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

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)

Dunno. All I got for you is right here on the old thread

I'm probably reading Tanith By Choice next week. Then Tanith Lee: A-Z soon after. Then start the novels before the end of the year if I can.

Still have to read the Campbell bio properly but this blog has got some stuff on it: https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/tag/philip-k-dick/

Bonus points for incredible quote using the word "excelsior"

Checked in at another charity shop recently (Oxfam Clarkston) and was amazed how much their fantasy section expanded. I'm still perplexed at the lack of collections and anthologies. I know that they've always been less popular but they never stopped selling them, so people must buy them.

Since someone said charity shops are filling with more paper books because of ebooks replacing them, I suppose old anthologies don't get ebook versions so often.

This cover was already used on an issue of the magazine but worth reusing, it's nice
https://subterraneanpress.com/best-of-uncanny

http://necronomicon-providence.com/core-schedule/
Quite intrigued by some of the people mentioned, Jarboe and Justin Broadrick!

I suppose old anthologies don't get ebook versions so often.

Probably the rights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2cMG33mWVY

Been looking around for Russian/Soviet anthologies (found about 15 of them) and saw this series I've never heard of. Most of them had a Theodore Sturgeon introduction and Richard Powers cover art.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?1107+3

That series is pretty good and has been discussed here a little bit, probably on previous thread

Grass by Sherri S Tepper - though it's definitely SF not fantasy (no magic, space travel & technology) it reads like fantasy, with the space travel and tech very much in the background and most of the action on a single planet with giant mind-reading dogs and horses, arrogant aristos, friendly commoners, a barbaric hunt, a cruel religion, a deadly plague. The mysterious and vanished race is a typical SF thing but wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy novel. It's all brought together by science in the end - a little too neatly for my liking, and at 500 pages it could stand to be cut down somewhat, pretty good though.

i think we all missed an opportunity here:

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/arthur-c-clarke/arthur-c-clarkes-july-20-2019/

(although it seems to be not widely available based on the prices i've seen)

bookshambles has an episode here: https://cosmicshambles.com/bookshambles/apollo-50th

On Tuesday I had perhaps my best charity shop day ever, 24 books was as much as I could carry, would have bought more. Found 4 Gwyneth Jones novels (including the Aleutian trilogy), Zenna Henderson, Damon Knight, Tanith Lee, Guy Gavriel Kay and more.

Only problem is that 7 of the books had extensive pencil notes that I wasn't aware of when buying, I've only erased them from 3 books so far and I was getting quite angry at whoever made them all. Perhaps this is why some of them were so cheap? I'm going to check books in second hand stores more carefully now because I never want to have to erase pencil marks for such a long time again, it is taking many hours to do.

There was lots of anthologies but unfortunately even in the Damon Knight and Terry Carr ones there was too many of the usual suspects for me to want much of them. So I got a Dozois one with lots of people I don't know well and a 1983 New Worlds anthology where Moorcock deliberately chosen the less famous stories.
Wonder how many of these massive Year's Best anthologies I can actually read because the size is daunting.

Hey where did you make this nice score, RAG? I am in the market for cheap Terry Carr anthologies esp

Hillhead Oxam bookshop has been a good source of SF recently

It was the Byres Road (that is Hillhead isn't it?) Oxfam and the Victoria Road Oxfam. I tend to always visit both.

Watch out for the pencil notes because it seems like one person offloaded a huge amount of their stuff.

And I will be visiting the Clarkston Oxfam more often.

Reading Anne McCaffrey's The Ship who Sang. I will probably struggle through to the end but it's incredibly corny. Worst offence is the use of the word 'Dylan' to mean a song so lyrically persuasive and melodically powerful that anyone who hears it can't help but be converted - and a 'Dylanist' is someone who writes them.

lol I had forgotten that particular detail. corniness sort of ingrained in her approach tbh.

she's an odd one in that she doesn't seem to get singled out for hipster kisses as a feminist sf icon a la LeGuin or Butler or Russ. Granted she doesn't write like any of them, she's way hackier/pulpier, but for a while there if you were an adolescent girl interested in sf, she was one of the few people speaking to/writing directly for that market