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

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.

emo = imo

Great artists are/were always making unsupportable (but often hilarious) pronouncements about others’ work or dismissing vast swathes of aesthetic

RJG, I ended up tabling The Flat Earth for later, it is very intense work and not the place my mind wanted to be at that moment.

As an illustration of how much genre work has been done in audiobook now compared to when Audible launched, my wife has listened to the whole flat earth series on audible this year...

I'm listening to the Dark Forest (second book in Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy) on Audible. Nearing the end and loving this crazy ride. Can drift into esoteria, info-dumps (as described upthread) and I agree with critics who say the wall-facer project is a very far-fetch conceit; plus it takes a while to get used to the many characters and their Chinese names. Still, it is making astrophysics fun and I appreciate how smart and slick this hard sci fi turned out to be

https://theastoundinganalogcompanion.com/2019/08/27/a-statement-from-the-editor/

John W. Campbell Award renamed! That was quick. I think the subject may have been under discussion there already. Although I do think calling it the Astounding Award makes it sound like a description of the award, at least to anyone who doesn't know the history of SF short fiction markets (i.e. most people). Couldn't they have called it the Gardner Award or something (after the recently-deceased Gardner Dozois)? Anyway, whatever, good news.

long time coming tbh

anybody read this (or anything by this guy?)
https://sciencefictionruminations.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/mercedes-nights.jpg?w=474&h=703

Sienkiewicz cover!

(never heard of the author before)

yeah he snagged Sienkiewicz for two covers somehow

From the back cover: “This stunning novel marks the arrival of a major SF talent. Mercedes Nights is a wildly inventive novel imbued with the unreality and manic energy of Philip K. Dick, but wholly original in concept and in the scope of its author’s imagination.

A black market cloning operation plots to sell duplicates of Mercedes Night, the hottest vidstar around, to clients with enough money to indulge in such pleasures. But the clones have minds of their own—and soon the real Mercedes must come to grips with the existence of several exact duplicates of herself. The characters whose lives are touched by the Mercedes Nights include the twisted and paranoid Arthur Horstmeyer, who waits for the day he can evolve past humanity; Lancelot, the handheld intelligent computer; and the mysterious Magnus, owned of Sub-Space Corporation and unseen manipulator of people and events. And drawing them all together is Mercedes Night—one of the most captivating, sharp-edged, unforgettable characters in all of science fiction.

Unique, ironic, and absorbing, Mercedes Nights is a novel that will be talked about for years to come.”

I looked it up in Pringle's Ultimate Guide to SF:

"A star comedian is kidnapped, cloned and sold as a sort of living sex doll. This turns out to be the front-shop operation for some political machinations. There is a parallel strand about travel to the stars by what seem to be mystical means. An energetic first novel." (1 star)

And his second novel, My Father Immortal (1989):
"Three newborn babies are cast into space and, as they grow towards puberty, machines teach them of their strange past... A complex tale of suspended animation and post-nuclear horrors: crude in place, but powerful." (2 stars)

Οὖτις - I think ERBurroughs was only a youthful enthusiasm for Moorcock. But like other writers, perhaps saw more potential in his style to be developed.

Jon says "RJG"

I'm reading this as Robert John Godfrey.

Daniel says "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."

I've always wondered about this. Nick Cave said something along these lines. Personally, I've never liked it. I believe that eventually big blind spots strangles artists when they get older.

Just far too many dismissive provocateur statements going around these days.

Another artist, Helmut Wenske used a lot of art for both albums and books. He was most associated with the band Nektar and did quite a few PK Dick, Lem and Strugatsky covers.

https://iansales.com/2013/06/11/your-epic-fantasy-list-smells-of-elderberries/

Ian Sales again. The epic fantasy lists he links to are entertaining enough but they're more concerned with speculating widespread influence than quality (still enjoyable though). His selections all seem to be his favorites.
Ricardo Pinto's interesting sounding trilogy is currently being revised into a longer series, he says "I have broken the Stone Dance into seven rather than three parts. There are practical reasons for this, but the artistic reasons are the clincher."
More info here..
https://www.ricardopinto.com/2018/08/15/stone-dance-second-edition/

I totally agree with Sales that the film/tv awards should be done away with in literary awards. Some of the recent nominations and winners are a bit embarrassing.
Rich Horton was understandably upset that Alec Nevala-Lee's landmark non-fiction Astounding was beaten at the Hugos by an online archive of fanfiction. See the comments here...
https://www.blackgate.com/2019/08/24/john-w-campbell-was-a-racist-and-a-loon-a-response-to-jeannette-ngs-campbell-award-acceptance-speech/
I had a look around this archive and was amazed how much music fanfiction there was (both of band members and the worlds contained in their music), but as with all the crossovers of prose fiction, comics, screen and videogame characters, I think a lot of this is done for laughs or outdoing each other at unlikely crossovers (Hodgson's Night Land mixed with some tv show I hadn't heard of). The Burzum/Mayhem sex stories might be serious but I didn't have the patience to verify.

I am finally reading a fantasy novel.

THE TROLLTOOTH WARS, the first Fighting Fantasy novel, by Steve Jackson:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1129762.The_Trolltooth_Wars

Because of nostalgia?

I tried to read "In the Ocean of the Night" by Gregory Benford but the attractive successful astronaut and his polyamorous relationship with two attractive successful women took up over half the book and was insufferable, even when one of them was stricken with a life threatening incurable illness.

From a goodreads review: white british dude whose only personality trait is getting irrationally angry at complete strangers about religion goes from being in a polyamorous relationship with two women to getting a petite Japanese manic pixie dream girl to fall in love with him via impressing her with weed? and being incredibly patronizing towards her.

Now I'm sad I didn't get as far as the japanese manic pixie dream girl.

Because I found it in a 2nd hand bookshop for £1 ... and yes, I go way way back with actual FFGs. A FF novel is of course a different entity, but it has fun with using some of the same places and names from books like THE CITADEL OF CHAOS.

I have a sense that Jackson was occasionally trying to do some quirky things, eg: with a character called a Chervah who is like an elf / pixie character who is vegetarian and teetotal, always trying to get the hero to eat health foods. The book sometimes reminds me of the corny humour of Fantasy people.

I read Gregory Benford's most recent novel, and criticised it on Goodreads, and he started bitching at me in the comments

lol

Hahaha

Just started my first R A Lafferty collection, the intro-heavy one referred to above.

and he started bitching at me in the comments

i saw that when you posted it before, your response was considered and otm!

Cheers. If it's a bad idea for a writer to respond to a reviewer, it's surely a much much worse idea for them to respond to some random dickhead on Goodreads.

Um, link please?

i tried the Traitor Baru Cormorant and i couldn't get into it. it was interesting but a little idk schematic or something. half felt like someone narrating their last catan game to me or something

Too dumb to work out how to link to a review on goodreads. Reproduced here, with apologies to all:

Me: Very weird and unsatisfying alternative-history novel about the Manhattan Project in which Benford's Mary Sue hero, his real-life father-in-law Karl Cohen, gets to save the world, minimises geniuses like Oppenheimer, Szilard and Fermi, gets to tell off and outsmart Heisenberg and Groves, etc, and is fawned over by people like Rommel. Not without some merit (though the prose is functional at best), but still very odd. Like an incredibly ambitious present for his wife that somehow got published for a wide audience by mistake.

Gregory Benford: this is simply an ignorant personal attack, not a review

Me: No, it's an honest and accurate summary of my response to the book I paid for, read, and was disappointed by. An ignorant personal attack would have used terms of abuse and given the book one star.

otm

Bunch of fanfiction that confused me at first then the next second made total sense: Phantom Thread.

Dover reissued Nine Horrors And A Dream and The Shapes Of Midnight months ago.
https://doverpublications.ecomm-search.com/search?keywords=Joseph%20Payne%20Brennan

so, has anyone else read Lidnsay's "Voyage to Arcturus"? This book is insane. The closest point of comparison I can think of is Silverbob's "Son of Man" but the tone is much more allegorical and also violently disturbing (there is a lot of murdering). Granted, I can't really make out what the allegory *is* in any given scene per se, but it's written with this sort of weighty spiritual tone that gives the impression everything the protagonist is going through is intended to reveal some hidden truth, even though it's being cloaked in really bizarre imagery and seemingly random plot machinations. Everything - the way the characters interact, the descriptions of the landscape and weather, the physical transformations - has this psychedelically grotesque quality.

That sounds deeply unpleasant

well, it's not really gross or explicit in any way, so it's not that unpleasant as much as it just kind of disorienting. I mean, it was written in 1920, so there's a certain kind of archaic stodginess to it. It's just like ... well here's an excerpt:

Other creatures sported so wildly, in front of his very eyes, that they became of different “kingdoms” altogether. For example, a fruit was lying on the ground, of the size and shape of a lemon, but with a tougher skin. He picked it up, intending to eat the contained pulp; but inside it was a fully formed young tree, just on the point of bursting its shell. Maskull threw it away upstream. It floated back toward him; by the time he was even with it, its downward motion had stopped and it was swimming against the current. He fished it out and discovered that it had sprouted six rudimentary legs.

Maskull sang no paeans of praise in honour of the gloriously overcrowded valley. On the contrary, he felt deeply cynical and depressed. He thought that the unseen power—whether it was called Nature, Life, Will, or God—that was so frantic to rush forward and occupy this small, vulgar, contemptible world, could not possess very high aims and was not worth much. How this sordid struggle for an hour or two of physical existence could ever be regarded as a deeply earnest and important business was beyond his comprehension The atmosphere choked him, he longed for air and space. Thrusting his way through to the side of the ravine, he began to climb the overhanging cliff, swinging his way up from tree to tree.

Colin Wilson wrote a study of his works.

it's very phantasmagorical and portentous so that's not surprising

I really want to get a copy of Colin Wilson’s 60s book on music - apparently he was an early proponent of Bax (very few were at that stage)

was sick last week, so i re-read zelazny's two amber series for the first time in like 25 years. easy and fun

Another Colin Wilson thing
https://thebedlamfiles.com/nonfiction/ken-russell-a-director-in-search-of-a-hero/

so how did a genre that (at least in its initial decades) prided itself on extrapolating many of its trappings from science (rockets, atomic power, space exploration, mass communication, etc.) get so besotted with something as un-scientific as telepathy/psychic powers? Seems like it was a common trope from the 40s through at least the 70s, but where did it come from? cuz it wasn't Popular Mechanics.