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

Thanks for reporting, don, thread is getting to such Dave Matthews thread magnitude reading too far back up thread may cause time travel paradox.

Okay, since all three of the following, in no particular order, Anthony Burgess, M. John Harrison and James Morrison seem to like /Timescape/ I guess I'd better find time for it.

Wow, Thomas Disch too. http://www.writersreps.com/feature.aspx?FeatureID=22

Weird, stuff on that list I somehow thought he didn't like: The Dispossessed, Lord Valentine's Castle, "Options." I wonder who compiled that and where they got the info from.

Okay, looks like some of it came from that On SF book I thought Shakey was reading. Disch liked "Options" well enough to consider including it on a year end best list but had problems with it. The inclusion of Lord's Valentine's Castle was, as suspected, based on a misreading of something, which is clear from this interview: http://www.ukjarry1.talktalk.net/difil.htm

Do you recommend I stick with it?

I would, FWIW, especially if you have some interest in weird physics possibilities. I read it about 20 years ago, so I'm not sure how much I'd love it now, but I did really dig it at the time.

Anyway I just read something great. Brian W. Aldiss's "Hothouse," the first chapter of the novel known variously by the same name or as The Long Afternoon of Earth which originally appeared as a short story. Bold and beautiful concept, brilliantly executed. Wonder if I should try to get a hold of the novel.

The book is quite good--perhaps loses some of the power of the short story at greater length, and has some very dodgy science if that bothers you--but well worth reading

Dodgy science isn't going to bother me (cf. recent Aldiss quotation about ghosts), more likely to be bothered by its "opposite" -pages of equations or what might as well be equations infused with geeky self-regard instead of interesting or at least decent prose about something other than galactic navel gazing, The Lint in God's Omphalos.

Weird, stuff on that list I somehow thought he didn't like: The Dispossessed,

yeah this entry surprises me a little - I can see how he would be taken by its scope but he seemed to really have a problem with her gender politics (which is perhaps why Dispossessed is here and not Left Hand of Darkness), maybe this was some grudging respect. He was a crank, who can say.

for my part, done with Sladek, on to Kuttner & Moore collection. The first two entries are solo stories and not collaborations (Shambleau and the Graveyard Rats) both owing a significant debt to Lovecraft as far as I can tell, although the former is maybe more successful on a purely stylistic level. And now I'm on some story about gnomes? I've never read much pulp horror/fantasy stuff from this period - may skip ahead. Curious in particular about one called "Reader, I Hate You" lol.

Dispossessed

Think the guy who compiled that list didn't totally understand what Disch was getting at, maybe just because Disch discussed something it was taken as an indication that he liked it. I know for a fact that Lord Valentine's Castle is included because of such an error- Disch uses it as the punch line in poem written by a character he despises, failed avant-garde filmmaker turned the world's worst underground poet, poem is called something like "why i like science fiction." You can read it in Dark Verses & Light, which I recommend.

"Graveyard Rats" very early Kuttner, maybe his first, don't believe anyone thinks it's his best.

Anyway came to post that I just quickly read The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farrah Mendlesohn, which has got lots of good stuff, particularly- at least for my interests- Chapter 2, The magazine era:1926-1960, by Brian Attebery. Extremely well-organized and thought out, concise witty and elegant retelling of a story that has already been limned in other places, packed with familiar as well as surprising and new (at least to me) information. Do you know who was at Horace Gold's poker game? In any case, if ilxor dow doesn't find anything of interest in this book, I'll eat my gold reflective visor.

DI FILIPPO: Were any of Joycelin's poems ever published anyplace?

DISCH: A few of them appeared in an English magazine' named Quarto. But mostly, nobody would touch them. The only places where they would be understood would be the places that would publish the kind of poems I'm satirizing. I mean, Joycelin is the world's worst Beat poet. Who's going to want to publish her? You know the St. Mark's crew? I was sort of peripherally among those people. Finally, I didn't qualify. But I got to know them well enough, and I certainly know the way they write. A particular kind of slack, lazy, doped-out way of writing poems, which Joycelin perfectly captures.

DI FILIPPO: It seems like her two guiding lights are Archy the cockroach and e.e. cummings. Is that an accurate as-sessment of her influences?

DISCH: Joycelin has many. influences. You wouldn't know some of them. Some of her dedicatees are the people who have been formative influences. Bernadette Meyer and others. Anne Waldman was a huge influence. Some of these are people whom I like, and whose poetry I enjoy, but who are nevertheless capable of being satirized. And I just couldn't resist the impulse to make fun of them.

DI FILIPPO: We have to talk about one. of the central works in Joycelin's oeuvre: "When I Am Sick, Science Fiction. "

DI H:. A tribute to SilverBob.

DI FILIPPO: It seems like a capsule description of a certain kind of SF reader, and the kind of fiction that's turned out to meet their needs. This poem cites Lord Valentine's Castle -

DISCH: Joycelin loved Lord Valentine's Castle.

DI FILIPPO: I'm glad there were many sequels for her.

Hm, Brian Attebery also put together interesting book reviewed here: http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2013/10/parabolas_of_sc.shtml

Which links here, if you are interested in this sort of stuff: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2013/20130826/2rieder-a.shtml

Feel like that one story ledge linked has so much science and so little fiction that I might as well just read a textbook instead.

That Cambridge companion to sf is really good and very readable--avoids the dead tongue of acadamese

Here are some links about editor Cele Goldsmith, who I had known nothing about:

http://lauriepowerswildwest.blogspot.com/2011/05/pulp-fiction-female-pioneers-cele.html?m=1

http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2011/05/women-editors-in-fantasy-and-sf-at.html?m=1

http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2012/07/cele-goldsmithlalli-interviewed-by.html?m=1

Cambridge Encyclopedia answers Shakey's question:

This new possibility coincided with a major disruption of the magazine market. At the end of the 1950s the primary distributor, the American News Service, was declared a monopoly and had to divest itself of its local holdings. As a direct result, twenty magazines (of various sorts) folded immediately and the others took severe hits in their circulation. 18 The more prosperous magazines were able to keep going, but sf ceased to be identified primarily as a magazine form. Shorter forms, from short- short stories to novellas, gave way to novels and even multi- volume series. In marketing terms, the brand names under which sf could be sold ceased to be Astounding or Galaxy and would become specialized categories such as military sf and science fantasy or individual authors such as Heinlein and Asimov. It is significant that the major magazine of the 1980s and 1990s was called Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine .

V interesting! Cant believe Malzberg didnt note this rather obviously significant detail

Asimov's Mag was never edited by IA, though publisher paid for the crowd-drawing name and to let him be a gas giant in monthly columns (after he passed, SilverBob held forth). Early Letters To The Editor complained about how different it was from cherished middle school memories, but soon enough, the range of voices and sensibilities made it work, not that everything was so significantly Asimovian (although it seems likely that many of the writers therein were influenced on some level by early encounters with his early, better stuff, among other poobahs' early, better stuff)

Lol at "gas giant," which I think I noted I learned the other day was coined by James Blish.

(Xp)
I was thinking exactly the same thing! I didn't remember him explaining this very well, if at all. But then I could have sworn yesterday I also read that Malzberg was a source of this information but I didn't have a chance to follow up and chase that down.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_News_Company

Footnote is as follows 18 . Barry Malzberg, ‘Introduction: The Fifties’, in Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, eds., The End of Summer: Science Fiction of the Fifties (New York: Ace, 1979), p. 2.

Which I believe is this:
http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/why_malzberg.jsp

What happened? A lot happened. The historical theory of synchronicity was demonstrated at the end of the decade as never elsewhere before the era of the assassinations began. When it happens, it all happens together, in short. The massive American News Service (ANS), responsible for magazine distribution, was ruled a monopoly and into forced divestiture. Twenty magazines perished in 1958, and the sales of the leaders were halved. These magazines could not reach the newsstands in sufficient numbers. The audience could not find them. But the audience had already diminished; it had never been large enough to support more than a few successful magazines, a few continuing book lines, and Sputnik in 1957 had made science fiction appear, to the fringe audience, bizarre, arcane, irrelevant. There were dangerous matters going on now in near space but the sophisticated, rather decadent form which genre science fiction had become had little connection with satellites in close orbit.

One interesting thing among many in that Wikipedia article is that the magazines were basically forced to switch to digest format by American News and then the other distributors.

Want to read the volumes of Mike Ashley's History of the Science Fiction Magazine. I guess I could go to NYPL and read online through their system.

Just read a few "Mike" M. John Harrison stories and man can that guy write.

He is so good that I don't want to sully his good name by making my own inept attempts to explain why.

that best of the year anthology i bought has circulation numbers for the biggest sf mags and i couldn't believe how tiny they were. asimov's mag is like the biggest sf zine in the u.s. and total circulation is like 20,000+.

maybe some people would think that was a lot, i dunno. every other print mag way less than that.

Which I believe is this:

lol I am just stupid then and overlooked this detail. It does seem like it took a bit longer for short fiction to die out as the predominate format and for serialized novels to take over though. while there's not a lot published in the early 60s, the new wave guys were all short story dudes.

I am reading some James Tiptree Jr stuff, it's pretty good!

"The Screaming Skull" by F Marion Crawford.

Disappointing. I love the original legends of this story and always thought they could make a really scary story but Crawford seems to play it humorously, told in a mostly tedious conversation from the main character. It does manage a bit of atmosphere but the whole thing just seemed clumsy to me, particularly how all the action is told through conversation.

am well into the late 40s Kuttner/Moore stories and they tend to swing between knowingly silly/ridiculous and disturbingly bleak, sometimes within the same story a la "When the Bough Breaks" where a bunch of goofily hyper-evolved people from the future with giant heads and dopey names/language travel back in time to help a hapless couple's infant reach it's true potential as homo superior. The infant rapidly becomes a monster that terrorizes his parents non-stop, and they proceed to let him accidentally incinerate himself. There's a lot of these kind of time-travel-paradox setups that have a gruesome or cynical undertone to them.

What's the name of that collection? I like "The Children's Hour" and "Mimsy Were The Borogroves."
Just saw this--don't have time for the whole thing yet, but starts ok, "tentacles out of the pigeonhole" and all:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin

Yeah, some stone classics are "Mimsy Were The Borogroves" and "The Twonky" (Henry), and "No Woman Born" and "Vintage Season" (Catherine)

Guess I should finally read "Clash By Night" and see what the hype is about.

One of my fave Stanwycks! (I keed; think Odets wrote that)

Collection is called The Two-Handed Engine. Agree about the Twonky being classic.

Oh yeah, heard of that, ended up just borrowing library copies of individual best-ofs.

Wonder if you've read anything featuring the Atlantean hillbillies yet.

Sf Encyclopedia article on him ends on the note that "If in the end Kuttner was a journeyman writer, he was a journeyman of genius," which is fair enough. His turns of phrase and distinctive witty take on things may linger in the mind longer in the mind than the profundities and certitudes of some of the bigger profile blowhards. I like the lineage that runs from Kuttner through Sheckley then Ballard to Chris Priest and Mike Harrison.

The stuff attributed to them both cuts deeper (they seem to know something about children and parents, for inst), but yeah he was real good under his own byline, though she was more imaginative. (Won't get back into who wrote what percentage of those published under individual names; the walls have eyes.)(And keyboards.)

Lol

Prob get banned somewheres: from Gary K. Wolfe's Chi Trib review:
Paolo Bacigalupi...('s) young-adult novel "The Doubt Factory"....
Alix Banks, the daughter of a wealthy PR executive, finds herself stalked by a brilliant but elusive black kid known as 2.0, who creates havoc at her private school and warns Alix that her father should know what it's all about. That well-connected father hires a high-tech security firm, but 2.0 and his group — all teens, all brilliant in different ways — manage to abduct Alix anyway and explain to her their real motives. Their families were all victims of unsafe products — a cholesterol drug than can cause heart attacks, an asthma medication that can lead to comas, etc. — which were defended by Alix's father and his scientist-for-hire colleague. Even when the products were eventually banned, keeping them on the market for a couple of years by creating doubt about the damning evidence could add billions in profits for corporations, who richly reward Alix's dad for his skills. Who are the real bad guys, then? Alix is caught between apparent terrorist activity on the one hand and corporate venality on the other, and how she handles this dilemma makes for a suspenseful and deliberately provocative adventure.

The Last Transmission, science fiction story in songs by Heliocentrics/Melvin Van Peebles ("picaresque"):http://thequietus.com/articles/16442-heliocentrics-and-melvin-van-peebles-the-last-transmission-review

Got 0 ereader/I am 1:
http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/free_stories_by_philip_k_dick.html

Did not know about William S. Burroughs quoting Kuttner's Fury in The Ticket That Exploded until a few minutes ago.

Any thoughts and recommendations on William Morris as a fantasy writer?

Several upthread. I'd search & paste, but can't be arsed to just now (sorry)

Thanks, I just went and read them.

Morris could make some really enticing book titles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nVPOxOZfek