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

Holy crap he did Mythopoeikon! I used to stare at that book on the shelf when I was 8 or 9 and want it so goddamn bad, second only to Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials! My parents got me Barlowe's eventually but never Mythopoeikon and I kind of completely forgot about it until looking at that website!

Anyone else reading 'Authority'?

Not me. But that series seems to be popular around here.

Amazing paintings on Woodroffe's site: so far, I'm hung-up on thee triptychs. Here's another drugstore paperback cover mentioned in the SFE entry:
http://www.alice-dsl.net/aymar/Reviews/Reviews_Robert%20Heinlein/Robert%20A%20Heinlein_The%20Best%20of%20Robert%20Heinlein_SPHERE_Patrick%20Woodroffe.jpg

A little sedate by comparison, but still.

Always got the detail!

He shares some ornamental DNA with Jim Woodring, clearly. Look at some of his images of temples, and in that cover dow just posted, that polka dotted tentacle-root thingy is hella Jim.

Reading the second Jeff Vandermeer Southern reach book -- promising stuff

I love Platypus Of Doom. The novella titles are great: "The Platypus of Doom", "The Armadillo of Destruction", "The Aardvark of Despair", "The Clam of Catastrophe"

Bizarrely, about a year or two ago I couldn't even find complete Orion/Gollancz Masterworks lists, I found it shocking that the publishers didn't have an easy to find list; but now there are seemingly comprehensive lists...

https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_sf_masterworks.asp
https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_fantasy_masterworks.asp

I wonder why there is so many times more SF Masterworks than Fantasy? The priorities of the company or the difficulty of finding enough fantasy books that people could agree on? It seems the fantasy series only resumed recently after years of no new titles.

A lot of these are way out of print.

Margery Allingham's Albert Campion sometimes got lured into the fantastic/sf; would like to check the pre-Internet ESP kiddie-hive of The Mind Readers, maybe others mentioned here:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/allingham_margery
Also, turns out Henry Kuttner def wrote some of the f/sf-ier of Leslie Charteris's Saint stories, (LC was upfront about his fiction factory), and may have written more:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/charteris_leslie

Was idly wondering last night - what is the earliest appearance in literature of the concept of time travel? Couldnt decide if things like A Christmas Carol qualify.

Just read Will McIntosh: Defenders -- humanity genetically engineers gigantic warrior drone creatures to help them win against an alien invasion, then has no idea what to do with all these intelligent, agressive monsters afterwards: things go to hell. Not bad, not great--would have enjoyed it more if McIntosh had written more about the things he obviously didn't give a shit about, ie the actual mechanics of making these things, as opposed only to their effects on the world, though I'm criticisng him for not doing something he expressly set out to not do

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_in_fiction
Looks like someone could have a hell of a reading project.

In Walter Map's 12th century De nugis curialium ("Courtiers' Trifles"), Map tells of the Briton King Herla, who is transported with his hunting party over two centuries into the future by the enchantment of a mysterious harlequin.

Golf in the Year 2000 (1892), by J. McCullough, tells the story of an Englishman who fell asleep in 1892 and awakened in the year 2000. The focus of the book is how the game of golf would have changed by then, but (...)

wow @ Talmud entry

De Nugis Curialium shockingly overlooked by a certain someone as an album title

Good leads here: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/time_travel

And lots more here, come to think of it ( should check SFE's ghost twin FE more often)
http://sf-encyclopedia.co.uk/fe.php?nm=time_travel

Just finished "The Door into Summer" by Heinlein - the 1950's were kinda innocent weren't they?

Intrigued by most enthusiastic references to "Burdekin's Swastika Night" on xpost John Clute's Twitter feed (which incl. Cory Doctorow), I looked it up on SFE, and waou: how have I not heard of Kay Burdekin/Murry Constantine: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/burdekin_katharine

Swastika Night is pretty amazing (and prescient, too)

Would anyone terribly mind if I made a new version of this thread in the ILE section? Whenever we had similar threads there, way more people contributed because most people seem to ignore everything but the music and everything sections (nobody makes film threads in the film section anymore).

How about Rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative, horror, magic realism, fabulation etc. thread?

finished Brunner's "The Jagged Orbit" and am now out of things to read BAH. Pretty good, standard peak-period Brunner, kinda better with the general ideas/concepts and po-mo tricks than with characterizations. Really goes to town with the race-related paranoia of '68; if anyone wanted to know how terrified people were in the U.S. of a major race war at that time this would be a good book to point them to.

shakes what is your #1 brunner for a noob to start with?

I would say "Shockwave Rider", and then "The Sheep Look Up". "Stand On Zanzibar" was the big award-winner but I didn't really love it. But the first 75 pages or so of "Shockwave Rider" are a real tour de force.

Think I'm gonna stick with this thread, for the most part,; there are several related ones on ILE, but this one has the best mix of books and comments (ILE tends to go more to extremes of the latter)

ILE overall, that is, despite some good threads.

And if somebody doesn't care enough about books to check ILB, so be it (good filter)

Fair enough, but several people who are totally into this stuff never come around here.

Really wish it was possible for all threads to be put into the correct section. Strange that moderators can't fix that.

I haven't had much to actually say about these books because I buy 50 books for every one I actually read and find it difficult to resist.

i like the focus of this thread. on ile it would turn into something else. people talking about burritos or whatever.

The new Gollancz fantasy masterworks books look really nice, I bought a few a couple of days ago (Avram Davidson's Phoenix & Mirror and Lucius Shepard's Dragon Griaule), new releases include Holdstock's Mythago Wood and Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy.

I really dislike the bright yellow they use for the SF classics.

there's already several sci-fi threads on ILE but they're all sort of dead-ends (my personal favorite is the Science Fiction and Teh Gays thread)

The new Gollancz fantasy masterworks books look really nice

Yeah, quite classy.

I really dislike the bright yellow they use for the SF classics.

For the first titles in the relaunched series they yellow-tinted all thew cover art, too: it makes them all look a bit urine-dipped. Fortunately they've stopped doing that for the most part.

Enjoyed this thread up to now, hope it doesn't take a turn for the worse. Feel like we've had a reasonably civil and interesting discussion so far. Like the fact that it is on ILB, easier to locate that way.

Yeah I meant those yellow tinted ones too. For an ambitious line that wants to introduce people to SF I don't know why they designed them like that. I guess they do stand out a mile in the shops.

Since Dow objected (being one of the main contributors to the thread)I killed my new ILE thread idea, now that other objections are there from other main contributors, the idea is even deader. I was just checking.

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/26/86/0d90a2c008a03da9bc799010.L.jpg

picked this up out of a pile of free books in the park on Saturday! Used copies go for $30 and up on Amazon. Only read the first story so far but def into this.

Yeah that, 900 Grandmothers and Ringing Changes are the lafferty gold. Nice score!!!

My brother is a Steve Aylett fan and he showed me this funny trailer to Aylett's new book about originality, which is being crowdfunded here
http://unbound.co.uk/books/heart-of-the-original

You can even win a lunch with him!

I haven't read any Aylett yet but my brother reads me funny bits from the books quite a lot. Aylett has my eternal respect for creating the title "The Inflatable Volunteer".

Aylett's an odd one - I prefer the Beerlight stuff myself, although the one about assassinating God was good. He's great at stringing together funny aphorisms/epigrams, characterization/plot are secondary to maintaining a kind of nonstop forward motion insanity.

Curious if his Lint film will ever get a home release
http://www.steveaylett.com/Pages/aylettLINTTHEMOVIEpage.html

Features lots of writers and comedians.

I got a proof of the new Peter Watts, 'Echopraxia', and am loving it so far. If you enjoyed 'Blindsight', it's set in the same world. If the presence of scientifically rationalised neanderthal vampires in that bothered you, this one also has body/brain-hacked soldier 'zombies'.

Woah, I started reading blindsight just last night. The silverberg short story?

i didn't know there was a silverberg story by that name? I meant the Peter Watts novel.

Get a load of these guys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crkt1kiNj4E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-oYbjDK3Z8

Kinda wish Poul Anderson had put on full Moondog anachronistic gear for that interview.

I actually blurted out an audible "yay!" when I saw the Lafferty cover (and that's a great book). He may just be my favorite author.

I read Aylett's Bigot Hall years ago. I liked it, but never followed up with him. Any consensus on where to go next?

Laugh With Lafferty

Lint seems to be the favourite Aylett book. It's about a pulp SF writer who is a moron but also maybe a bit of a genius.

got a copy of Malzberg's "Breakfast in the Ruins" for Father's Day. Always a pleasure to read such an amazingly sharp writer. The cynicism and negativity get a bit wearying; fortunately this is leavened with heavy doses of humor, and while he makes grand claims about the uniqueness of his perspective its hard to disagree with him, he does occupy a singular space. So far I've only made it through a bunch of the shorter pieces, looking forward to digging more into the details.

David Langford's ansible Twitter feed links a Facebook announcement of Daniel Keyes's death. I finally thought of looking at his SFE profile, which incl. several books written after Flowers For Algernon. Anybody read 'em? I've never seen anything in anthologies, other than the originalFlowers...
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/keyes_daniel

arguably the most popular sf novel ever published

seems crazy to me but then I *was* taught it in high school English. which is more than I can say for any other sci-fi novel.