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

thanks to everyone for turning me on to james tiptree jr. sheesh.

the stories come wrapped in this standard issue sci-fi tone, people saying "jeez!" a lot, lovers casually mentioning physics periodicals to each other, and then there will be something incredibly disturbing, and i wonder, "was that allowed then, to write things like that?" but before i've finished asking it the paragraphs have exploded into hot vertical shards and the universe has imprisoned the characters into frozen glyphs of unending pain and the story ends. and the next one's similar. it's addictive!

still reading Robert Sheckley, of course.

Two of my favorite posters reading two of my favorite authors :)

With Loncon3, the largest WorldCon in history disappearing into the rear-view mirror, convention guest of honour John Clute joins Gary and Jonathan on the podcast to discuss fantastika, the mission of science fiction, the SF Encyclopedia and much more.
http://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-198-john-clute-science-fiction-and-loncon/

Just heard that one of the new Vandermeer anthologies is a big collection of feminist SF.

thanks to everyone for turning me on to james tiptree jr. sheesh.

the stories come wrapped in this standard issue sci-fi tone, people saying "jeez!" a lot, lovers casually mentioning physics periodicals to each other, and then there will be something incredibly disturbing, and i wonder, "was that allowed then, to write things like that?" but before i've finished asking it the paragraphs have exploded into hot vertical shards and the universe has imprisoned the characters into frozen glyphs of unending pain and the story ends. and the next one's similar. it's addictive!

Very well put. I'm reading the new edition of 'Her Smoke Rose Up Forever' a few stories at a time between other books, as the concentrated misanthropy gets a bit much, but it's frequently amazing. I especially love the one, can't remember the title, of the man running backwards in time towards the detonation of nuclear war.

Found that one yesterday looking for online freebies, it's The Man Who Walked Home:

http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/9781625791542/9781625791542___2.htm

... two others linked here: http://www.freesfonline.de/authors/James_Tiptree,%20Jr..html

excellent!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMga-1TVZWc

yessssss

Tom Baker bit is lol

Alan Moore doppelganger at 11:46 (I suppose it could really be him?)

lol Dreamsnake

This morning before breakfast (trying to beat the heat, hit the library early), I read Tiptree's "Beam Me Up," killer opener of Hartwell's The Science Fiction Century You'll guess the basic plot from the title, and it's early, even has an old-time tacked-on ending, but the damage is already done: nobody but JTJR, leaving her calling card and a dark buzz for the rest of this glorious suburban summer day, like many in the story.

Sorry! It's actually "Beam Us Up."

http://formerpeople.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/a-literary-history-of-weird-fiction-an-interview-with-s-t-joshi/

Pretty good interview with Joshi about Lovecraft and weird fiction, pulp magazines vs modernism and avant garde movements, comparing approaches and philosophies. Also about regional differences in the respectability of fantasy.

I once saw some people say that numerous pulp authors including Richard Matheson and Fritz Leiber had a "dirty old man phase". I haven't read enough of their work to say.

I would have thought that maybe they always wanted to have lots of sex in their writing but couldn't previously get away with it in the earlier days.

library finally came through with one of my book requests: reading "The Collected Short Fiction of Robert Silverberg Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose (1969-1972)"

wow @ Silverberg's "The Reality Trip", feel like this may be his best short piece (at least of what I've read so far). Funny, dark, disconcerting, good use of the diary-as-narration device

I'm finding some writers better known to me for science fiction in A Centurty of Noir, edited by Mickey Spillaine and Max Allen Collins.
First up is Leigh Brackett's novelette "I Feel Bad Killing You." Despite the jokey title, it's serious lead overcoat weather for seedy-ass WWII-era Surfside Cali (12 years before the slick dicks on TV's "Surfside 6," which would fit right in with "Royal Pains" and "Suits" right now, if so lucky). The opening description of the low-rent outdoors seems a bit overwritten, but then it quickly turns out to be how the main character involuntarily takes everything in; he's a traumatized tough guy, close to a ghost, it seems. But then he goes indoors and you see he really is a tough guy--scarred but maybe smarter, though hellbound to avenge his dead cop brother, in any case---ready to haunt the Big Sleep/Big Heat-type action. Like if Hawks or Lang ever worked with Robert Ryan. So not SF or fantasy, but pretty spooky in its way.
Next up is Fredric Brown, Spillane's favorite short story writer. We'll see.

Just read Le Fanu's "Green Tea", pretty good ideas but nothing especially struck me in it. I really liked two of his other stories, "Schalken The Painter" and "Lord Justice Harbottle". I hope it wasn't a mistake buying his 8 volume (500 pages each) collection years ago.

Oh! It's his 200th birthday today. Happy birthday to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.

Would read 2000 pages of Le Fanu, but maybe not 4000 ... I have a crumbling cheap 1867 edition of A Lost Name checked out of the library, but it's too beat for reading ... The short stories are best but I also liked Uncle Silas and Wylder's Hand

HB

gutenberg, y'all.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/272

Seem to recall Peter O'Toole awesome in Uncle Silas (movie)

I saw the Jean Simmons version of Uncle Silas. The scary French woman was great and the fight at the end was pretty brutal for an old film like that.

Oh my God, not just OMG: figured the xpost Century of Noir's Fredric Brown offering, "Don't Look Behind You," would be gargoyle-cute, considering the couple other trenchcoat things of his I've read, and it does start like that---but this goes mondo beyondo anything else in here so far, incl. beyond even the Brackett walking scar tissue's righteous quest for pulp justice. Covers a lot of ground in fewer pages than Brackett and others, while putting the gore in phantasmagoria, with tightening logic, no arbitrary pulp seasoning. Must read The Screaming Mimi and others mentioned by editors.

Year's Best Weird Fiction edited by Laird Barron was just launched. I hope the series doesn't feel too much like a club of friends, as anthologies sometimes do. "What do you know! All the best stuff from this year was made by my buddies!"
But I think Barron was recently saying that his praise of another writer's book was nothing to do with back patting, so I'm fairly convinced he'll do the job fine. I wonder how long this anthology will go on for? Editors who are also fiction writers tend not to do this sort of thing very long.

"They left silently, wrapped in dignity like stained cloaks." That's the only time he permits himself such a turn (around two characters who have just acted like shit), but John D. MacDonald surely does draw out the nuanced truth, even more than his insurance investigator---who's very experienced, but a little too smoothly good at his job to be quite plausible, unless he reads a lot of stories like this.Were there all that many in 1952, when Detective Tales magazine first published "Murder For Money"? Gotta read some more of MacD.'s SF. The only one so far was in the Aldiss anth Galactic Empires, Vol. 2, I think (the one w Lafferty and Cordwainer, if so). "Escape From Chaos" or "Escape To Chaos," either title would fit his POV: crisis, philosophical discussion, asskicking under and among the stars. I'm told the philosophical part got out of hand in the later Travis McGee books. Only remaining SF-versatile pulpster I've spotted in A Century of Noir is John Jakes: kind of a hack, right? Hope not.

http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TCM/Images/Dynamic/i47/markershort_ff_188x141_081420061133.jpg

The aforementioned La Jetee will be on Turner Classic Movies thie evening, 7:15 PM EST. A little under 30 minutes, but quite enough; what a time trip. See it.

thx

Love how the people of the future look like The Young Marble GIants.

The xpost John Jakes story turned out okay: no trenchcoats, but early Atom Age bloody irony---a la Tales From The Crypt and others busted by the newly created Comics Code Authority---transposed to and still appropriate enough in the eco-gothic 70s. Also one by Ed Gorman, whom I otherwise know as a horror guy, but the violence here is recalled and accounted for, at a reunion of one of those bedroom community high schools where the poor and richer kids are all up in each other (horror enough, at times).

i'm still reading the cities in flight novels. taking me a while. but i'm enjoying. corny mixed with cool.

Thanks for the reminder; I'll have to check those out (from the library, yalll). But you know you're going to run into his religious thing, right? If you haven't already: A Case of Conscience, Black Easter...I used to picture him typing madly, in a monastic cell---little projection there, but not too much.

John Clute Tweets:

reading #martinamis's ZONE OF INTEREST, remembered #tomdisch's unfulfilled 1960s ambition to write a play set in Auschwitz based on OUR TOWN

Hahaha man disch was a piece of work

so, reading the cities in flight books one of the first things you come across is the motto *millions now living will never die* and at first i figured that's where tortoise got it for their album title but it turns out that's an old jehovah's witness phrase so who knows where they got it. but then yesterday it came to my attention that david briggs had a record label called spindizzy! which is totally from blish!

http://www.popsike.com/pix/20130819/360720915187.jpg

omg @ that record

on a different note - I have been wondering why/when sci-fi short fiction periodicals began to die out. Seems like the mid-70s...? Did this have something to do with the success of Dune (a phenomenon I have never understood?) Numerous authors/fans/commentators note the genre's transition, largely for the worse in terms of quality but a net positive economically, from an emphasis on short fiction and one-off novels to longer, self-contained series' of novels (everything becoming a trilogy/quadrilogy/googlilogy etc.)? I'm inclined to agree that this was a shift for the worse. My favorite 70s/post-70s guys all still clearly rooted in the demands of short fiction, even after they eventually branched out into series of novels; for the most part I am not really as interested in these sort of insular "I am building a really complex WORLD aren't you blown away" approach to novels as I am in the compact, efficient exploration of a singular concept in a short story, which seems to have been the genre's bread and butter for so long.

cosine

I just don't get why/how this happened exactly. Obviously publishers went where the money was, but what was the catalyst pointing the way (rediscovery of Tolkien in the late 60s? and then sf following suit?)

1-sine^2

i blame the sword of shannara. or star trek books.

it just happened. it's true. the multi-novel series. it's a brand thing. keeps people buying. i mean, people were reading serialized novels for a bazillion years, so, it's certainly not a new thing. even for sci-fi.

on some level, people just like the anticipation of a new installment. i have never been like this. a little bit with t.v. , i guess. Lost killed that in me forever though.

there were serialized novels before then, but they were *always* by guys who came up through the periodicals/magazines (Asimov, Heinlein etc.) Herbert was no stranger to Astounding either. But at some point those magazines died and that training ground became unnecessary, and I'm not sure why that is.

and all those early Star Trek books were by James Blish c'mon now

For a very long time, the process of coming up through the magazines was required before getting access to major publishers of the genre - this required writers to deal with editors, to refine their approaches, etc. To some extent there was an editorial grooming/culling process built into this; guys that became established in the genre in turn worked with up and comers as they graduated into editorial/curatorial positions (Silverberg's a good example of this). I gather that this more true for sci-fi than for fantasy but I'm just guessing. Sterling and Gibson and the other first-wave cyberpunk guys seem like the last major movement that started in short fiction/magazines. After that I don't really understand how new authors get four-book deals for their stupid series', but there sure are a fucking lot of them.

It is a real shame. Some people feel horror has suffered most from novel-mania because it's rare to sustain all the necessary elements over that length. There are lots of classic SF novels but there aren't a whole lot of horror novels that fans, authors and critics can agree on.
Most of those 100 Best book genre surveys focus on novels but for horror that's impossible.

I've never read many pure fantasy short stories and I wonder what they are like. Fairy tales make sense but epic fantasy in short form might be more difficult. Most of the ones I have read are recurring heroic fantasy characters like Conan.

yeah fantasy's roots are in epic poetry, it's a fundamentally different beast from sf imo, it is v much about form and archetypes. sf is more about the central, underlying concept imo.