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

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.

Campbell, no? Before he got into dianetics.

that's what I'm wondering, is it really largely down to one guy? Residual fascination w previous century mesmerists and table-knockers?

also Rhine's book about his ESP experiments came out in 1934 and wasn't debunked for quite a while

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasensory_Perception_(book)

interesting, did not know about that book thx

William Hope Hodgson - Carnacki The Ghost Finder

I'm a big fan of Hodgson's other major works and I found this a bit disappointing. A lot of his fans rate Carnacki very highly but then so many people love strong detective elements in their horror and I never have, so far. But like everyone else today, I don't welcome faked supernatural Scooby Doo explanations but I do try to keep an open mind about this approach and the early stories even warm you up for this possibility.
4 stories are genuinely supernatural, 2 stories are fakes, 2 are a mixture of faked and genuine supernatural, 1 story is a completely different genre (about book swapping/fraud, would have been more appropriate for his Captain Gault stories).

I think "The Horse Of The Invisible" is particularly spoiled by the fakery, could have been a much better story without the daft and very unconvincing explanations. The only one where the fakery brought some real interest to me was "The Searcher Of The End House" but that's largely because the ghosts were left intact.

Many of the stories are a bit too drawn out and have too much of Carnacki arranging his electric apparatus.
"The Haunted Jarvee" tried my patience the most of them but is somewhat redeemed by its later scenes, a highlight of the book. "The Hog" is the best thing in the collection, sharing with House On The Borderland the threat of pigs from the depths of the earth; the concept is more developed than the other stories and has an interesting science fictional origin for the monsters but the story would have been a lot stronger if it were a tad shorter.

After reading more of Hodgson's characters, I'm seeing humour in places I previously wouldn't have.

I'm very curious to see how a few of these stories are condensed in Nightshade's Dream Of X collection.

"Out you go!"

Pretty cool cover gimmick
https://littleredreviewer.wordpress.com/2019/09/20/special-edition-six-for-friday/

Read the script of Clair Noto's unmade THE TOURIST, supposedly the greatest science-fiction movie never to escape develoment hell, and it's about on a par with the worst episodes of Torchwood.

What is Hodgson's other major creation? Think I only know about Carnacki, from LOEG - bought a cheap Wordsworth Classics anthology of his stories but haven't read (story of my library's life).

I bought that Vandemeer Fantasy doorstop after hearing about it on this thread. Less humungous than their Weird Fiction tome, which I actually finished. They end at Tolkien, i.e. fantasy's commodification into a genre in a marketing sense. Very difficult for me to think of what "fantasy" is before that - where the borders lie with, like, fairy tales and such. The Vandemeers seem to think the origins are mostly germanic.

Yeah, that's the premise of Douglas A. Anderson's Tales Before Tolkien---or at least, while of course pointing out that Mr. T. himself was a deep scholar of Beowulf etc,, and mentioning ancient Greek etc., he has to draw the line somewhere for a non-doorstop, and starts from Tieck, eventually goes on to Brits: he says he's picked stories that Tolkien discussed in his correspondence and notebooks, others he mentioned, others that he prob knew, and a few he may not have known about, but hey. Contents: (ends with one from the rarely seen, yet notoriously and proudly something David Lindsay)
https://vufind.carli.illinois.edu/vf-icc/Record/icc_87441/TOC Seemed like a very edutaining collection to me, but maybe duh to someone who really knows fantasy.
I did miss Estimated Time of Arrival Hoffman who can show up on the expressway to my skull, but maybe his approach is different from what the editor was going for---also missed the no-anesthetic woodcarvings of Lucy Clifford, like this:
http://seanconnors.net/eng3903/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/The-New-Mother.pdf

Oh yeah, I'd heard about that anthology before, thanks for bringing to my attention.

The Vandermeer book has ETA Hoffman. Also the Grimm Bros.

Dan Simmons is a twat:

http://file770.com/dan-simmons-criticized-for-remarks-about-thunberg/

Daniel - I was referring to his 4 novels, although not everyone would consider them all major works. 2 of them are the sort of supernatural sea stories he did a lot of. But Carnacki, House On The Borderland and The Night Land are worlds that numerous other writers have played with.

http://file770.com/tiptree-name-will-be-removed-from-award/

Time for a thread related to Arthur C. Clarke and the allegations of pedophilia against him. This is response to someone who tweeted me wondering if the allegations against Clarke had been debunked. All of this is relevant b/c one of the genre's major awards is named after him.

— Jason Sanford (@jasonsanford) September 27, 2019

that's a dumb reason for renaming the Tiptree award imo

I don't like it either but some say the distress it causes people is reason enough. Difficult for me to come round to that and I doubt I will. Really not enough evidence to judge her.

Amazed Bram Stoker hasn't had his award name changed yet (Lair Of The White Worm is said to be extremely racist).

Not that I'd ask for Stoker award to be changed, but I'd be more sympathetic than with the Tiptree issue.

as i said upthread, i don't think the charges against clarke are very credible -- the evidence cited in that twitter thread is very thin, and the quotes from that daily mirror story are frankly unbelievable. sanford also seems unaware that sri lanka had some of the harshest anti-LGBT laws in the world till fairly recently, which places some of the stuff he cites in a different context.

has anybody else here read Matthew Derby's "Super Flat Times"? seems super obscure. he has yet to write anything else, he doesn't get an entry in the sf encyclopedia, he got great reviews but appears to have sank without a ripple. too bad. was idly thumbing through my copy last night and it seems like such a lost gem.

New to me. There's also a collaborative novel and a bunch of short stories (some in Unstuck magazine).

Quite cool that Valancourt is so eager to take suggestions for possible reprints. I wish there was a more sff orientated publisher like that because horror has been very well reprinted in the last two decades.

It's a shame that a Bob Leman collection has been in development hell or some sort of unknown limbo for several years.

I’ve read Super Flat Times and it’s awesome.

I read Super Flat Times too! That book was amazing. Reminded me of Ben Marcus a little if I remember correctly. Really, Matt Derby isn't still at it? That's a damn shame.

It looks like he wrote some kind of interactive iPad novel which also exists in print in some form?

http://www.thesilenthistory.com/

Interview from 2017 http://riverriver.org/2017/07/19/interview-matthew-derby/

Just finished reading the NYRB collection of David R. Bunch's MODERAN!!! stories. I imagine that read in isolation, discovered unexpectedly in a pulp science fiction magazine, any one of these stories would be electrifying, a revelation. Read in a huge chunk, all in one go, they become a bit of a slog, and the virtual absence of narrative starts to feel a little like a cop-out. You get the feeling that Bunch was really getting off on the repetition of his stock phrases and neologisms, and they do take on a mantra-like quality, read in bulk - I suspect they would be great fun to speak aloud.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/moderan?variant=6835859587124

yeah they definitely get repetitive

I liked the one in The Big Book of Science Fiction, but one might be enough, or one once in a while, anthologized, yeah wouldn't mind that.

Fairly recently read Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, guest edited by Charles Yu. Each year, series Editor John Joseph Adams and his staff read several hundred stories, Adams picks the semi-finalists, and hands them to the guest, who picks 18-20 or so. As I posted upthread, the ones picked by Karen Joy Fowler in 2016 made for an uncommonly strong collection, almost too strong for this compulsive cherrypicker (me), while 2015, guested by Joe Hill, did pretty well considering that Kelly Link and Karen Russell were such tough acts to follow (they might should have been right at the end).
But for this one, Adam says (in effect, and pretty much right out) that Yu wanted to tell about What's Happening in Our World, and though all of his picks have good qualities, they mostly end with a Message, and tend to suffer by proximity, I think.
Some of them suffer by comparison to selections in prev. volumes: NK Jemison's The City Born Great's message is delivered with some verve, flair, even, but if you want comic book homeless wild child discovering and grappling with psi power's, try 2015's "We Are The Cloud," by Sam J. Miller, which is informed by what he's learned as an activist, and as a creative writer.

Fave topical: "Vulcanization," by Nisi Shawl, a scholar of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, as confirmed in the bio notes: she's drunk deep, and is a prestidigitator like you can't quite learn from any book.

But they ain't all topical--like, there's one bit of shameless Y.A, pandering (or Y.A. wannabee pandering; would think actual Y.s are sick of this stuff by now) which seems like it's gonna be Romeo and Juliet of exobiology, but becomes amusingly sameless, with a laidback, slack ending, which given what I thought would happen, is 'ppreciated (and can be taken as a take-off on such pandering, incl. the author's own--it's entertaining, so what the heck)(I won't identify this one, although if you read the book you'll recognize it pretty quickly, sorree.)

"The Story of Kao Yu," by Peter S. Beagle, might or might not have come from an actual Chinese folk tale, but has no "translated" quaintness: it's about a circuit-riding judge and his staff, in some Empire, some century or other, but there's nothing vague about the characters or their situations--fantasy element is the entity that sometimes appears in the back of whatever courtroom, observing. I guess it *could* be considered topical, in the sense that gender roles, incl. suddenly hapless maleness, can still be news, somehow.

That's almost my favorite in the whole volume, but give a couple extra points to Brian Evenson, whom I'd somehow never heard of, though turns out he's fairly prolific. "Smear" is a space horror story, so tightly constructed that it's hard to describe without risking spoilers.

psi powers, not power's, sorry.

amusingly *shameless*

Have only read a tiny bit of each but the discussion of Super Flat Times reminded me of Moderan, so it seems appropriate that that came up again.

I never buy magazines, but I bought this, mainly for the first story, which turned out to be worth the price of admission at least:

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
70th Anniversary Issue!
October/November
NOVELETS
The White Cat's Divorce – Kelly Link
American Gold Mine – Paolo Bacigalupi
Kabul – Michael Moorcock
Erase, Erase, Erase – Elizabeth Bear
SHORT STORIES
Little Inn on the Jianghu – Y.M. Pang
Under the Hill – Maureen McHugh
Madness Afoot – Amanda Hollander
The Light on Eldoreth – Nick Wolven
Booksavr – Ken Liu
The Wrong Badger – Esther Friesner
Ghost Ships – Michael Swanwick
Homecoming – Gardner Dozois
POEMS
Last Human in the Olympics – Mary Soon Lee
Halstead IV – Jeff Crandall
DEPARTMENTS
Three Score and Ten – Robert Silverberg
Books to Look For – Charles de Lint
Books – James Sallis
Films: Love Death + Some Regression – Karin Lowachee
Science: Net Up or Net Down? – Jerry Oltion
Plumage from Pegasus – Paul Di Filippo
Coming Attractions –
Curiosities – Thomas Kaufsek

I love Kelly Link!

yeah she is great

idly making my way through an Aldiss collection from '59, this guy was so erratic.

Yup

he's does have a knack for idiosyncratic turns of phrase (describing a young man as "thin and sweet as celery" for example) that catch my attention, but they're deployed in a haphazard way, and a bunch of these stories either don't go anywhere or have very pedestrian "twists".

Surprising recent example of reused cover art, only a few years apart.
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?574386
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?726680

Richard Clifton-Dey is another older artist who made numerous sales of the same images
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/titlecovers.cgi?1872409
https://www.discogs.com/Blue-Öyster-Cult-Cultösaurus-Erectus/master/68052
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1178504
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1009766

Wonder what’s in that Caitlín R. Kiernan book? Oh I see.

Aldiss is great when he is on though. Maybe somebody should do a POLL. I nominate you, Shakey.

One day I will read the Helliconia books.

I read The Malacia Tapestry, did not know what to make of it

I've really been enjoying some recent-ish Russian/Jewish/Yiddish/Eastern European folklore-influenced fantasy lately.

I think I started with Spinning Silver (Jewish identity + folk magic) by Naomi Novik, and then I realized that I had previously read Katherine Arden's The Girl and the Nightingale (Russian + folk magic vs Christianity) and not known it was a trilogy, so I crammed in books 2 & 3 (The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch), all wonderful.

Took a minor detour to read every novel by T. Kingfisher, (fairy tale re-dos but uncommonly lovely and un-stilted). Took a break with some murder mysteries and then just ran across The Sisters of the Winter Wood (Jewish identity + folk magic).

I kind of never want to come back to read anything else tbh.

Aldiss is great when he is on though. Maybe somebody should do a POLL. I nominate you, Shakey.

lol no, there's too much! It's just funny how even within this one fix-up book with material from a pretty brief timeframe (2 years?), the quality and styles vary really widely.

I haven't read any of the Helliconia books either

in orbit, you remind me that I still haven't read my library discard edition of Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg and Jack Dann, something different in '74. Contents and comments here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_Stars