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

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.

Apparently he also wrote a lot of parodies of other sf writers under the rubric "Parodies Tossed" - get it?

Second link is to something called "Who Killed Science Fiction?"

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

― Thus We Frustrate Kid Charlemagne (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 19 October 2014 19:11 (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so is this guy still a witless piece of crap or

More Than Human is one of the few books in the Box Of Paperbacks I’d read before. I liked it quite a bit the first time, and I’ve been saving it until some point relatively late in the project—and we are getting toward closing time—when I wanted a sure winner. (In retrospect, maybe I should have sandwiched it between some of the Lensman books to come.) If anything, I think I appreciated it more this time, both for its compassion for freaks and misfits, and its ability to see, in their mutations, a way to the future.

Just finished John Scalzi's aforementioned Lock In. It's tight, lotta fun, especially after xpost Atkinson's sometimes plodding Life After Light Another xpost science fiction police procedural, imaginative enough that the template gets a little recharge or three (whodunnit is not much of a surprise---except in some of the sometimes devilish details, and that's the way to do p.p.) Shippey's review, reposted below, mentions Asimov, but seems like most relevant are Laws of Robotics (fucked with here, of course). Otherwise, it's more like the sardonic sense of power trips, relationships of ownsership, etc., found more in some of Asimov's peers, like Damon Knight (esp. the xpost four-novella edition of his Rule Golden); also Kuttner, Pohl, you know the scene.
Also, despite the penultimate caveat here, it really doesn't get too technical (more like the 50s b-movie response to: "Explain it in our own language, Doc.")

Lock In

By John Scalzi
TOR, 336 pages, $24.99
review by Tom Shippey, WSJ
Comparing the latest novel by John Scalzi with Isaac Asimov's famous "The Caves of Steel" from 60 years ago makes you realize how much modern sci-fi authors have had to raise their game. Both books have detectives trying to solve a murder shaped by human/robot interaction. But ideas of robots have changed beyond recognition, and scenarios now have to be much more complex.

Mr. Scalzi's imagined future is shaped by "the Great Flu," the pandemic often prophesied for our networked world. In some cases, the flu turns into something like meningitis. The next stage is complete paralysis, the sufferers forever "locked in" their own minds.

Technology can help. Once the first lady suffers "lock-in," research money pours into developing neural implants, which the "Hadens" (as they're called, after the first lady) can use to control robot avatars, or "threeps" (derived from "C-3PO"). These give them life in a second body. The same neural implants can be used to merge with "Integrators," Hadens with no physical disabilities but the capacity to receive—for substantial payment—the presence of alien minds. In a phrase, they're human threeps. The capacity for corruption is obvious —think cross-gendering, to start with—and so is the potential for confusion. What is an FBI agent to think when he, or rather his threep, comes on a crime scene where an Integrator appears to have committed a murder? He sits in the blood saying, "I didn't do it," and maybe he didn't. But who, then, was using his body?

In the background are politics and money. Some Hadens see themselves as a new species, while those with only one body claim noisily that Hadens have unfair advantages. The Senate is about to pass a bill removing the Hadens' subsidies. Neural implants draw parasites like computers draw hackers. Mr. Scalzi keeps upping the complexity from one level of grisly opportunism to the next. Every time he does, you feel you should have been able to predict that, but he is always a jump-and-a-half ahead.

Sci-fi has always been, we should remember, a high-information genre that demands and repays reader interaction. If you can't handle words like "polyproprioreception," let alone the concept behind it—well, stick to mainstream. Though that will leave you at the mercy of the future.

― dow, Tuesday, September 9, 2014 4:53 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Might be interesting to compare with Oliver Sacks' descriptions of his patients in Awakenings.

― dow, Tuesday, September 9, 2014 4:55 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh oh coworker trying to sell me on Scalzi's Old Man's War

Ha, thomp, I actually didn't read any of that stuff he wrote, just came across it and it seemed like an interesting project so I posted link here for further research, topic for further research as Ver Dean would say. tffr

david hairs mageblood series has lots of cool magic and nonsense in it

Really enjoyed the three Aldiss stories I read recently by cherry-picking in various anthologies - "A Kind of Artistry," "Man in his Time," and "Who Can Replace A Man?" He's got a lot going on- big audacious ideas, stylish careful writing with attention paid to register, troubled domestic situations that are well handled and don't seem like tacked on subplots, a dry sense of humor. Looking forward to collected stories.

lamp imma check that out. after a couple books with no cool magic or nonsense in them at all i am about ready for exactly that.

i'm reading _through the valley of the nest of spiders_, i don't usually like YA fiction but this is pretty good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paCqiY1jwqc

China Mieville on Marxism, Halloween and the way octopuses use tools. He also says mentions William Morris in a funny voice.

Jeff Vandermeer, with all the stories and writers (maybe more) encountered while co-editing The Weird, still swirling around and through him (hadn't heard of several; guess I better read his anth)
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/uncanny-fiction-beautiful-and-bizarre/381794/2/

Reminds me, I got this worlds/ages-roving trove a while back; haven't tried to read it straight through, cos so mesmerizing each time I pick it up:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51vSAeHjiCL.jpg

From Publishers Weekly
Originally conceived of by its Argentinian editors in 1937, and now published in English for the first time, this unusual and provocative volume is an omnibus collection. In addition to stories by Ballard, Poe, Saki, Max Beerbohm, Ray Bradbury, May Sinclair, de Maupassant and Julio Cortazar, there are shorter pieces, anecdotes, folkloric fragments, dreamlike moments. Most of the 79 selections are only a paragraph or two long, giving us brief passage into magical visions of the world culled from the work of an international array of authors of the past three centuries, including less well-known authors such as Santiago Dabove, Edwin Morgan and Niu Chiao. The keynote tale may well be Borges's own "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in which an imaginary world, conjured up by manufactured documentation, ends up eroding our reality: reality is malleable, and imagination necessarily subverts and alters it.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Business information you can use.

http://www.argentinaindependent.com/top-story/silvina-ocampo-writing-the-feminine-into-the-fantastic/

Isn't there some sequels to the Borges/Ocampo/Casares collection? I think there were others that only had two of those authors editing.
That's a great cover too, never saw that one.

about 3/4s of the way through Two-Handed Engine and my enthusiasm for Kuttner/Moore has cooled a bit, although not altogether. Some recurring motifs: alcoholism (so much drinking in these stories! Like, everyone all the time), monstrous children beyond the control/understanding of their parents, Lovecraftian/vague indescribable horrors, loads of references to classical mythologies (greek/roman, pagan, fairies/gnomes/goblins etc.) The "science" end of things is more often than not complete window-dressing, often self-consciously silly in application. They seemed prone to using genre trappings as a cover for exploring these sort of tortured psychological profiles of confused parents, doomed lovers, or amoral idiots. Loads of very Twilight Zone-y darkly ironic twists. Surprised more of their stuff wasn't used besides just "We Have What You Need". A lot of the stories feel very much like an attempt to create "modern" fables. As such there isn't a lot of engagement with contemporary issues or ideas, apart from the occasional reference to Hitler or psychoanalysis, which is something I usually find more engaging about scifi in general.

Thanx James, will check that in a sec.
Robert, this was an expansion of the original edition; there may be others, but I haven't seen them.
Οὖτις, This A lot of the stories feel very much like an attempt to create "modern" fables. seems to contradict this: As such there isn't a lot of engagement with contemporary issues or ideas, apart from the occasional reference to Hitler or psychoanalysis, What does the "modern" attempt consist of?
which is something I usually find more engaging about scifi in general. What do you find more engaging?

Good one, James! Still need to read her and Bioy Casares.

(Looks at my terrifyingly huge shopping list) ah, it was Extraordinary Tales edited by Borges/Casares.

A lot of the stories feel very much like an attempt to create "modern" fables. seems to contradict this: As such there isn't a lot of engagement with contemporary issues or ideas, apart from the occasional reference to Hitler or psychoanalysis, What does the "modern" attempt consist of?

mostly placing things like fairies and monsters in the context of drunk adults lol (I am not entirely kidding). The settings are modern insofar as they involve the juxtaposition of things from classical antiquity/fairytales/myths against regular adults with jobs and cars and families. But there's little of the "what if [insert trend in modern society] was carried to some extreme conclusion", there's very little that explicitly connects the stories to a time and period any more specific than "some time in the 20th century".

which is something I usually find more engaging about scifi in general. What do you find more engaging?

I'm referring to authors extrapolating from some uniquely contemporary situation or new scientific idea into the future. The Martian Chronicles isn't really about Mars, it's about Bradbury's reservations about contemporary culture and politics. PKD writing about drugs and religious visions and figures in a way that is very late 60s/early 70s. Bester and Sturgeon writing obsessively about psychoanalysis is a very 50s thing. Cyberpunk guys reflecting the dawning 80s obsession with computers and information systems. There isn't really any of this in Kuttner/Moore, the details of their stories are deliberately vague and generalized in an attempt to occupy that archetypal space that belongs to fables and myths. Specific dates or locations or cultural references are pretty much entirely absent from their stories. There isn't anything wrong with this - these are well-written, engaging stories - they just take a tack that's a little different then what I usually like to get from sf.

enough (specific dates or locations are rarely mentioned,

hmm sorry for that text tag at the end there

here's an example - one of these stories is about a couple renting a room to a strange roommate. turns out the roommate is keeping fairies in a birdcage in his room and the fairies bring him good luck. the couple disturbs the fairies, roommate moves out but leaves the birdcage behind, and then some more slovenly, "less lucky" fairies move into it. the end. All of the tension in the story centers around this couple trying to a) find out what's in the birdcage and then b) not being able to accept that fairies are real. There's pretty much no details given about the couple, where they live, what they do, etc. beyond the fact that they like to go to a local bar to drink.

Ha ha, great descriptions, thanks!