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

Bastable books are contained in Nomad Of Time and mars books are in Kane Of Old Mars.

No sight of Mother London or the Pyat books but I think that's because they aren't SF or fantasy (or are they?) This reissue series only covers SF and fantasy stuff.

huh ok I didn't see those listed

Pyat is sort of uncategorizable - he is a character from the Cornelius Quartet, but it's basically a historical novel by a v unreliable narrator. there aren't any explicitly SF elements, beyond various characters from other sci-fi novels showing up

Seems the new edition of Von Ben taken out Brothel In Rosenstrasse.

Breakfast In Ruins, Chinese Agent, Russian Intelligence, the Second Ether books, the Sexton Blake/Zenith books and a bunch from the last two decades aren't included either.

Von Bek not Von Ben!

Actually the Second Ether series is collected in War Amongst The Angels.
Brothel In Rosenstrasse isn't included because it's a realistic romance book.

So apart from Doctor Who, Sexton Blake/Zenith and a collaboration with Storm Constantine, this is a very comprehensive collection of his SF/fantasy.

koogs: well that's what she said; dog nose where she got it (book published in '63, h'mm). mookieproof, did you prefer the second and third dimensions, or second and third books? All of the above? I prefer those dimensions, may check out the books; SFE also indicates further developments.
Unearthed an ancient paperback, Moorcock's Warlord of the Air---good? (And what Dr. Who did he write??)

Warlord of the Air is great

Moorcock did Doctor Who: Coming Of The Terraphiles in 2010

Looks good, thanks!
http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2011/03/doctor_who_the_.shtml

I'll check out Warlord too.

Btw earlier I was looking at the orion reprints, not the gollancz ones so uh ignore all my posts. His stuff has been reprinted a lot, forgive me

Orion owns Gollancz, so it probably is the same line you were looking at, but the whole series isn't finished yet but should be by the end of the year.

I wonder why he did that Doctor Who book? I don't know him but I can't imagine him itching to do one or that it gave him lots of money he badly needed. Maybe just a fun little challenge.

Here's the complete Gollancz list, including release dates, ebook exclusives and which omnibuses include which books...
http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Michael_Moorcock_Collection

The more I've been reading about this, the more I've found how much territorial rights difficulties there are. I assumed that Gollancz books can be easily found in USA but they have to be imported. Some books have had to be renamed, sometimes the print or ebook rights are different to different countries. I think sometimes even the artwork gets into these problems too.
People in UK are not allowed to buy from the Jack Vance ebook site.

I haven't read the Dr. Who book (not sure I want to). No idea why he did it - probably just good, easy money.

Yeah, many of those Gateways are n/a in US, unfortunately.

I probably should have noted the book titles by Vance and Tanith Lee I do like

Vance: Rhialto The Marvelous, Lurulu, Eyes Of The Overworld, Languages Of Pao; Strange People, Queer Notions; This Is Me, Jack Vance, or, More Properly, This Is I.

Tanith Lee: Drinking Sapphire Wine, Here In Cold Hell, Delirium's Mistress, Faces Under Water, Forests Of The Night, Cold Grey Stones; Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer.

This Is Me, Jack Vance, or, More Properly, This Is I.
Interesting. The reviews are so were pretty much uniformly dismissive.

No I mean the title names, as we were discussing above how dull and generic most of their titles were. I haven't read any of these yet.

I remember it being said of Vance and Robert Bloch's autobios that they weren't very revealing and many men of their generations rarely open up all their deepest thoughts and feelings.

That's certainly characteristic of Vance. He also refused to talk shop on almost all occasions.

Can't recall if I've talked about that upthread but on YouTube I listened to a radio interview with Vance in which he says alternate history books are interesting, but when someone else starts enthusing about Man In The Highcastle, Vance appears to change his mind and start saying that alternate history is totally pointless! I had to keep rewinding to make sure he really did abruptly change his opinion.

It disappointed his fans when he dispassionately claimed that he only wrote SF/fantasy for money and the only reason he'd read any new genre work was if he was selling poorly, to find out what everyone else was doing better.
On some occasions people caught him being more passionate about his writing, saying he felt his work deserved to be more popular and proudly saying "my fans are not stupid". But it seems like it taken some work to get him to enthuse about his influences.

I don't know why he was so reluctant to show enthusiasm for what he did.

The public Vance was all mannerism, veils, contrariness and faux-naivete. The writing belies it all.

Yeah, but why on earth did he do that?

Wonder

It's why some people write.
Entirely new entry (replacing old) for La Jetee:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/jetee_la

Spoileriffic, but I knew the plot before I saw it, only added to the impact/

tl;dr but will read later for sure

It's why some people write.

I understand writing for wonder, but being so reluctant to show passion for your work among fans and professionals is strange.
If he sounded more embarrassed I would imagine he was so scarred by bullying that he couldn't be more open even to a welcoming audience, but I don't think that is the case.

"Wonder" was short for "I wonder."

I thought I might have made that mistake

He wants to have it both ways. And leave the mundane, ass-scratching, bill-paying, typewriting Jack out of the public eye all together.

He's a dr strange who wants to present as a Ben Grimm.

So, there's also what might well be not even a trend, much less a subgenre, but once in a great while I spot a vulture-like sort of Western Gothic, calmly if avidly accepting the challenge of a sun- and moon-stripped landscape, later for your swamps, castles and urban fantasy menu of kinky textures. Yet with plenty of white light atmosphere, and tempos picked up at will.
I was reminded of this when I received the latest smoke signal from Subterrranean, re yet another lavishly limited edition of Red Country
http://subterraneanpress.com/uploads/Red_Country_by_Joe_Abercrombie.jpg
dark-starring Joe Abercrombie's young female desperado, Shy South, whom I first encountered early on in Dozois & RR Martin's trans-genre anth, Dangerous Women, described upthread. At that point, she's all nerves, skills, painful hopes (like surviving another five minutes)(and, even more unreasonably, 'bout making it over the horizon line one more time). No ghouls or ghosts yet, except the ones you might have to peel off in everyday crises, depending on who, what and where you are--hey it's free ( as generously posted by Tor) http://www.tor.com/stories/2013/11/some-desperado-joe-abercrombie

(The mass-ed. Red Country was published in '12.)

have never abercrombied. Due to other recent chatter itt, have started R McCammon's Speaks the Nightbird. Early days yet but I'm pretty fucking finicky when I am in the first chapter of a novel and I ain't thrown it away so far. Some signs of possible authorial doofusness but we'll see.

Oh yeah, I still need to check him too. Meanwhile, I prefer the UK PB's cover art:

http://www.joeabercrombie.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/red-country-uk-pb.jpg

I am super digging the Women Destroy Science Fiction issue of Lightsaber Magazine - http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/special-issues/women-destroy-sf/table-of-contents/.

Thanks for the link! Take at a look at the aforementioned Dangerous Women---thought most of it was good, though couldn't finish the George RR Martin slog (at least it was at the end)

abercrombie is the finest 16-year-old fantasy writer working today

Cool, thanks!
This was for the Favorite Sentence (or 2 or 3) thread, but it got out of hand: from current reading, One Hundred Years of Solitude The village people find being awake all the time to be exciting, but their memories start to burn out. This is mental steampunk! To some degree.
In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting. Pilar Ternera...contributed most to popularize that mystification when she conceived the trick of reading the past in cards as she had read the future before...
Defeated by these practices of consolation, Jose Arcadio Buendia then decided to build the memory machine... based on the possibility of reviewing every morning, from beginning to end, the totality of knowledge acquired during one's life. He conceived of it as a spinning dictionary that a person placed on the axis could operate by means of a lever, so that in very few hours there would pass before his eyes the notions most necessary for life. He had succeeded in writing almost fourteen thousand entries when along the road from the swamp a strange-looking old man with the sad sleeper's bell appeared...He gave Jose Arcadio Buendia a drink of a gentle color and the light went on in his memory. His eyes became moist from weeping even before he noticed himself in an absurd living room where objects were labeled and before he was ashamed of the solemn nonsense written on the walls, and even before he recognized the visitor with a dazzling glow of joy.

I wonder why he did that Doctor Who book? I don't know him but I can't imagine him itching to do one or that it gave him lots of money he badly needed. Maybe just a fun little challenge.

There has been a concerted effort from the Dr Who people to get good/popular SF (and other) writers to do their "dream" Doctor Who novels and stories--see also Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, AL Kennedy, etc etc

Yeah, Star Wars and Star Trek tried that for a while. Think I might read KW Jeter's trilogy about an apparently badass/manipulated Star Wars emissary, mentioned way upthread (yeah, been thinkin' that a while).

From current online issue of Ansible:
Awards. Gemmell (heroic fantasy): NOVEL Mark Lawrence, Emperor of Thorns. DEBUT Brian McClellan, Promise of Blood. COVER Jason Chan for Emperor of Thorns.
• John W. Campbell Memorial: Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies.
• Locus: SF NOVEL James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate. FANTASY Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. YA Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two. DEBUT Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice. NOVELLA Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White. NOVELETTE Neil Gaiman, 'The Sleeper and the Spindle' (Rags and Bones). SHORT Caitlín R. Kiernan, 'The Road of Needles' (Once Upon a Time). ANTHOLOGY George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds., Old Mars. COLLECTION The Best of Connie Willis. MAGAZINE Asimov's. PUBLISHER Tor. EDITOR Ellen Datlow. ARTIST Michael Whelan. NONFICTION Jeff VanderMeer, Wonderbook. ART BOOK Cathy & Arnie Fenner, eds., Spectrum 20.
• SF Hall of Fame: Leigh Brackett, Frank Frazetta, Stanley Kubrick, Hayao Miyazaki and Olaf Stapledon.
• Sturgeon Award (short): Sarah Pinsker, 'In Joy, Knowing the Abyss' (Strange Horizons 7/13).

The Theroux is one I was already thinking of checking out, recently tagged on ILE's search and destroy science fiction thread:
I read Marcel Theroux's 'Strange Bodies' and 'Far North' recently, one's a cool modern-day body-switching story (kinda, but I don't want to give anything away) and the other is straight post-apocalyptic survival in Siberia. His sentence-level writing is reaally good and he has that rarest of qualities, he's fucking good at endings.

― festival culture (Jordan), Monday, July 14, 2014 5:16 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Anyone read this site?
http://greatsfandf.com/
Pretty impressive stuff but I take note that he doesn't think much of Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft and CL Moore. But those lists are overwhelming.

Through that site I found this list that terrifies me too
http://vanderworld.blogspot.com/2006/05/big-ass-fantasy-list.html

The articles on obscure writers on Weirdfictionreview are quite daunting too.

Any of you got favourite internet resources for this stuff?

(how is "Byatt, A.S., Possession" on that second list?)

I know the greatsfandf site, I like that guy. He's eloquent and knows how to tell you exactly what he likes about what he likes. And he gets it about Vance (happily, not such a rare thing anymore) and James Blaylock (still a very rare thing, and most people who rep Blaylock talk about the Victorian stuff -- mr greatsfandf understands that Blaylock's southern california magic realist novels are his legacy.)

I dislike some of his opinions but there is so much to admire there too.

I'll check it, but any reviewer who "doesn't think much of CL Moore" has a large blind spot.

thsoe lists are too overwhelming to me, i need someone to tell me 'read these 10 books' not 'read these 200' or i get option paralysis