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

Opinions on D.G. Compton? I am not digging “The Continuous Catherine Mortenhoe” tbh, reads like a combo of Spinrad’s dumbest ideas + some heavy-handed moralizing.

I see there are some positive readings upthread but tbh I’m finding several aspects of the basic premise irritating, like he had a polemical point to make that superseded any pretenses of logic.

Really enjoyed The Silent Multitude, but then I also enjoyed Catherine Mortenhoe, so that probably doesn't help.

Reading Ann Kavan’s “Ice”

Thoughts? I'm midway through and it's not doing much for me. It's techniques are almost identical to Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, one of my all time favourites of all time; however the characters and setting here are too unsympathetic for my tastes.

re: Catherine Mortenhoe - I'm not ready to give up yet (only 50 pages in) because honestly the writing is so good maybe it will get me past my quibbles with the premise

re: Ana Kavan's "Ice" - I really liked it and read it in two days. The repetitive, hallucinatory vibe is very well sustained, even though it's incredibly dark the dreamlike atmosphere just carried me along. Granted I haven't read Ishiguro.

Bought Emma Bull's War For The Oaks today, taken note that Vernor Vinge and John Christopher are the two remaining in the Penguin Worlds line (did this just stop? There hasn't been any books since the initial bunch in 2016) I don't have.
Then I had a dream Vinge, Christopher and I were all at a convention and had a diarrhea attack at the same time.

We three had a diarrhea attack in the dream. I didn't have a diarrhea attack during the dream.

http://www.egaeuspress.com/Of_One_Pure_Will.html
Looking forward to this, just ordered.

I asked Hari Kunzru if there were going to be more in that series, and he said he hoped so but it was up to the accountants. I guess the accountants said no.

Maybe the covers were just too retro.

Any cyberpunk recommendations from the last couple years?

I am not digging “The Continuous Catherine Mortenhoe” tbh, reads like a combo of Spinrad’s dumbest ideas + some heavy-handed moralizing.

so... I came around on this one, largely due to the excellence of Compton's prose and the depths of his characterizations. This is ultimately a character study wrapped around some old school Christian humanism, the sf elements largely being just background/window-dressing. Some of that is arbitrary and/or poorly defined but ultimately it doesn't matter much. He is definitely a much better writer than Spinrad. While the premise and general UK 70s malaise setting are, I guess, kind of Ballardian, Compton's overall approach and tone are nothing like Ballard's alternately cold or bemused detachment. Will read Synthajoy if I come across a copy.

Wish Spinrad was a better writer.

I like some of his stuff quite a bit but he is even more hit or miss than, um, a lot of other writers in the field, and that’s saying something.

I've only read some of his short pieces (which were fine) and Bug Jack Barron (which was awful)

Finally gave away my copy of The Iron Dream, accepting peacefully I will never actually read it

Liked it in high school, have been leery of rereading.

One I really liked of his was The Void Captain’s Tale, which delivers on its provocative premise and doesn’t flag stylistically or at least doesn’t annoy, although I couldn’t get into its sequel, Child of Fortune, which is written in the same fashion.

has anyone read ada palmer's too like the lightning, and does it become less insufferable than the first 20 pages is?

objections: a grating 18th century prose style with frequent asides to the reader; copious chandleresque unexplained in-universe words and concepts; ridiculous names (martin guildbreaker, saneer-weeksbooth); frequent references to theology and theological concepts.

also, magic.

She had donned her boots too, tall, taut Humanist boots patterned with a flowing brush-pen landscape, the kind with winding banks and misty mountains that the eye gets lost in. Any Humanist transforms, grows stronger, prouder, when they don the Hive boots which stamp each Member’s signature into the dust of history, but if others change from house cat to regal tiger, Thisbe becomes something more extreme...

kill me now

Jack Vance it ain’t.

so i'm winding my banks, goin' to misty mountain

yeah I checked out at around that point ledge

seemed like it might be a cool concept but nah

I LOVE COMMAS!
This sentence I'm working on is SO BEAUTIFUL thanks to commas, and would be utterly incomprehensible without.
now back to work. #writerslife

— Ada Palmer (@Ada_Palmer) June 18, 2019

sentence construction how do it wrok

There was a post or two by Martin S that I would read reasonably often about who could write and who couldn’t but I don’t recall her being mentioned there pro or con.

I'm reading the new Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin. This time it's sentient octopuses!

Won't make any grand claims for the dude's writing, but I love 'uplift' as a concept in general and he clearly puts some work into figuring out the nuts and bolts

I’ve been meaning to read that guy for years

Read his Walking to Aldebaran novella recently, which was not bad. Some very interesting ideas/concepts, but all deflated/undercut by the irritating bluff no-nonsense man's man narrator

objections: a grating 18th century prose style with frequent asides to the reader; copious chandleresque unexplained in-universe words and concepts; ridiculous names (martin guildbreaker, saneer-weeksbooth); frequent references to theology and theological concepts.

― The Pingularity (ledge), Wednesday, 19 June 2019 13:51 (yesterday) Permalink

man from this description i was hyped for whatever this is but the sentences you quote afterwards did not live up it

She had donned her boots too, tall, taut Humanist boots patterned with a flowing brush-pen landscape, the kind with winding banks and misty mountains that the eye gets lost in. Any Humanist transforms, grows stronger, prouder, when they don the Hive boots which stamp each Member’s signature into the dust of history, but if others change from house cat to regal tiger, Thisbe becomes something more extreme...

idk if the punctuation of a definition as if it were an adverb in the first sentence is the worst thing or if the defining relative clause boner in the second is the worst thing. if you love commas set them free i guess

live up *to it. sod's law there would be a typo in that sentence

read 'record of a spaceborn few' by becky chambers, which was pleasant and positive and naive

it also had no plot to speak of, an uninteresting world/galaxy milieu, and rote one-note characters (literally all of whom are Good, but Different, and That's Okay). i don't know that it really merited publication, let alone a hugo nomination

otoh i did finish it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. and there are no bluff no-nonsense man's man narrators or supernaturally capable protagonists or creepy-old-writer sex scenes

I didn't finish her previous one, a long way to a small angry planet. 'Pleasant and positive and naive' nails it, I gave up when the main character managed to pollyanna the brutal space pirates into taking just what they needed instead of plundering the ship and murdering everyone on board.

lol

I heard there was a roundtable (Shadow Clarke) in which she was savaged by overexcited critics, some were calling it racist. Didn't sound like my kind of thing but a lot of people seem to rate her.

i obviously don't think the book i read was good, but 'racist' seems really far-fetched -- her whole thing seems to be oh we are all human but in different ways and it's all good and can't we just get along

i suppose that in this fraught era she can be blamed for not addressing the problem of race, but shit, she didn't even address the book's need for a plot

Think some people said there were racial stereotypes in there applied to different species of humanoid?

iirc it was because the main character failed to check her privilege. there's a link upthread somewhere i think.

Anyone read the Genevieve series by Kim Newman/Jack Yeovil? I was under the false impression that I bought the complete omnibus but they've decided to publish them separately again (possibly due to increased popularity of Newman?). Getting a lot of conflicting info on what order these books should be read in and whether they're fine as standalone reads.
This is one area where I envy readers of strictly mainstream realist fiction, I bet they never have to worry about reading orders of Bougie McMiddleman.

Was interested in Terry Dowling because he was one of the few authors Jack Vance wrote an introduction for (a young one too, considering Vance did not keep up with the genre) and Harlan Ellison interviewed him on television, championed him.
But the Tom Rynosseros series is the hardest to buy series I've ever come across, the first easy enough to find but the third and fourth are rare as fuck. So this news was welcome...

The Complete Rynosseros due from PS Publishing in 2019

Preparations are well under way by PS Publishing in the UK and its affiliate PS Australia to release The Complete Rynosseros in the first half of 2019, first as a deluxe three-volume slipcased hard-cover edition, then in paperback. All forty-five Tom stories (two previously uncollected and one brand new) will be available at last, featuring 398k of fiction (24k never included in the four original Tom Rynosseros collections), plus Appendices and a further 36k of Story Notes produced exclusively for this edition. For those new to the saga, the Australian SF Reader in October 2007 called this: “The best and most ambitious Australian science fiction series ever written, and one of the best, ever, period.” Nick Stathopoulos is producing brand-new artwork for the project.

Will surely be expensive but I'm probably going to go for this.

Julien Gracq - Chateau d'Argol / Castle Of Argol

A pair of tag-team bastard intellectuals share a castle with a perhaps equally brilliant lady. The men are proud of their skills at rejecting women but they cant deal with her quite so easily (not that she fares better than them).

This book is completely filled with descriptions (only one line of dialogue), probably the best purple prose I've read so far, other writers often end up repetitive in their striving to stay so ornate but this flows wonderfully, even if the sentences are quite complicated at times (I would have liked more paragraph breaks). I guess this is what those other writers are striving towards but unable to execute.

I wasn't quite sure what to make of the constant extreme descriptions of feelings that seem like they should be more subtle. It can be a bit irritating, calling to mind books where people of leisure say things like "oh I do so hate bramble picking, it really is the most intolerably beastly thing!"
Are the writers just like these characters or are they criticizing the behavior of these silly people? Do we all become so sensitive if we live in such leisure? In an ideal world, would a slightly uncomfortable chair seem like a torture instrument from hell?
Gradually I accepted the extremity and imagined their world to be one with far more extreme feelings than ours, feelings that don't always seem to make sense, like they are floating around with their own agency greater than that of the characters.
Sometimes I thought Gracq just likes writing so much that he'll throw out coherency in favor of an impressive flourish and it sort of fits here.

The descriptions of the setting are very generous, especially the enormous forest. Impressive lighting, rich darkness and winds. This takes up the majority of the book and could maybe be called the soul of it.

There is a potential stumbling block I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned: the brutal act upon the woman is treated in a very detached, abstract way and the main character applies a magical logic to the situation even though he is horrified. Press on and you'll see that Gracq isn't so callous; although the gorgeousness of the brutality will still leave some readers unhappy.

For a long time I was less pleased with the portrayal of the relationships but by the end it all made much more sense, even if I didn't get all the symbolism and reference points to the religious figures.

Maybe it needed a bit of something else in there but I liked it very much.

I think my next Gracq will be The Opposing Shore, as the idea sounds interesting.

Nice write-up. I haven't read any Gracq but I may check something out.

Another quite interesting article by Nicoll.
https://www.tor.com/2019/07/02/ten-favorite-flawed-books-that-are-always-worth-rereading/

I'm a little dismayed to see the sorta low estimation of Godwhale, because I'm looking forward to it and I've seen people very enthusiastic about it.

finally read the three-body series. translation was occasionally clunky (i liked the translator of #2 better than that of 1 & 3), many of the characters are a bit rote, and also i thought it was brilliant and am having a hard time recalling a better huge hard sci-fi series

I got this "Very Best of Barry Malzberg" from the library, which is atrociously edited (tons of typos, random line breaks, punctuation errors, etc.) but contains a broad overview of his short fiction up through the 2000s. Having really only been familiar with his late 60s + 70s output it's been kind of a revelation to read some of these later pieces. This one "Anderson" from 1982 is probably the best piece on Reagan I've ever read, eclipsing Ballard's "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" by a fair margin, really gets at the vicious nullity and dislocation from reality at the center of Reagan's personality.

*Phew* thought all those typos were only in my e-version.

it's kind of mind boggling how shitty it is!

haven't been reading too much sf lately (altho I did just finish Malzberg's "Revelations", since I happened across a copy at a used bookstore) but am digging this blog, which covers a lot of interesting stuff: https://sciencefictionruminations.com/

haven't been reading too much sf lately myself, have come across that blog before and enjoyed it, probably linked to it at least once or twice but can't remember exactly in what context.

he covers a lot of late 70s/early 80s stuff I've never heard of and/or forgotten about, I like that he wanders a little farther afield from my usual interests. Like, do I want to read this gender-exploration novel by Tanith Lee? (Probably not, but it's interesting to read about)