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

Based on the one Farmer I've read (the first Riverworld) that is horribly true

Yeah, Silverbob seems to have had a great run roughly bookended by those two stories just mentioned.

I don't know where I got hold of the weighty hardback I had that collected Time of Changes, I Robot, and one other I forget. Far too young and naive for the Silverberg but I think I read it multiple times anyway.

I see the Gollancz SF Masterworks are being replaced by the less appealing (to me) Golden Age Masterworks:
https://www.gollancz.co.uk/news/gollanczs-golden-age-masterworks🕸/
Quite like the covers, though.

Guy who wrote the article also quite dedicated to reviewing forgotten women
https://www.tor.com/2018/12/27/100-sf-f-books-you-should-consider-reading-in-the-new-year/

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, January 5, 2019 5:42 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

SO MANY GREAT BOOKS ON THIS LIST!! Several of which I just finished reading or re-reading (Swordspoint, Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, God's War (which is part of a trilogy iirc--I'm on book 2 now), The Thief, All Systems Red, SO MANY

Whoops! And so many more beloved old friends from over the years--I'd forgotten Jirel of Joiry but now I can revisit her! Reading list for weeks (if I can find them as ebooks, which is sometimes not possible).

Believe Jirel exists in ebook form

And in French paperback as well, I see

I would say that you can't go too far wrong with any of the SF that Silverbob wrote in the late 60s to mid-70s, and what's especially impressive is how different the books are from each other - despite being insanely prolific, he wasn't leaning on any particular style, setting, genre.

agree w all this and feel like it's the consensus around here. Having dipped into his material on either side of this era, I'm loathe to go much farther. His earlier stuff is, completely understandably, a bit pedestrian and unexceptional, as he was quite young and still finding his voice and figuring out the mechanics of the genre. Post-comeback material I've read is just "Lord Valentine's Castle" (and maybe one or two of the other Majipoor books) and a story from 1973 ("This is the Road") that he later apparently repurposed into a novel. The Majipoor stuff I read in high school and I would think would be less forgiving of it now. It seems like post-comeback he was content to settle in to genre conventions and just hone his craft, engage in "world building", etc.

The 100 books you should considerlist is indeed awesome, b-but--no Brackett, no Cadigan, no Kress, no Seabright/St. Clair? Oh well Cadigan and S/S might be best at short stories, and no short story collections here, that I noticed, which is a major limitation. Also, good that he's got Piercy on there, but no Lessing, not even The Four-Gated City? Also no Angela Carterw!
A few guys and non-binary on here, as noted in readers' comments, but wtf:
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany (1975)
It’s important to acknowledge SF’s crowd-pleasers along with its more ambitious works. Dhalgren is just such a crowd-pleaser. The inexplicably transformed city Bellona has enthralled readers for decades; the Bantam edition alone went through nineteen printings, with sales of over a million copies. [One of my advance readers asked at this point: “But how many of the people who bought it finished reading this doorstop? I didn’t.” "I don't like it, but the kids do, but maybe not." Why bother? Also it did seem ambitious, in a seemingly leisurely way, and justifying what only local yokels would think was rape? Or was it a comment on self-justification? Liked some parts, but it's where I got off the bus, probably missing a lot of or some better stuff. Seems like very much of a ringer on this list.

mookieproof
Posted: January 5, 2019 at 3:18:26 PM
Perhaps the finest military fantasy about a Germanic centaur in a quasi-WWI setting ever.

Of course I immediately know what this is.

Replaced, you say? Or augmented by?

Well, there are no more of the SF Masterworks scheduled for at least the next 9 months.

I'm pretty psyched for the Marlon James tbh, I liked Seven Killings.

these are out in March apparently

https://www.orionbooks.co.uk/assets/OrionPublishingGroup/img/book/449/isbn9781473213449.jpg

https://www.orionbooks.co.uk/assets/OrionPublishingGroup/img/book/029/isbn9781473226029.jpg

goddamn those are ugly

I kinda like the lafferty

Ok, that's weird: neither of those were going to be Masterworks -- see the original Lafferty cover upthread. Still. Glad to see the series hasn't been binned!

Possibly common knowledge for thread participants but wow I just learned last night that the director of the Vance Integral Edition project insisted, controversially, on creating his own typeface from scratch to use for the books. It looks ridiculously amateurish:

http://imgur.com/8Aa66hnl.png

Who was the director? Paul Rhoads? I hate him

Yeah; I hadn't heard of him, or anything about the details of the project, but that is hateable kerning

I love Jack Vance, but don't really feel the need to own a complete edition in a hateable typeface - it's not that hard to find lots of Vance secondhand in the UK, yes, even Servants of the Wankh.

The ebook editions of the vie are unobjectionable in this respect, at least the ones I have bought (they have their own store, Spatterlight, run by Vance's son IIRC, and the ebooks are very affordable).

Paul Rhoads is a horrible clash of civilizations hard right neocon who latched onto Vance's legacy with his polluted beak. I don't think the other VIE people are ideologues of the same type as Rhoads and certainly many in Vance appreciation hate him.

I haven't checked lately but I do queasily wonder how Rhoads has processed the alt-right era.

Back to xpost Ian Watson's Books of the Black Current:
James M was dubious of the author's interest in mysticism, but at least here (almost the only Watson I've read) it's a cover story, one you tell other entities and yourself ('tis said that a real conperson starts with belief in own BS): a means to an end, to the Greater Good of course, also "rationalization" in the sense of making sense to yourself of some crazy senseshifting---stuff. Which goes, for one instance, with this reader's increasing awareness (narrator catches up sometimes, but then gets excited and distracted) that the Godmind (post-Singularity supercomputer of course, anointing itself w "precog myths" of Son of Man), also its "offspring," are essentially still passive, reactive, also passive-aggressive. in trying to anticipate problems or anyway solutions, to be plugged into any problems that might arise/further cohere---essentially algorithmic, maybe?
So that if our Mouth of the South Yaleen gets all "J'Accuse!", Something might respond, like,"Hadn't thought of that one, but now that you mention it---" She's not necessarily wrong in some or maybe all of this, but she sees and deduces and infers etc more than the Godmind or the Current might be aware of doing, or heading in the direction of; she makes the super/sub/post-humsn mind more self-aware, helps it further develop something like a self--which might be taken as an implied comment on or derivation from the history of religion (as well as a spin-off from Forbidden Planet, although mastermind there has to find out about his subconscious the hard way).
Anyway, one example of how familiar elements get thoroughly Watsonized, and it's all about character development (I did barely anticipate one plot point-mutation, but 0 of the ramifications). Now in the home-stretch.

She doesn't confront these Things very often, and they don't show up very often, and so many ramifications in between, spiraling to encounters that don't seem that much like previous, so of course developing habits of self-restraint aren't encouraged (not doing this too often keeps the running gag, sometimes a killing joke, from wearing out).

C'est la VIE

I hope the Spatterlight print books look okay. I'll probably be buying them mostly for the short story collections rather than easy to find novels.

Andre Norton has had quite a reappraisal in the last few years. But still, these retrospectives haven't given a list of the best ones. I've got my eye on a few collections.
https://www.tor.com/tag/andre-norton-reread/
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/reviews/series/50-nortons-in-50-weeks

I don't think Nicoll's list on the Tor site was supposed to be his definitive list or anything.

Sad that there isn't more Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks. I imagine they sell poorly because the prose style of fantasy classics is generally less accessible to most people.
This is actually the third time Gollancz has packaged some of that CL Moore material as classics. There was a Fantasy Masterworks and SF Gateway Omnibus with that stuff.
I'm happy about the Leigh Brackett announcement.
Wish Gollancz did more collections.

No joke: I searched amazon for "Pamela Sargent Shore Of Women" and I got a result saying "we cannot find Pamela Sargent Shoes Of Women"

xpost Books of the Black Currentcharacters' mythopoeic urges getting more psychedelized go sister go

Finished it, and immediately started jumping back into it, toward the Afterword, written by another character, with her own, cooler-minded speculations about the authorship, comparative veracity, and long-superseded ancestral mindset behind these planterary-to-cosmic "romances," as she accurately labels them up front--"not that we aren't great romancers ourselves!" Magical thinking makes some great self-sacrifices/selves-sacrifice at times, in some bearable forms---incl. being taken as so quaint and done---but always comes back, the real black current maybe.
What an entry! Had no idear he's done so much:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/watson_ian

I am about halfway through first Ghormenghast book (Titus Groan) and I totally get why goths love this, but not sure if I do, really. It is appealingly idiosyncratic, but the glacial pacing and obsessively detailed descriptions of every setting and minute character movement gets a little hard to slog through. The whole thing feels like a fussy Tim Burton movie.

robyn hitchcock's favorite book btw

lol doesn't surprise me at all

Looking forward to it as I'm usually let down by lack of description in books.

====

Priya Sharma - All The Fabulous Beasts

Sad families and lovers, many of them horribly depressed and/or with some sort of aspect of another species.

Most of the stories are set in Britain (one of them over a hundred years ago), two in Hong Kong and one in India.

Despite most of the stories having a supernatural element and a few using mythology (one of them goes much further into fantasy), these are very grounded in realism, relationships being the main focus. The cover and title don't suggest quite how gritty and bleak the stories are.

I've got mixed feelings about this collection, there were lots of times I recognized Sharma's skill but just wasn't especially engaged, sometimes I thought the comparisons were overdoing it a bit (particularly all the things compared to birds in "Crow Palace"), and sometimes I felt the stories deserved something a little better than the perhaps too traditional supernatural elements they had.
But I was also frequently swept away with the stories and found several of them quite emotional. All in all, it's a pretty solid collection, the best stories are very good ("Son Of The Sea", "Fabulous Beasts", "The Absent Shade" and "Rag And Bone").

http://www.egaeuspress.com/The_Book_of_Flowering.html

Looks nice.

Post a controversial SF opinion -

Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel Ringworld by Larry Niven is boring as fuck

Truthbomb

And that's supposed to be his good one before he went bad.

I received one of the Spatterlight paperbacks of Jack Vance and the typeface is a regular one, not like the screenshot above. These short story collections are very handy because there's never been good options before, mostly a lot of Best Ofs with overlapping contents.

Wondering what I'm going to have to sacrifice to read as much of my wishlist as possible. Hope that a lot of the writers turn out to suck, so I can whittle down the wishlist.

yeah i don't really 'get' ringworld. probably wouldn't have finished it if i hadn't brought it with me to the middle of nowhere

Never liked that one myself, preferred some of his short stories.

i finished a couple Scalzi novels recently, The Collapsing Empire and The Consuming Fire, the first two in a trilogy set to be finished later this year iirc. Very good, I thought. I guess it would depend on your tolerance for Scalzi's irreverence but it's a got a good cast of characters and could make for a decent TV series (it's been optioned, which usually means bupkis but you never know). Both are pretty swift reads.

xp re: Ringworld.

The rampant interspecies sex (rishathra) held my pre-adolescent attention in 1982. It served some contractual/potlatch function, but I was totally cool with that at age 11.

Niven was always more a big idea guy than a someone who could plot an epic. So my nearly 35-year-old recollection of the book is as very episodic, reliant upon whether one could identify with aging-yet-not Louis Wu, improbably lucky Teela, feline pre-Worf Speaker-of-Tongues, or coward mastermind Nessus (still remember them, I'm not all gone). If you didn't want to be Wu or Teela, or bone them, then it fell apart.

'ringworld' --- every generation gets the big dumb object book it deserves -- and this is the big dumb object of the first return to conservatism -- plus it could pander to post new wave sensibilities in that people had sex and there were swears --

I recently read that Niven used to be a Marxist and that he hadn't swung fully right by the time of Ringworld, cant really find much about that.

For a while I didn't think I had any interest in buying a Heinlein book but seeing peoples hugely differing reactions to his work (most people I follow are not right wing) fascinates me. Like similar enough readers having totally different views on his most famous works.
Some trans person said that a few of their trans friends believes Heinlein may not have been completely cis or might just have had a fetish, because they said that men transforming into women is a recurring thing in his work.
Recently listened to a Pat Cadigan interview and I really didn't expect her to revere both the man and his work.

ringworld' --- every generation gets the big dumb object book it deserves -- and this is the big dumb object of the first return to conservatism -- plus it could pander to post new wave sensibilities in that people had sex and there were swears --

Knew going in that Niven was part of the libertarian/conservative SF wing, but I couldn't especially read Ringworld as a right-wing tract (tbh, I was so bored I wasn't paying deep attention), tho' any 'big dumb object' can obv do almost any kind of metaphorical heavy lifting if you really really want it to. In Ringworld and Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama (another beloved hard SF favourite that did nothing for me) the big dumb object has been abandoned, its purpose unclear even at the end of the book - so in both cases, there's also the sense of past glories gone, vanished. I guess that could be considered a conservative version of history.

As to the New Wave influence, the book that Ringworld most reminded me of (other than Rama) was Samuel R Delany's Nova, which I adored when I read it fairly recently. Both Niven and Delany are doing a kind of Bester re-boot - slam bang incident and invention, smart slick writerly style (Delany more poetic, to good and bad effect), big cosmic canvas - except Niven gets bogged down in endless technical scientific detail, and his characters are cardboard, lacking any of Delany's florid, compelling self-involvement (or Bester's hep cat cheekiness). Needless to say, the treatment of the few female characters in Ringworld is close to grotesque.

Science Fiction always seems like a form that's constantly in dialogue with itself, so Ringworld definitely feels in part like Niven's manifesto for a modern hard SF, and sometimes (but only sometimes) it's smart and flip and fast enough to anticipate cyberpunk, while at the same time fighting against SF as an 'inner space', psychologically more complex literary form.

Good post, although I felt like Nova was a little bit overrated when I finally got to it a few years ago.

TY James - I guess Nova also has a mystical, metaphysical dimension (all that tarot stuff) that's absent in Ringworld, and that I'm a bit of a sucker for when done well.

Re: Heinlein - of the classic 'big three' of 20th-century SF - Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein - he seems to be easily the best writer as writer amongst them, tho admittedly it is not a hugely high bar set by the other two. Needless to say, his many flaws and kinks - the fascisty social and racial politics, the incesty leering - make him by far the most 'problematic', too.

I would say of those three Asimov is easily the worst writer. Heinlein was a good writer in that sense that he adapted some kind of clean, propulsive Dashiell Hammett style to sf, but it comes with all that baggage you mention which makes it difficult for many of us to (re)read. Clarke can be a bit of a snooze but he has a mystical side that intrigues, particularly evident in The City and the Stars.

I love incest fantasies so that's a recommendation for me.