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

S. P. Somtow - Light On The Sound

I first heard of Somtow over a decade ago when people would mention his book Vampire Junction as being one of the best vampire stories or even one of the best horror novels. A few years later I found out Somtow is a successful composer of operas and symphonies and that he's written quite a few fantasies. In more recent years I saw the fuller extent of his fantasy and science fiction books (unfortunately since he used write under the name Somtow Sucharitkul, sometimes databases divide his work between two different author pages), got a better sense of what he's done in music, film and television.

Some of the reviews, titles and cover art for his books are intriguing, he's very likable in his public talks... I feel an obsession coming on. I start with Light On The Sound, first part of the Inquestor series (4 books in the series, a 5th book is promised and 2 supplemental booklets about the series came out recently). Theodore Sturgeon calls it "no less than the greatest magnitude of spectacle and color since Stapledon"!

It's a story of an empire that travels the universe destroying utopias and creating extremely manufactured existences for the people they exploit. Most of the story is divided between three characters, the majority of it set on one planet, with a few brief trips to a couple of other planets. The dwellings of the Inquestors tend to be extravagant but the other characters live in very bare, deprived places which are nonetheless quite technologically advanced.

There's an invented language (explained in an appendix in impressive detail); Somtow is especially fond of joining words without hyphenating them; the perceptions of people who cant see or hear is very cleverly described in many chapters. Then there's poems and folk songs.

I absolutely adored this, I haven't enjoyed a book this much in quite some time. It's pretty close to the kind of thing I'm hoping for when I'm delving into semi-forgotten fantasy/science fiction from the 70s-80s-90s. It has the kind of scale and beautiful spectacle I to look for in fantastical weird fiction but also has these wonderful big rousing moments of a type that weird fiction authors usually don't do. This isn't weird/horror fiction but Somtow definitely can do that when he wants to. I was beaming with morbid glee at a couple of the things Lady Ynyoldeh does.
One of the best things is getting a taste of amazing things we're unlikely to ever experience. I wish I could ride the gravity devices, Udara and the Overcosm.
I also like the way it explores the mentality of the Inquestors, their ideas ingrained over centuries that even heretics have trouble shedding.

Quibbles:
Characters too often survive and progress through incredible luck.
Why doesn't the girl recognize crying? What would have stopped her? And how did she learn to talk so fluently in such a short time?
It seems like too many instances of risks being taken for the sake of action. Why were the Inquestors so careless in going to the Dark Country? Their soldiers have so much power and they could have easily avoided this. Why was the inexperienced boy left with the sensor panel?

Some people have issues with the dialogue. It is a tad unnatural sounding at times but it's set in a very different time and place.

Some parts of the big plan near the end are ridiculous, initially this dampened my enthusiasm but there's promise that it isn't all it seems. This is probably a hook for the sequel.

One reviewer said it takes too much from Dune. I only know the Lynch film version. The brain whales are certainly similar and at one meeting with them, Dune is clearly referenced. Some of the villains are reminiscent of Dune villains but not that much. I thought there was a few other more muted references to other science fiction books. But I'd be surprised if that many of Somtow's other inventions have much in common with the Herbert books.

Cant wait to read all Somtow's other books. I might go to the Riverrun trilogy, Vampire Junction, Jasmine Nights or a collection before I read the next Inquestor book. All his books are available from his print-on-demand company.

A real buried treasure, should have a much bigger following.

Somtow Ted talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUMY4WQyGOs
Somtow talking about making the English language work for you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXJFuQCJUMg
http://thevampireproject.blogspot.com/2008/12/interview-with-sp-somtow.html

He recently released a book about his time ghost writing classical music for an American guy in the 70s.

Some other things about him: Barry Malzberg played violin on one of his pieces. Tim Powers, Edward Bryant and a few other sf authors appeared in a (notoriously bad) film directed by him. He written a poem for a Thai newspaper at age 11, Shirley MacLaine happened to be in the country, liked the poem and used it in one of her books.

I had heard from the director, who I didn’t know anything about, that he wanted to make it, and my agent said, “Yes, he’s reputable, so go on and have a talk.” I went along expecting a clichéd, cigar-chewing guy, I and I was going to cry all the way to the bank after he had signed the contract, you know. First of all the image was completely wrong. It was a lithesome young Frenchman, rather elegant and thoughtful. I finally came down to the classic cliché question, “Tell me, why do you really want to make a film of my book?” He said, “There was one phrase in it that told me I had to make it, and it’s when there’s this dying woman and you write that ‘she has the possibility of joy’.”

I tell you this is utterly true. That sentence was the most important thing in that book for me and he had picked those six words out as his reason for making it. You can’t get much luckier than that, can you?

https://www.blackgate.com/2019/03/11/concerned-by-moral-imperatives-an-interview-with-d-g-compton/

Getting just a bit off topic but I liked this bit about portrayals of Asian women.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do31JulCT6E

Vandermeer couple's Big Book Of Classic Fantasy comes in July.

Will check library for Somtow's books. Sounds like you might like Dune too.

read THE PREFECT by Alastair Reynolds and followed that up by digging into its sequel ELYSIUM FIRE. koogs otm as far as it dragging a bit more than the first novel but I’m enjoying it despite it featuring one of my least-loved and very common narrative devices: cutting away to seemingly unrelated scenes of peripheral blank slate, unlivable characters engaging in mysterious activities which of course will pay off around page 350 and will be directly related to the mystery at the core of the novel but they’re grueling in the meantime (despite being brief asides). Prefects Dreyfus, Ng, and Sparver remain excellent characters.

Just read his new novella, PERMAFROST, which was very enjoyable: only around 150p, and all the better for it. Unconnected to any other works.

You'd think Amazon would tell you me about these things given that I've bought a dozen of his other books from them. But no. It turns out that he has another nother book out as well, a follow up to Revenger.

Prefects Dreyfus, Ng, and Sparver remain excellent characters.

do any of them hold lifelong and extremely harmful grudges against each other?

No.

The other characters though...

I scored high at the charity shops this week, but there was a ton of stuff I didn't buy because there are omnibuses that contain this stuff, like De Camp & Pratt's Enchanter series, a lot of Brian Stableford and a Mary Gentle book with a cover I really don't like.
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/4/4a/LTHODV1994.jpg

Always told myself I'd go to one of these things next time they came to Glasgow but don't know if it'd be worth 32 quid for what might just be a quick look around.
http://www.fantasycon.org/members/purchase-membership/

I quite like Surridge's articles, he wrote a short series about interesting but not amazing fantasy books from the 80s that show experimentation and paths not taken.
https://www.blackgate.com/2012/11/18/phyllis-ann-karrs-at-amberleaf-fair/

Strikes me as kind of weird that the fantasy novel boom didn't actually start until the late 70s.

Gene Wolfe's Urf Of The New Sun was one of my charity shop finds. Quite pleased that you actually only need 5 books (four being omnibuses) to get the whole solar cycle (not including a few related shorts stories).

Is there a Short Sun omnibus?

Yes
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?252257

But I just checked around and it tends to go for unfortunate prices. Damn. Don't know why other publishers didn't go for it.

"I quite like Surridge's articles, he wrote a short series about interesting but not amazing fantasy books from the 80s that show experimentation and paths not taken."

ooh, i should read these

-

i just read M John Harrison's The Centauri Device and Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End and for all that I didn't like them they did seem to be interestingly in conversation with each other

Surridge made an ebook of his reviews in 2015. I might get it someday.

I think this is the last article of that short series and he links back to the previous ones.
https://www.blackgate.com/2014/06/02/what-might-have-been-steven-bauers-satyrday/

He links back to a good number of reviews of his favorite books here in an enormous response to puppygate.
https://www.blackgate.com/2015/04/04/a-detailed-explanation/

He's only written a little bit of published short fiction but I'm definitely interested.

To be fair, M John Harrison himself doesn't like The Centauri Device.

recently:

jemisin's broken earth trilogy, which i liked a lot although one particular stylistic choice may have been a little much

karin tidbeck's amatka owed a lot to platonov/zamyatin/tolstoya/etc, which is fine with me. the ending was underwhelming. god bless anyone who translates their own work into english, let alone this well

pk dick's the crack in space was kinda corny

http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/3/38/BTRPLNTGQK2005.jpg

Seed Collective dedicated a song to Samuel R Delany when I saw them last Saturday :)

Just saw this: https://www.tor.com/2019/04/15/gene-wolfe-in-memoriam-1931-2019/

https://www.blackgate.com/2019/04/14/total-pulp-victory-a-report-from-windy-city-pulp-paper-2019/

Nice big pile

Review of a Shiel book I found quite funny
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2774811607

I don't read a lot of fiction, but I did breeze through "Infinite Detail" this week. It's exactly the sort of apocalypse fantasy that resonates with me, which probably doesn't say anything good about me.

https://www.tor.com/series/ok-where-do-i-start-with-that/
Quite a fun feature from 2010. Going through the alphabet with threads (most of it is in the comments) recommending the best place to start for each author. It doesn't stick strictly to speculative fiction. Yes, this taken quite a while to read and I skimmed/skipped plenty of stuff.

Obviously not every commenter is an expert on every writer they mention, most are probably just talking about the most popular books they happened to read, but there's definitely some very knowledgeable people in there and surely some trash bingers too.

I found it most useful for the tons of female writers who I occasionally hear about but nobody in my circles seems to read, lots of writers who owe as much to Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen as much as any fantasy writer, and space opera writers. Maybe Kari Sperring, Michelle Sagara West, Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison, Melanie Rawn, Kate Elliott, Sharon Shinn, Sherwood Smith, Carol Berg, Patricia Wrede, Jennifer Roberson and so much more.
A lot of them are very popular and it just shows you how distant parts of fandom can be from each other.

And sending me on my way for finding (supposedly) good early Piers Anthony and Jack L Chalker.

Jo Walton sometimes says "start anywhere with this writer", then in the case of Poul Anderson, some considerate fan tells you which Anderson books you should definitely NOT start with.

I often skimmed over writers I've never heard of (otherwise I would be reading this for weeks more) but I was intrigued by the talk of Elisabeth Vonarburg, a French writer who has maybe a third of her work in English.

====

Spatterlight is branching out into Jack Vance fanfiction, starting with Dutch writer Tais Teng (comparatively little of his work is in English).

Also reading Martha Wells talking about fanfiction. Says there was lots of fanzines featuring stories of Harrison Ford characters having gay sex back in the 80s. Recently listened to an interview with someone who started emerging as an author writing gay sex stories about Star Trek movie reboot characters (makes me feel a bit old even though I'm not).

Apparently some people go nuts at writers for not writing fanfiction! But if nobody wrote their own stuff, what are you going to write fanfiction about?

http://www.scottedelman.com/2018/08/24/dive-into-vietnamese-seafood-noodle-soup-with-rachel-pollack-in-episode-75-of-eating-the-fantastic/
Listened to this. Her novel Unquenchable Fire is in the SF Masterworks series. She's an authority on tarot cards, wrote Doom Patrol and New Gods (she hated the art she was saddled with on the latter), says that the Captain Marvel stories by Eando Binder are genius. Quietly spoken.

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

― change display name (Jordan), Monday, January 7, 2019 3:04 PM

it's real good imo

Mentioned upthread, and I'm intrigued. How is this?

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/561572/a-peoples-future-of-the-united-states-by-edited-by-victor-lavalle-and-john-joseph-adams/9780525508809/

Havent read this guy before but its the first halfway affordable book I've seen from him.
http://www.egaeuspress.com/Children_of_the_Crimson_Sun.html

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/538034/exhalation-by-ted-chiang/9781101947883/

happy to have a copy of the merchant and the alchemist's gate, but give us a novel, ted.

Maybe I can sell my limited ed copy of The Lifetime of Software Objects now--it goes for silly money

Lol at last two posts

I bought Best Of RA Lafferty and every story has an introduction by a (mostly) different author and some stories also have an afterward. Seems like overkill to me but I guess they just really want to boost Lafferty's chances of drawing an audience through these different writers.

Had forgotten about The Owl in Daylight---any of yall read any of it?
https://electricliterature.com/philip-k-dicks-unfinished-novel-was-a-faustian-fever-dream/

^ cool story, didn't know

just been through the new monthly kindle deals (UK version, 51 pages...) and saw some things that've been mentioned here... not recommendations necessarily.

Reynolds: Aurora Rising (The Prefect) £0.99
Wyndham: The Kraken Wakes £1.99 (Triffids also)
Stephenson: Anathem £2.49
Scalzi: Head On £0.99
Ewing (et al): Judge Dredd Year One Omnibus £0.99
Tchaikovsky: Ironclads £0.99
Mieville: London's Overthrow $1.99
Man in the High Castle
Station 11

(the Dredd is a novel rather than a graphic novel)

all the SF&F offers for may here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?bbn=3017941031&rh=n%3A341677031%2Cn%3A%21425595031%2Cn%3A%21425597031%2Cn%3A3017941031%2Cn%3A341689031%2Cn%3A2967299031&pf_rd_i=3017941031&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_p=6b17e745-4ab5-40d0-89c1-12892013e48d&pf_rd_r=K3KHHS2S0V6NA8KV5TQJ&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-16&pf_rd_t=101&ref=s9_acsd_hps_bw_c_x_ccl_w

and not on offer but cheap anyway
Lafferty: 900 Grandmothers £1.99
Lafferty: Lafferty In Orbit £1.99

How come the Mieville is in $s?

mac keyboard. 8)

Robert E. Howard - The Haunter Of The Ring & Other Tales

There isn't as much overlap with the stories in Del Rey's REHoward horror collection as I expected, this has more macabre detective stories not in that collection. It doesn't feature "Old Garfield's Heart", which is often considered one of his best horror stories.
I chosen to read this collection first because it has no illustrations to influence or distract me (I love good illustrations as much as anyone, but I prefer as few as possible in amongst the text) but I really should have read the 2 volume Best Of (Crimson Shadows and Grim Lands) which includes the best story here and "Old Garfield's Heart".

The quality of the writing is quite erratic, there's one brilliant story, a few quite good ones, a few pretty bad ones ("Horror From The Mound", "The Children Of The Night", "People Of The Dark", "Black Talons") and most of the rest are goodish to mediocre. This was quite tough to slog through, my eyes and brain were frequently sliding away from the page but I don't regret reading them all, though I doubt I'll ever be a REHoward completist.

I often felt that so many of the tales were very nearly scary or exciting but spoiled by something, perhaps too much packing in redundant information that we already know? I quite liked the aesthetic of the rural horror stories like "Graveyard Rats", "Fangs Of Gold" and "Black Wind Blowing", they have a heavy darkness and a bit of gruesomeness kind of like Hugh B Cave.

"Wolfshead" is quite a fun mixture with gothic castle horror, an interesting werewolf mythology and full-on action at the end. "Skull-Face" is too long and lags in places but this was the best orientalist detective story of the bunch. "The Cairn On The Headland" has some very fine imagery but I felt it was spoiled slightly by making Odin seem like too much of a demon at the end.

Although REHoward doesn't have as low a percentage of positively portrayed non-whites as Lovecraft, I think some readers might be put off by just how much more persistently they have to deal with Howard's views and portrayals.

In "Names In The Black Book" and "The Fire Of Asshurbanipal" we have two imperfectly portrayed but still genuine Afghan Muslim action heroes that we cheer on. In "Skull-Face" and "Names In The Black Book" we have two Asian women as love interests (which I'm sure will make people groan; one of them says "The mysterious instincts that are part of my Eastern heritage are alert to danger").

There are a few handsome or sophisticated non-whites who make the white protagonists insecure, this shown in a very racist way. Although I'm wary of being too presumptuous about how much Howard is writing about himself, it's kind of amazing how bare he seems to lay his insecurities and masochism in "The Hyena" (search "Elements of Sadomasochism in the Fiction and Poetry of Robert E. Howard" by Charles Hoffman, he makes a good case that Howard was genuinely into this stuff).

Mongolians get it worse than black people in "The Children Of The Night" and "People Of The Dark". Both stories come off meatheaded and the former one left a bad taste in my mouth; the main character acknowledges how senseless tribal conflict is but then goes on to counter that by saying that aryans have become weak since they stopped being a nomadic group.
I don't know enough about Howard to say how much he really believed a return to savagery was a good idea. Maybe the story is about his conflicted feelings? Maybe the horror he sometimes shows in tribal prejudices and the rise and fall of civilizations is his way of saying savagery might not be a great thing? Or was he just writing these out and not thinking too much about what kind of message might come across?

A decade ago I read Scott Hampton's brilliant comic book adaptation of "Pigeons From Hell" in Spookhouse 2 (the definitive version, others had different lacks of color), easily the scariest comic I've ever read and even one of my favorite comics of all time. Scott Hampton claimed that "Pigeons From Hell" was the scariest story he'd ever read, so I've been eager to read the real thing for a long time.
My reading of the real thing might be partially influenced by my powerful memories of the comic adaptation but I'm confident it's a genuinely great horror story; head, shoulders and knees above everything else in this collection and gives me a bit more enthusiasm to read more Howard. It has become a bit of a classic but it hasn't appeared in nearly enough anthologies. It's not perfect (I've heard this was one of the stories he never actually got around to submitting, so possibly not finished?) but the imagery, folkloric mythology of it and the chills are very fine.

https://chuckhoffman.blogspot.com/2010/07/elements-of-sadomasochism-in-fiction.html

Something that seems particularly quaint to me about pulp era stories, is the hysteria that human sacrifice is treated with. It becomes really annoying.

Getting to the end of Charles Stross' Accelerando, near-future cyberpunk to post-singularity silliness. It's basically science fantasy masquerading as hard sf, bursting with ideas (fermi paradox solution etc) but ludicrous (humans get out-evolved by intelligent corporations and legal devices); however it definitely doesn't take itself seriously. It pulls its punches somewhat by focusing on the least augmented, most human of the post humans, also does the annoying Alistair Reynolds thing of the main characters being a single family bearing massive grudges against each other.

Also a while ago I finished Marge Piercy's A Woman on the Edge of Time. Where Joanna Russ' The Female Man is blisteringly angry about women's lack of opportunities, this is blisteringly depressed about women being punching bags for men, and getting committed, drugged and imprisoned when they fight back. As some recompense it offers a future utopia, but interestingly the eponymous protagonist is not immediately convinced of its benefits. Anyway I'd put both of them (Russ and Piercy) on a list of absolutely essential SF.

That's funny, I was also recently giving Piercy's "A Woman on the Edge of Time" a go. tbh, I couldn't finish it. I just wasn't in the mood for something so relentlessly bleak, just living inside this tortured woman's head. I wouldn't say it was bad - in fact it's very well written, and it demands a certain level of attention to get all the nuances and keep everything straight as the main character lurches from one mental state to another. But the general subject matter and didacticism got in the way of me wanting to make the necessary effort, it's just not a mental space I wanted to occupy, sympathetic though I am with the author's overall aims and ideology.

of the authors that seem to be going through a popular career resuscitation due (in part) to the current cultural political climate - LeGuin, Delany, Russ, Butler, Piercy, I'm sure there's others - I would definitely put Russ and especially LeGuin at the top of the heap. But that's just me.

'woman on the edge of time' was definitely a book that stayed with me for a while.

started 'revenger' by alastair reynolds -- hadn't read anything by him, figured i'd check out something shorter than revelation space -- and . . . it's a young adult novel? i kept waiting for some plot twist or, um, revelation, but no. and i don't have anything against YA -- god bless earthsea, etc. -- but there was no depth to anything at all in this one.

read peter watts' 'blindsight', which i think JM recommended? it was great, although the re-creation of a certain extinct species might have been a little much.

now reading 'chaga' by ian mcdonald. i like it even though the heroine is awfully precious.

I couldn't make it past 20 pages of Blindsight, hated the narrative voice/tone