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

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

ahem

? did I miss something

Oh no I'm just outing myself. AMC was right there in the pocket for baby In Orbit circa 1988-1994 or so.

Tbh I think the Master Harper trilogy is really the masterwork there. It all goes a bit "BUT THEY'RE FROM EARTH DON'T U SEE" after a while, but Menolly's story of persecution, escape, and finding refuge and a purpose in life is some high-quality stuff.

AMC was a huge formative influence on my wife (which I've probably mentioned before), we have an extensive collection of her works, only some of which I've read myself

<3 <3 <3

I wrote to her once. It was pre-internet of course but the bio in the back of the book gave her address as "Dragon Hold, County Wicklow, Ireland" so I addressed it there and, wouldn't you know, it arrived? I think she wrote me back but I actually can't remember, which seems crazy? SOMEWHERE I think I have a reply from AMC.

haha my wife had the exact same experience

She must have had a whole secretary just for answering 14-year-old girls.

I'm sorry, I tried a few AMC short stories for the first time recently, and thought they were p terrible - the short story version of Ship Who Sang was def more tolerable then the first two dragon stories, which seemed interminable even at novella length. Obv she's not mentioned in the same breath as Le Guin or Butler or Russ because she just isn't in the same class as them - or Vance or Silverberg or Tiptree. Funnily enough, just re-read 'When It Changed' by Russ - now THAT's a science fiction short story!

I’ve only read the dragondrums etc trilogy and I remember liking it. Long time ago though.

That's the one I meant to reference! Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, Dragondrums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q587qIUFET0

Enjoyed a couple of her books as a teenager, but yeah, she's a dreadful writer.