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

Yeah. I know those masterworks are great for republishing but I find them a bit sterile and classy. I feel wrong if I’m not reading the mass market paperback size.

https://i1.wp.com/www.djabbic.co.uk/BookCovers/Images/BrucePennington/TheShadowOfTheTorturer_1982.jpg

I’ve got this one linked upthread. The extra pulp factor comes from Gene Wolfe’s name - instead it’s blood red and embossed so you can see your reflection in it

I've got the Severian Of The Guild omnibus (why didn't they just call it Book Of The New Sun?), the small painting on it isn't interesting and it seems misleading but I haven't read it yet.

Not sure why there has never been a complete Solar Cycle collection, you could maybe do it in 5 brick books. Seems like a handsomely produced series like this could be a hit but maybe publishers don't have much faith in people reading the whole series.

Been going down rabbit holes on the SF Encyclopedia. Turns out Jonathan Clements does most of the east Asian entries, but he has a crazy cv, including Japanese, Chinese, Scandinavian history, translation, voice acting, lots of 2000AD and Doctor Who stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Clements
https://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/2011/10/10/get-lost/
Don't worry the last link is totally work safe.

Did any of those wormholes lead you to the discovery of a pocket universe or did you find yourself with the confines of a
keep?

I hadn't but now I know from the latter entry, Ben Elton has an entry!

Looking up the Japanese cover art for New Sun, I found proper alt-right shithead blogs fantasizing about a euro-Japanese future.

Noticed this in my collection the other day

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1372743915l/2373939.jpg
https://66.media.tumblr.com/7db090aea9e29cbb683dabd2f44918e7/tumblr_mznp4qi5HQ1ssmm02o1_500.jpg

lol

on the whole tbh i prefer the "cover looks spacey or futuristic or handily evocative but has little or nothing to do with the contents" sf book cover aesthetic to the "i skimread this garbage and here is my somewhat inept lightning indication of some themes" school

(exception to this: maybe bruce pennington)

It was not uncommon for fantasy artists to shop their work around for anything they could get. I've seen some things that were book, comic and album covers.

This springs to mind
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?34280
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?28847
https://www.discogs.com/Sepultura-Beneath-The-Remains/master/57949

Another Whelan
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?33416
https://www.discogs.com/Cirith-Ungol-Frost-And-Fire/master/253625

I think some of Cirith Ungol's other album covers by Whelan were also originally book covers. I don't know if the band were doing Elric songs or what.
See also a ton of comic magazines in the vein of Warren and Metal Hurlant across the world, a ton of fantasy artists sold their stuff in lots of countries for all the different magazines (wouldn't be surprised if a lot of stuff was stolen). There is a painting of the Mexican movie Dracula of the late 50s that was swiped by numerous artists and I've seen that face on film posters, book covers and comics.

see i think this is good and i approve of it

(not the stolen bit, ppl shd be paid, but the multiple use)

also cirith ungol doing elric songs, everything is canon in everyone else's universe, thomas covenant also a tank engine etc

I think the usage should be somewhat appropriate. There's too many books with spaceships on the cover but nothing like that in contents.

The best thing about it is giving artists some freedom to pursue their own ideas, because they sometimes are treated as specialist handymen for whatever the editors want.
The Elric thing is kind of different though because I'm sure that image was done specifically for Elric.

Also see Giger.

any book is made better by a chris foss rocketship (that looks like like a stripy space potato)

Controversial opinion: I've never liked Foss. It's a big side of SF I've never really cared for and part of the reason it taken me longer to come around to science fiction.

Richard Powers is the only real SF specialist artist (though he did other things) that I love but with all those Japanese entries of the encyclopedia fresh in my mind, Noriyoshi Ōrai and Naoyuki Kato are good too, but with more reservations.

I don't like Foss at all. Powers is great obviously, but I also highly rate Charles Moll, Bob Pepper, Karel Thole, Michael Payne, Jack Gaughan, Mike Hinge god there's so many classics

tbh this needs its own thread: this is the thread where you help me find evocative/komikal sf cover art

downside: a lot of the links in that are now dead
upside: everyone now know the artists' names!

John Harris is very good: vast SF Things floating over futuristic landscapes.
http://www.graphicine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/john_harris_25.jpg
http://www.graphicine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/john_harris_22.jpg
http://www.retrogamesmachine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/007.jpg

Writer Jeannette Ng called John W Campbell a fascist during her Campbell Award acceptance speech at the Dublin Worldcon. I know that not everyone here is a Cory Doctorow fan, but thought this was a good response to the subsequent fuss:

https://boingboing.net/2019/08/20/needed-saying.html

Agree with every word she said. On a slightly different note, does it bother anyone else that there's a major award named after Arthur C. Clarke, given the nature of the accusations against him?

lol how is calling John W. Campbell a fascist even remotely controversial? I mean, his politics weren't exactly a secret

unaware of accusations against Clarke so idk

I think the charge against Clarke, that he was a paedophile in Sri Lanka, was always disputed (by Clarke himself and others). The main sources for the story were the British tabloid press in the 1990s, so the scandal could easily have been malicious homophobia masquerading as concern for the vulnerable.

British tabloid press in the 1990s

lol truly a reliable source

Hmm yeah maybe, although accusations against dodgy Brits tend to turn out true more often than not. Read the first story here and decide for yourself I guess:
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/bjxp5m/we-asked-people-what-childhood-moment-shaped-them-the-most

Vice is not worth reading

Further to the Campbell controversy, David Pringle on Facebook shared a couple of...provocative quotes from J G Ballard:

"BALLARD: I never liked Asimov, I never liked Heinlein, I never liked Van Vogt -- that school of American SF I couldn't take. I never liked Astounding very much. I thought that fellow, what's his name, I met him once, the editor....
"PRINGLE: John Campbell.
"BALLARD: I thought he was a baleful influence. He consolidated all the worst tendencies of American SF. He introduced a lot of bogus respectability, all that hard sociology thing. You know: 'I was up at MIT last week, talking about the future of...' something or other, and it all sounded very _serious_. He allied SF to the applied engineering, social engineering, and so forth, of somewhere like MIT. He gave SF a serious, real dimension which was all wrong because that isn't what SF is about. I couldn't stand those writers..."
From: "An Interview with J. G. Ballard" by James Goddard and David Pringle (Shepperton, 4th January 1975).

"I mean, somebody like that illiterate editor, whatever his name was -- Campbell -- is an important figure to the American writer, and his influence is still strong. But he has no counterpart over here. I regard American sf -- much as I admire individual writers -- as really a kind of cul-de-sac, a minor tributary of the great stream of imaginative fiction. I regard the Americans, modern commercial sf which extends from, say, Asimov at one end of the spectrum to Star Trek at the other, as having done an enormous disservice to the possibility of the emergence of, you know, a serious science fiction." (From: "Interview with J. G. Ballard" by David Pringle, Shepperton, Middlesex, 14th June 1979.)

Didn’t Barry Malzberg win a Campbell for Beyond Apollo, which fact if true seems to fit in with this discussion somehow.

also didn't campbell go all-in on dianetics? hard science indeed

("who goes there" still rules tho)

Longest way round is the shortest way home

xpost

Yep:

He famously won the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel for Beyond Apollo (1972), a fine book about neurotic astronauts. A number of writers associated with Analog, including Poul Anderson, protested this award on the grounds that Malzberg's fiction was actively anti-Campbellian.

http://rrhorton.blogspot.com/2018/07/a-little-remembered-ace-double-gather.html

Malzberg's meta-fictional short story 'A Galaxy Called Rome' is also partly about Campbell and his ideas

Following that link leads to these:
https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2018/07/13/malzberg-reading-daniels-reading-malzberg/
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/10/08/turkey-in-a-suitcase/

Malzberg is way closer to Ballard's POV than to Campbell's, even if he is a huge Astounding fanboy

Yes exactly

Tanith Lee - Tanith By Choice

This is one of two recent Best Of collections, in this one the stories are chosen by friends (many people you'd expect, although I was surprised to see no Liz Williams). The other is called A-Z, a much larger collection of mostly newer stories chosen entirely by her husband John Kaiine (he chooses a story and supplies cover art for Tanith By Choice).
The Selected Stories series (2 books) from 2009 was misleadingly titled. "Selected Stories" tends to be an upper-class publishers way of saying "Best Of", but these two were just regular collections.
Dreams Of Dark And Light from 1986 was the first Best Of. Forests Of The Night from 1989 might have been a retrospective but I'm not sure, as quite a lot of her collections have overlap and choose some old favourites.

My three favourites in this collection are...
(1) "Bite-Me-Not Or, Fleur De Fur". Wonderful setting: a castle of decadent royalty and vast surrounding mountains populated by winged humanoids, beautiful story.
(2) "White As Sin, Now". Fairy tale told from fragments of different viewpoints from different time periods.
(3) "After The Guillotine". Funny story about the afterlife of a group of people executed in the French revolution. I kept smiling at "let us pause to admire him". Gorgeous ending.

Although I tended to prefer the type of stories most associated with Lee, there's a good range, surprising at times. Especially "The Ghost Of The Clock", a fairly modern gritty British story. Perhaps too many stories were chosen for the circumstances in which they were first encountered?

I could see some people making a good case for "The Isle Is Full Of Noises" (final piece, the only novella) as the best in the collection. Even quite a long way into it, I wasn't sure what shape it would take or what sort of story it was, the uncertainty was enjoyable. There's so many parts to consider and piece together, to puzzle over. What was "the sound"?
Sarah Singleton says it's one of a few Tanith stories that sort of casts Rutger Hauer as a character (I have a strong feeling that "After I Killed Her" from another collection put me in mind of Hauer, which is bizarre, since I cant imagine any detail so specific suggesting him so effectively) and it has some commentary on using real people in this way.
I thought it was mostly great but I often struggled to visualize the shapeshifter in a satisfying way and a bit more detail could have fixed that, I know it was purposely vague but I felt it could have been less awkward. And some of the comparisons used throughout the novella seemed too much of a stretch. An impressive piece all the same. Loved the way it criticized talk shows too.

Unfortunately, there's quite a number of typos and one story has the wrong title across the upper corner of the pages. I'm guessing scanning technology was used because a few times "1" was used instead of "l" or "I". "Cold Fire" has lots of course slang written in an unfamiliar way, so possible typos were doubly dangerous there.
Every book should be proof-read but when you're trying to ensure a writer's legacy and talk in the introduction about the preciousness of their words, it's a bit harder to swallow a lack of proof-reading. Still a very strong book though.

After I've read A-Z I might come back here and say how it compares as an introduction to the writer. This is only my second book by her so I cant say how well selected it is.

Always liked this cover but I had no idea it was by the Dillons
http://bookscans.com/Publishers/pyramid/images1000/PyramidX1611.jpg

I'm increasingly wary of people being dismissive of large areas of a genre, or a large body of one writer's work. I used to lap it up when people dismissed Booker middlebrow stuff but now I think most such claims are probably bluffing about the extent of their reading experience. Upthread I mentioned Moorcock saying Aldiss was the only one who had read much American golden age SF. Would he have admitted this as a younger man? In that New Worlds 1983 anthology, he gives his opinion on a large number of trends and writers and while I have no doubt he's read a ton of this stuff and he's always interesting to listen to, I really don't think I can trust him. So many writers summed up quickly by a negative trait.

I realize that with certain areas of comics and animation, I'm in danger of becoming this schmuck. But the capability of someone's drawings is a bit easier to gauge.

So many writers on twitter impatient to dismiss one of the big boys. Show me report cards, motherfucker.

I'm impressed by John Clute's entries in the SF Encyclopedia but I'd like to know if he really has read everything by the dead authors he's mapping out.

Not that I'm doubting him, major respect but I just would like to know.

I know what you mean but with Clute I believe it. He has lead me to some great stuff but also to some mediocre stuff. I think he, like Michael Dirda of the WaPo (or James Morrison of ILB *ducks*), just seems to have an endless capacity to keep reading.

Although to be fair Clute and Dirda seem to err on the side of boosting merely okay stuff which Real ILB James does not do.

What did Clute overrate for you?

Raising Stony Mayall, by Daryl Gregory, some mid-level Poul Anderson are what come to mind at the moment

iirc, isaac asimov said that the reason he rarely included extra-terrestrial life in his early stories was that john campbell refused to run any stories in which aliens were depicted as superior to humans in any way -- definitely an odd guy.

i spent a couple hours trying to figure out the charges against clarke a while back and came to the conclusion that they were pretty much BS -- there were no actual accusations as far as i could tell, just innuendo from some very untrustworthy sources.

campbell refused to run any stories in which aliens were depicted as superior

he'd already written "who goes there" so no others were necessary QED

Think maybe we should run a book club (famous last words) on that Astounding Campbell bio.

I would be into that

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/612DyWJpRGL.jpg

Damn that is better than the one my childhood copy had (which I also loved)

Major soft spot, at least in memory, for the well of souls series

Me as a child reading Barlowe’s Guide: omg this one series has like ten aliens in here! Must read!

I just bought two Chalker omnibuses. Apparently his best stuff if Clute and Gollancz are to be trusted. For some people, he's filed together with Piers Anthony as an author who had great early work, occasionally returns to ambitious work but got drunk on commercial success and endlessly milked a successful series.
I often wonder if a world of guaranteed financial safety would stop writers pandering and churning out lower quality work than they were capable of, but maybe the fan attention is enough to create this effect.

Did you finish the Tanith Flat Earth book you were reading?

I'm increasingly wary of people being dismissive of large areas of a genre, or a large body of one writer's work. I used to lap it up when people dismissed Booker middlebrow stuff but now I think most such claims are probably bluffing about the extent of their reading experience. Upthread I mentioned Moorcock saying Aldiss was the only one who had read much American golden age SF. Would he have admitted this as a younger man? In that New Worlds 1983 anthology, he gives his opinion on a large number of trends and writers and while I have no doubt he's read a ton of this stuff and he's always interesting to listen to, I really don't think I can trust him. So many writers summed up quickly by a negative trait.

This might be reductive, but maybe that sort of dismissiveness is a bad trait in a critic but a good one in an author? In that you kinda have to have a lot of faith in the idea that what you're doing is to some degree the "right" way.

Moorcock's fantastic for certain things. Literary crit isn't particularly one of them emo. His opinions are often entertaining if not entirely trustworthy. For ex. he called Tolkien a crypto-fascist - which is funny and thought-provoking - but I would much rather read Tolkien than Moorcock's precious Edgar Rice Burroughs.