Dick, at least atmospherically.
Also in the sense of SF etc. with literary appeal/standards (no painful/clunky syntax, anyway, nor too-crass grasping at tropes), I'm so far enjoying Vampires in The Lemon Grove, short stories by Karen Russell.It's holding up well in the wake of other crossovers from Creative Writing turf, xpost Whitehead'sZone One, Perrotta's The Leftovers; ditto the most recently xposted back-and-forth of Hartwell-Cramer's Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder and Anderson's Tales Before Tolkien. So far.

Oh yeah, and she's got that new novella about dealing with a world epidemic of insomnia, but so far it's only available for Kindle and Audible. Good interview this week on Fresh Air podcast; think she read some of it too, but need to re-listen amid less multi-tasking/-slacking.

Will check that out, thanks.

I tried reading the Book of Skulls last year but couldn't finish it. Didn't like the misogyny, didn't like any of the characters or find them sympathetic or intriguing.

Just finished 'Store of the Worlds' by Robert Sheckley which I enjoyed very much, though. Lots of interesting ideas and although a lot of the stories are influenced by technology and social/political events of the 50s/60s, overall the concepts and execution/writing felt pretty contemporary to me.

Think Sheckley really stands the test of time. If he were a B-picture director or noir cinematographer he would be eventually get his MoMa retrospective I guess that NYRB collection is the equivalent.

Haven't heard of that one; still want to read his Dying Inside, which has been described to me as somewhere between prime Philip Roth and PK Dick, at least atmospherically.

More Roth than Dick, but not a bad description: it's an ageing-Jewish-man-losing-his-potency story, but instead of sexual power it's telepathy that's fading. It's a really good book.

Thanks Oystein (and salsa shark), I ws a bit worried I ws being oversensitive bt yr experience(s) w that book sound like I'm not alone, so good. Also sounds like Book of Skulls isn't Silverberg at his best, so if I get the opportunity I'll prob give him another go

Reading this new one, Adam Christopher's 'The Burning Dark', after seeing a couple of rave reviews. So far it seems more like a not-great, not-awful haunted-house story set on a spaceship that relies on your having seen Aliens to do the heavy lifting in its world-building.

I think I need to get Ancillary Justice.

This story A Logic Named Joe by Murray Leinster is celebrated and studied as having predicted the internet in 1946. It's written in a kind of humorous pulpy style reminiscent of Fredric Brown. Let me know what you think.

Read three of the five Sheckley novels compiled in this: http://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/images/Sheckley-600.jpg

Not bad, generally amusing, occasionally tiresome. There's an extended fantasy-type detour in Mindswap that is fairly pointless and goes on way too long, for example. Journey Beyond Tomorrow struck me as the best, the one where the satire and the stylistic shifts in authorial style work most in concert. Oddly, I am also reading Pohl's "Age of the Pussyfoot" at the same time, which contains what has to be an intentional and direct nod to Sheckley with the "Immortality, Inc." conceit.

three stories in to this and i wanted to stop. one of the stories being some xian parable about god dying and the devil going to heaven and another story being a long fairy tale about a prince and princess didn't help.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c2/CrownOfStars.jpg

i might go back to it. in the meantime i started this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/TheWholeMan%28Brunner%29.jpg