ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

Hey James, tried to reply to yr kind email, but it won't let us reply directly, and the webmail form has the worst captcha evah, I refreshed it a half-dozen times, got rejected over and over and over and over and over and over. So I'll reply here: thanks, you keep up the good posts too!

has this been posted already?
http://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/

Laird Barron wrote a parody of the horror/weird scene, it included jabs at Mark Samuels in particular (however serious they were intended, nobody knows), there was some discussion of this at the Ligotti forum and eventually that resulted in Justin Isis writing hilarious rap battle lyrics.
Several spread across this page
http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=6815&page=9

The xpost link to Mark Sinker's William Morris exhibit etc is back online this afternoon. Read that before reading further, for max headroom:
When his fellow visitor/ILXor xyzzz (sic?) said it was down this morning, I told Mark, and we had this email exchange:

Mark:oh cheers, yes, the guy who hosts it (on a laptop in his spare room) sometimes has to reboot :)

me: OK, will keep in mind. I fairly recently got into Morris and those Kipling stories (if you meant "As Easy As A-B-C" and "With The Night Mail," for inst), but hadn't made the connection. Now I'm also thinking of Blade Runner's Earth, a mostly abandoned First World-as-Third World backstreet, where it rains all night in perpetual eco-ruins; also PKD's original setting, more like a slightly-future-to-us Beijing, with workers scuttling between buildings, hoping not to be singed/cancer-seeded by the invisible sun. Some later Tiptree stories too, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man, for me amazing as Frankenstein.
Probably some of Kim Stanley Robinson's later novels too, though they've gotten so long I may never know (early The Wild Shore was fine, best I recall). But I recently saw a mention of "cli-fi" as emerging trend, so we may get sick of the whole thing even before it all comes true.

Mark: Yes, Kipling’s mum was related to a famous Pre-Raphaelite in the Morris circle — his dad of course ran the Lucknow museum — and when he was boarded in England as kid (not the notorious time that became Baa Baa Black Sheep) he stayed with the De Morgans, who were also minor slebs in Arts&Crafts terms: William DM a high-end potter and tile designer (he did the fireplaces for the Titanic iirc!)

Yrs partly (Kipling's)sic-fi stories, but also the stories about ships and trains and cars — esp.the ones from the perspective of the train or ship. The ones abt cars are really intriguing: he was totally an early adopter.

me: Didn't know any of that, thanks! Will def have to read more Kipling----recently found one of his I mentioned in an anth w HG's "The Land Ironclads"---getting back into Wells, and suspect the Eloi and Morlocks might have gotten Morris (and Tolkien) going. Finally read The Lord Of The Rings, and feel like I totally/mostly get it! Specific associations re the "not allegorical, dammit!" Ring/magic can shift, but lately I think of fossil fuels as thee ancient source of modern marvels, source which must now be sacrificed to/for any chance of future lives, bearable legacy But once that ship sails off into the autumn sea, it sails, buddy. So the book is a tragedy, but fairly often experienced as a comedy, in a commedia sense: fascination of the vivid details, robustly acted out, with some mortal meat joy, and other meat conditions.

William DM a high-end potter and tile designer (he did the fireplaces for the Titanic iirc!

De Morgan Centre looking for a foothold. (Those are Tolkien's ships, right there)

Love you ursula:

http://parkerhiggins.net/2014/11/will-need-writers-can-remember-freedom-ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards/

Just heard "Dream Weaver" on the radio. Wasn't there an sf writer named Gary Wright who had a much anthologized story about some futuristic luge called something like "Ice Slide"? "Ice Capades"? "Ice Rink" ? "Ice Mutants"? and then was never heard from again? I'll guess I'll see what Clute & Co have to say.

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/games_and_sports
"Mirror of Ice"

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.sf.written/tF2gWUrE_fY

Looks like some Canadian teacher assigned it to his students to adapt as a short film. Don't think it was clemenza, though.

Can anyone tell me what on earth Science Fiction Poetry is? Poems of fantasy and horror just uses tropes of those genres but how do you achieve the conceptual framework of SF in poetry? Because without that, the tropes by themselves would just be fantasy poems or poems about radical change.

If you have to ask you'll never know.

Tom Disch might have had something to tell you about it, but he is sadly no longer with us.

Oh gosh, now that you mention it, I've seen poetry in science fiction mags as far back as I can remember, though I don't remember any specific poem, at least in part because I haven't read any sf mags in a long time. I do remember there being quite a range, from short light verse (limericks, even)to much more ambitious testimonials and mini-sagas(never got much space in the page sense).
I'll have to dig up some of those zines; meanwhile this looks like a good place to start:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/poetry

Also notable were the infusion of a quantity of poetry into the text of Brian W Aldiss's novel Barefoot in the Head (1969)

There are some poems in the anthology Sense of Wonder.

Just came across a 1962 American printing of The Long Afternoon of Earth, AKA Hothouse; unabridged edition didn't come out in the US 'til 76.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/915UUZNX5hL._SL1500_.jpg

Did you buy it? It is currently out of print. I loved the story/extract in the Silverberg SF 101 book, as mentioned on prior thread.

This is the abridged version I got (for 25 cents)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518xgA8aO7L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

in terms of thematic vibe, this cover may be more appropriate, but the UK is awesome o coures

In your favorite online sf reference work I believe that book has the tag ***SEMISPOILER ALERT** "Space Elevator" **END OF SEMISPOILER ALERT

Vandermeer has come back to one he still thinks is underappreciated. The title and author seem vaguely familiar; anybody read it? http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2007/08/19/smile-on-the-void-by-stuart-gordon/

New Yorker won't let me link, but check out Laura Miller's "Fresh Hell" for clear lens view of profuse YA dystopias, and how the lit varies from Classic adult-aimed (later school-assigned). TNY's Amy Davidson later agrees with much but not all of Miller's take.

been reading LeGuin's "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" (they had it at the library). I took Disch to task in "The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of" for his attacks on her, and while I won't recant on that count (he was unnecessarily harsh and dismissive), she really can let her didacticism get in the way. I can think of few fiction writers that have a more keenly developed political agenda that is so readily apparent in their work. Ayn Rand obviously (lol) and Heinlein and Scott Card I suppose. But LeGuin's well to the left of those boorish blowhards, and arguably more audacious conceptually. I wonder if I should go back and re-read the Kestrel books for any political subtext I may have missed in jr high, I always liked those...

I don't think I'll read her for a very long time unless I come across her work in anthologies. Because once Moorcock said her work was self-consciously literary and left him cold. But he was very fond of her as a person.

That really put me off and what you say here adds to that. But Wizard Of Earthsea is an attractive name so I'm not totally discouraged.

Moorcock doesn't always make the right choices...

Even people I know who don't usually like her (or science fiction in general) tend to like this

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81dSlqYK3SL.jpg

And this

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SCqzNF1eL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Suspect that she may have said it all and/or best with these two, judging by the others that I've read, but I haven't come close to reading them all.

http://chomupress.com/wp-content/uploads/Jane-Front-Cover.jpg

I so love this cover art. PF Jeffery is another writer I see on the horror forums and every time I see descriptions of her work it sounds fascinating. I love the idea of very British girly fantasy.

Thousands of years in the future, the division between the sexes is entrenched, turning to warfare. Many technologies are lost and much history forgotten, but gynogenesis (by which two women may have a child) is becoming the scientific foundation for the Empire of Her Majesty, Berenice I. Amidst the haunted marshes of outlying Essex, the routine and romance of homes and offices in the Surrey heartland, and the crumbling feudal heritage of Lundin town, the action unfolds like the panorama from a stagecoach window.
Jane is a sixteen-year-old civil servant under Her Majesty. Sent to audit the spoils of battle, she falls for Captain Modesty Clay, precipitating a maelstrom of events that force her to grow up fast, and in which she catches the eye of the Empress herself.
The first novel in the Warriors of Love series, a projected twelve volumes of intertwined stories told by three female narrators, Jane is a beguiling evocation of a memory-haunted future, combining erotic picaresque, breathless narrative in the best tradition of British adventure yarns, and poetic delineament of place and person.

Michael Moorcock: "a man who excels at saga-making in a timeless magic world" or like the movie Yellow Submarine w/o any of the good bits

www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=55&threadid=1374

Sorry, works better as pre-"2001" space travel psychodramas - SLUGS IN SPACE and donald malcolm, I think. Because I'm thinking of sinka.

Was looking for the thread where he said something like: "lol at Michael Moorcock saying someone doesn't know how to write."

Maybe I imagined. Closest I came was this: James Tiptree Jr. vs Robert Silverberg

Dow is right to call out her two best books upthread. They are classics imo.

Been meaning to read those forever. LIked the old PBS adaptation of Lathe of Heaven so meaning to read that as well.

I am glad to see even a big Moorcock fan like Οὖτις takes such opinions with a grain of salt.

Haha moorcock has all kinds of baffling opinions. Only makes him all the more lovable imo.

dont agree w sinkah at all of course. I readily agree that he has plenty of boring books to his credit, but his pulpy peaks are some of the best, most audacious in the genre.

Lathe of Heaven is excellent.

Earthsea saga is excellent, dips a bit in the middle but the way she turns it all around when she revisits it 20 and then 30 years on is without equal. "Self consciously literary" wtf a) no; ii) fuck off; 3) her work is some of the most generous and compassionate I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Didactic maybe a better criticism for *some* of her work, couldn't really get behind Always Coming Home.

i haven't read a ton of le guin but some of what i have read is some of my very favorite sf. she can be completely amazing to read. Four Ways to Forgiveness blew me away! i still think about it. and that came out in 1995, long after her glory years, i never wanted it to end. 4 stories that make up a book. same mythology as her earlier most famous books.

I should probably post the source so I don't misrepresent his meaning.

I wasn’t rejecting the pulps. I loved the pulps. They were the thing that I got all of my stuff from. The other stuff – frankly Ursula LeGuin, though a nice person left me completely cold. All the writers who were literary in their ambitions didn’t particularly interest me.

http://www.harikunzru.com/archive/interview-michael-moorcock-2010

It's a really good interview.

i've never read Moorcock. i like Hawkwind.

I've read his New Wave stuff. Can't bear it.

i liked the covers of the elric books when i was a kid.

I've got a whole bunch of his stuff but Behold The Man is the only fiction I've read so far and I really liked it.
Yes, it is a bit hard to swallow how Karl manages to be in the right place at the right time for some parts of the book. Some people think that even if Karl had studied the language of Jerusalem of that period you wouldn't be able to go back in time and speak to them so easily. But I thought Moorcock did a great job of portraying their lives and believes.
Some people complain it's childishly provocative to Christians but I wasn't so sure it was supposed to be offensive. It made sense to have Karl's hopes for Jesus tarnished in a demoralizing way, but I suppose you might say Moorcock didn't need to go that far.

I rank moorcock's ouevre thusly:

dancers at the end of time books
oswald bastable/nomad of the time streams books
Pyat quartet
behold the man/breakfast in the ruins
jerry cornelius books (with the latter entries better to the earlier ones)
elric books
count brass books

dont bother w the rest, aside from a couple random novels

What about Gloriana? I'm looking forward to that one.

I love his fantasy overview book Wizardry And Wild Romance (get the updated one with the Mieville and Vandermeer foreward and afterward, Moorcock adds new reviews and some new retrospective views). I was sceptical of quite a few of his opinions but it's a lot of fun.
It also has this great bit...

If the bulk of American sf could be said to be written by robots, about robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written by rabbits, about rabbits, and for rabbits.

Actually I havent read gloriana

I bought loads of books again, not sure if it was a good idea.

3 romantic poetry anthologies (Penguin, Norton and a Dover one about German poets).
2 collections by Reggie Oliver (a recent-ish highly acclaimed writer of ghost stories)
2 collections by Quentin S Crisp (a weird fiction writer, note the "S" in the middle of his name)
A collection by Justin Isis
Jane by PF Jeffery
Dadaoism (an anthology of writers of the Chomu group)
2 Brendan Connell books (Life Of Polycrates and Miss Homicide Plays The Flute; I'm intrigued by all the praise, his work sounds bizzare)
Dark Domain by Grabinski
2 collections of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (a poet who CA Smith and Lovecraft greatly admired)
Strange Tale Of Panorama Island by Edogawa Ranpo
The Golem by Meyrink
North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud
Chateau D'Argol (Castle Of Argol) by Julien Gracq
Glass Coffin Girls by Paul Jessup
Kaiki: Uncanny Tales Of Japan 3
Against Nature by Huysmans
Portraits Of Ruin by Joseph Pulver
Gaki And Other Hungry Spirits by Stephen Mark Rainey
Klarkash-Ton Cycle by Clark Ashton Smith
Master Of The Day Of Judgement by Leo Perutz
Other Side Of The Mountain by Bernanos
Distorture by Rob Hardin

2 omnibuses (Lords of Darkness and Night's Daughter) collecting Tanith Lee's Flat Earth series. The series can be bought individually on e-book now but it really sucks that there hasn't been an omnibus since the 80s. Quite a few short tales in the mythos don't seem to have been collected and I've heard she is planning two more books in the series.
Seen an interview (which actually might have been quite a few years ago but I couldn't find a date) with her saying she is having trouble selling some of her books. Hope that lifetime achievement award comes in handy.

Encyclopedia Of Fantasy by David Pringle

Asian Horror Encyclopedia by Laurence Bush (supposed to be full of errors but still holds extensive information)

Wanted to buy some collections by Caitlin R Kiernan but most of them are pretty expensive. Wanted some DP Watt, RB Russell, Simon Stranzas, Laird Barron and a bunch of others but I should probably read their work in the anthologies I've got first.

Master Of The Day Of Judgement by Leo Perutz

Went on a big Perutz binge a couple of years ago--like him a lot. His 'Saint Peter's Snow' is also a good borderline SF/fantasy novel, based on a mind-altering drug developed from a white mould.

Cool, are a lot of his books in translation? I'm finding a lot of these writers only have a few books in translation and often the quality of translation is in question.

More Grabinski books are coming out. Passion just came out this week I think.

I really wanted some Marcel Bealu but old copies of Experience Of The Night are pricey. Water Spider is in an e-book anthology called Unstuck 2 but I'm still a bit reluctant to buy an e-book if I think a print version my come out. There are a bunch of his tales across the internet but I'm hoping a new collection will surface.

I think it's weird there's never been a complete short story collection for Angela Carter.

Microcosmic lol.

Anyway came here to say that as the Great Threadroller I am well aware that this thread is on ILB and concerns the written word but wanted to mention that I have recently been binge watching Babylon 5 which is really hitting the spot, lots of multi-year multi-season arcs that really pay off, really good writing and characters, but as far as I can tell only two other ILX0rs are fans and one of them just went into a borad beef-induced space-time anomaly. The thread is here Babylon 5, barely running along like a poorly crewed generation spaceship, and contains some super spoilers so don’t click on the hidden text!

i saw it and enjoyed it at the time and have all the dvds (although i can only see 1, 2, 3 on the shelves). and a lot of the daytime stuff that's been keeping me going has finished now, so i might have some capacity.

I watched it at the time, not religiously but enough to remember g'kar and londo, and to notice andreas katsulas when he popped up on st:tng. Don't have the dvds or hbo access or much time to spare.

been watching ‘counterpart’ — two ten-episode seasons of sci-fi/thrillerdom from a couple years back featuring j.k. simmons; quite like it so far

it’s set in berlin and has a vibe not unlike that of dave hutchinson’s ‘fractured europe’ series

jk simmons is a delight. and in counterpart you get two for the price of one!

the vaccine subplot ended up being pretty fuckin prescient

read n.k. jemison's 'the city we became', in which five people become the living avatars of the five boroughs of nyc and must band together to fight evil

fast-paced, a bit too rah-rah-greatest-city-in-the-world, and almost hilariously Not Subtle -- in some ways it's practically a book-length revenge fantasy. unclear how it's supposed to become a trilogy

loooool mean! I found it so easy to love and enter into! Also fuck Staten Island for real for real.

i'd never read any jemisin before that and i found it very compulsively readable. i agree about the rah-rah stuff, which was extreme to the point that i hesitated to recommend it to a friend who's an avid sci-fi/fantasy reader but doesn't live in nyc, but as a native ny-er i was cool with it lol

vc, read all the Jemision, seriously.

i didn't say i disliked it! and the revelation of the Evil's origins was neat, if not enough so to make me actually read lovecraft.

but, you know, rip wu-tang

yeah i would recommend the broken earth series

on my list. if it's like city we became, i'll probably tear through them

SP Somtow - Vampire Junction

I first heard of Somtow and this book in the additional recommendations at the back of Horror: 100 Best Books, his name stood out but so did the word "Junction", which is nothing like the words generally used in vampire titles. This is his most famous book (considered by many to be an early splatterpunk book), not his best, I've only read 4 of his books but the Inquestor series is on a higher plane.

Timmy Valentine is a 2000 year old vampire stuck with the body of a 12 year old boy, now he's an extremely successful pop star. We frequently visit previous eras of his life and the various characters connected to him. Jungian archetypes are central to the story and the more it gets into them, the more hallucinatory the story is. Vampires can change form based on the fears and desires of the people who see them and somehow Valentine's home has same ability.

This is very much set in the modern world (or the early 80s) with all the cultural references, videogames, famous brands and preposterous merchandise. Vampire films are often referenced and I think one scene was a nod to Stephen King's Salem's Lot. Somtow's classical music background is used even more extensively than in Inquestor.

The best scenes have an incredible energy, I really like the way it developed the archetypes concept, it's frequently funny. Stephen Miles is such an odd character.

Some complaints: the writing is not quite as refined as the other Somtow books I've read. As much as he executes his imagery very well (and he can do this brilliantly), there's still lots of scenes that I think needed more fleshing out and description, because so many things that seem ripe for a juicy description just pass by without conjuring much of a vivid picture or just land awkwardly (a scar that moves like a worm), Inquestor didn't have this problem often. It isn't a long book but I think quite a lot of scenes of relatively ordinary stuff could have been trimmed a bit (especially the vampire hunters getting supplies).
I don't think Somtow aims for realistic dialogue but some choices are just head scratching. This particularly in the chauffeur scenes that are told only in dialogue, it doesn't work very well, the scenes (as I say above) could have had more impact if they were more conventionally fleshed out and the characters describe what they see at such length that I wasn't sure if their dialogue was to be taken as completely literal.
Why couldn't Valentine escape the wooden cage? What does an "irish face" look like? Why does the shoshone mother let the children out so easily? In what way did Brian being with her resemble what his awful brother was doing?

But all in all it's an admirably ambitious, frequently fun and violently energetic novel with lots of fractured, hallucinatory images. I'm looking forward to the sequels but more excited about getting to many of his other books.
Just a warning: Somtow can be disarmingly light hearted and earnest before he plunges you into taboos and extreme horror, Valentine (remember he has the body of a 12 year old boy) has sex with a handful of adults, is raped and butchered and lives through and repeatedly dies in the holocaust. Enjoy!

https://www.valancourtbooks.com/the-valancourt-book-of-world-horror-stories-vol-2.html

ok so i finally cracked open exhalation by ted chiang and that first story (merchant and the alchemist’s gate)...holy shit

^^^

That was the first story of his I read. Still my favourite tbh. So good.

All of his stories are great but yeah that one's special.

He can do no wrong

Am reading Broken Stars, an anthology of Chinese SF/F. Not that I want the same old western pabulum but a lot of the stories are a bit too reliant on knowledge of Chinese history and culture (others here might get more out of them!) The best one so far is enjoyable with only a broad grasp, it's an alternate history story where time goes forward as usual but historical events are reversed - Gorbachev gets elected president of Russia and creates the USSR, China moves from a market to a planned economy. At one point our hero travels to America where he sees the sequel to Star Wars episodes I-III: episode IV A New Hope. He bemoans the basic story and amateurish effects, blaming the downturn in the US economy.

Yeah, like I said upthread, I was disappointed in a lot of those---but the title story is amazing, and will check some of them again (although already did a fair amount of re-reading the first time through).

Found your post in among the other 5000, maybe time for a new thread. Agree with you on the editorial/lecturing aspect, and the "wtf oh well" nature of many the stories (for me including the title story, the magical realism/horror vibe just didn't do it for me) - though in my experience that's par for the course for almost any sf anthology. I abandoned the 'connecticut yankee' story after just a few pages.

If you want to be the next ThReadroller, feel free and go ahead, you have my blessing.

ThReadRoller

Thread of Wonder, the next 5000 posts: sci-fi, fantasy, speculative fiction 2021 and beyond