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

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

I'm sure many of you will take issue with various and sundry points therein but there is an interesting approach here: http://www.academia.edu/1828890/The_Writing_Machine_Ballard_in_Modern_and_Postmodern_Short_Story_Theory

searching for morris on this thread would be a lot easier if James Morrison didn't exist. sorry james 8)

have been reading *about* him recently and the scans of his books on archive.org look beautiful (and the couple of reproductions i've seen in the WM society in hammersmith (have spent the last couple of saturdays there borrowing his big albion letterpress for a friend's project)).

but those fonts... you'd go blind...

https://archive.org/details/storyofglitterin00morr
https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowhere01morr

searching for morris on this thread would be a lot easier if James Morrison didn't exist. sorry james 8)

It worked OK when I searched "William," although this is as far as I got:

So, after Brunner's deliberately knotty "The Things That Are Gods" (the author seems like he might be a schoolmaster who also coaches wrestling), Fitz-James O'Brien's droll, jaded yet energetic "The King of Nodland and His Dwarf" (kind of an animated editorial cartoon, though some farcical melodrama too, intentionally icky),Jack Vance's cheeky "The Seventeen Virgins" and "The Bagful of Dreams," starring his antiConan, the resourceful Cugel, Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder goes out with a bigger bang, via William Morris's "The Hollow Land."
Science Fiction Encyclopedia says that his early works actually weren't escapist enough, lacking committed development (of course SFE wants story stories, dammit), but still,"Morris created the literary equivalent of Pre-Raphaelite paintings: romances of febrile charm and phthisic delicacy." Yeah, well this here story (which SFE calls "confused" in passing)taps and caps the fever, rills stills the chills, swinging delirium out into northern lights revelations, with their own kind of clarity. Yes, now I can follow to and through the hollow, more than once, but never too much of "Oh, *that's* what it means," with a slightly deflated, slightly irritated satisfaction, like I had with the Brunner---though that may be more on me than him---but there's
something satisfyingly rebellious about the Morris tale.
He gets medieval on us, but not pious in any too-Victorian way (although the Pre-Raph bit is the launching pad here, but I ended up thinking more of William Blake, re the rebellious cosmic etc.)(Okay, the spasms of self-reproach can seem Victorian, but they're something the antihero has to go through, and not just for their own neurotic sake, or even *just* to catch a sanctified Scooby snack).
Also, the initial asshole-vs.-asshole thing (which I mentioned re that RR Martin slog in Dangerous Women) soon provides enough shifting of moral high ground to keep things challenging. The deployment of imagery I praised in the McKillip really gets a run for its gelt here: can see how he might've inspired her, and all other practitioners of heroic fantasy, maybe incl. overtaxers of inspiration as well (Should I re-read The Book of The New Sun, h'mmm). The end implicitly harkens back to the beginning, though not like the explicit loop of---oh well I won't spoil that. Anyway, this collection is by far the most reliable Hartwell-Cramer evah, despite a few ho-hums here and there.

― dow, Thursday, February 27, 2014 11:16 AM (7 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"rills *and* stills the chills," I meant.

― dow, Thursday, February 27, 2014 11:19 AM (7 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The imagery of the writing matches his visual art, so when I think of reading it in those blinding fonts...

I'd imagine those books were fairly large in page size

the copy of News From Nowhere i saw (which is a bit more sensible, fontwise) was standard hardback size, the other one, which is on display in british library, probably twice that.

ah, internet says
News From Nowhere = 8vo (6 x 9")
Glittering Plain = large 4to (10.5" x 12.5")

which seems right.

Red / Green / Blue Mars are 99p each on amazon.co.uk at the moment. istr people recommending them above.

Stephenson's Anathem also. ditto.

would not want to live in this parallel universe.

Aw, shucks :)

Am currently eyeing off the Gollancz Gateway Omnibus of Hal Clement books. Have only ever read his Mission of Gravity, but I really liked it. Anyone have any Clement recs/thoughts?

Dunno. Have Hot Planet in some collection, wonder when I'll get around to reading it.

Also came to post link to interesting Disch website I just came across: http://www.ukjarry1.talktalk.net/tmd.htm

"Like such other Minnesota boys as Terry Gilliam, Garrison Keillor, and the Coen Brothers, he won acclaim with his observation of the most minute and telling detail coupled with a revelling in grotesque comic fantasy and exuberant genre controversions." Hadn't thought of connecting cunning exile Disch to those homeboys; will have to read comments on them too. I'd add the heydays of Dylan, Prince, and Craig Finn.

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life
begins w heroine Ursula's pulling her father's old faithful Service pistol on up-and-coming Hitler--oops darkness, start again. Not like Groundhog Day, but she does gradually accrue and respond to fleeting bits of memory: push maid down the stairs, so this time she can't come back from London Armistice Day celebrations w Great '18 Flu? Start again. Early and final sections are pretty lively-to-deadly, but the middle's a slog, as her lives get longer and she becomes "a witness," as she puts it, wry and rueful and plucky and endearing, but just while passing along received historical material. (Wouldn't be so bad w out Cap'n Obvious pushback in paren, incl. smarty-pants older sister, who seems like an audience-surrogate, an especially contemporary touch)(ditto gratuitous spelling out of every goddam thing, incl. point of brusque British witticisms).
Kind of the opposite of prev. mentioned The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which was speculative (w the sometimes poetic turn of elegant blunt instruments) approach to a worn template, while this builds up mundane marbling of a promising premise.
Might well make a pretty decent movie though, given more faith in the audience's intelligence than this author shows, and a ltd. budget. And you could certainly do worse with a book, if stuck in an airport and/or reading self to sleep.
Next: finally back to the genre, with John Scalzi's prev. mentioned, promisingly xpost reviewed Lock In.

Just breaking: Steely Dan R.A. Lafferty fans. http://www.yetanotherlaffertyblog.com/2014/09/dan-ktistec.html?m=1

Haha that's so awesome. Best news since robert Palmer turned out to be a Jack Vance fanatic.

Hadn't known about that, just looked it up.

Stevie Nicks needs to be hugely into Avram Davidson

No way

I know, but it would make me feel complete.

Time for a new screenname

http://www.avclub.com/features/box-of-paperbacks-book-club/

what was that place that was epublishing orphaned sci-fi novels as some sort of subscription bookclub? do they still exist?

http://singularity.co/index.php/about/save-the-scifi

Here are some useful sites to figure out when stories where originally published and what anthologies they appeared in. I was looking for Aldiss's "Poor Little Warrior!"

https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/bibliography/fsfanthstorieswho01.htm
and especially
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?56882

Yeah I use ISFDB all the time. Fantastic Fiction is a good database apart from tracing short stories but it compensates with the displays of cover art on the author pages.

Awards page useful too.

I actually never knew about the awards feature.

Just reserved library copy of Man in his time: the best science fiction stories of Brian W. Aldiss

Was leafing through Chip Delany's The Motion of Light in Water and saw him mention his neighbor "science fiction writer Randall Garrett." This was a name I hadn't seen in three decades and does not appear in any anthology or any history of sf I have access to. If I remembered it all it would have seem to me just a misremembering of Randall Jarrell. Then I saw that Silverberg had something to do with him, wondered if Malzberg had championed him at which point I came across this: http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2011/11/ffb-neglected-visions-edited-by-barry-n.html?m=1
Which linked to this http://efanzines.com/EK/eI29/ which is tl;dr but with all those famous names surely there is something of interest.