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

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

And speaking of murder mysteries/alt time-line police procedurals, have you read The Yiddish Policeman's Union? Sticks to the ribs.

Finished the 7oth Anniversary Oct/Nov F&SF: Link's story has a soothing, bedtime story cadence and texture rooled by punk whiffs, but for her it's mellow, despite the measure ov blood. Just as strong in its way is the last story, the only fiction I've ever read by Dozois, which the editor says he sent just before his death: it is about mortality, mostly subsumed to views of the mountain, the forest, the inn, a couple of old men, one tough and thought to be a wizard, then just to be old and rich, suitable for rolling by a foursome of thugs, also seized on by a desperate girl.
Nick Wolven's story has something like an HG Wells combo of deliberately dowdy old-man narration times extrapolation, here at teh edge of a very settled (-seeming) galaxy---enough ideas to seed a saga series or two, but certainly satisfying on its own.
Bear's story is a brave combo of spacey humor and seriousness, narrated by a damaged person who has an urgent foggy notion that she must, recover, buried memory, to keep shit (the city, things as they are, stressful as those are) from blowing up. There are pods of suspense, like when she finally resolves to stand up,"my hands go through the sink" (the parts of her hands that are still attached; she keeps losing things). Can't work it our in the laptop, because she can't touch that, has to recover pens that she has known at loved on eBay, where bidding for these is sometimes fierce. Sometimes too rambly, but always in character: as much a groove thing as the Link and Dozois.
Moorcock's saga is good in unexpected ways when his narrator gets to Kabul, but some of the preceding scenes in the field feel a bit awkward; think his battle etc. scenes work better when he has a freer hand (not so conscientious about realism), on the retro future battlefields of old Mars, for instance, in his contribution to RR Martin & Dozois anthology of new old Mars stories.
James Sallis provides an extended review of The Water Cure, by Sophie MacKintosh, with intriguing excerpts.
The rest is meh.
Don't care much about th

i have been reading a lot of cj cherryh and had to make a spreadsheet of her bibliography to keep shit straight (the wiki entry is formatted very poorly) and man there is a lot of cj cherryh out there!!

sometimes i am not sure that she's ever met a human being and that's she's kind of guessing as to how one would react in various situations but her politics and corporate machinations and her aliens and alien politics and alien corporate machinations are SO FUCKING GOOD

xpost Damn, sorry for lack of edit!

what cherryh would you recommend for first timers?

yeah I never really considered her worth pursuing, all I can recall are some stories in the Thieves' World anthologies

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51JE46M6IJL.jpg

pride of chanur and the sequels. love that michael whelan cover. this one has good aliens and is a good example of cherryh's low-exposition but very detailed worldbuilding.

downbelow station is also excellent and is sort of at the center of the "company wars" part of her larger universe/timeline. she dips in and out of different eras and locales so part of the fun is figuring out when/where a novel is set and what else is going on.

idk if i would recommend either of these to like "novice" sf readers because she is really not interested in slowing down and telling the reader what's going--even though the first 40 pages of
downbelow station are a very dry description of interstellar trade policies.

look i know i'm not selling these very well but ultimately there's a sense of mystery/grandeur/big-universe-out-there-in-the-lonely-interstellar-deep that's missing from most of the modern "space opera" stuff i've read. (cf the expanse)

my real favorite so far is 40,000 in gehenna but i think maybe it would make zero sense going in cold

ugh eg the expanse not cf what is wrong w me

Downbelow Station won the Hugo, or Nebula? I always tend to pick award winners up when I see them, so have that, unread. Not that SF award winners are always 'classic', but trying to hack a way through the huge, still largely uncharted swamp of the genre, awards are, for me, at least some kind of working guide, however divorced from the actual terrain once stepped through.

Re: Aldiss. I think I've already noted on this thread, just how insanely prolific he was - up there were the Silverbergs, Andersons etc in terms of sheer productivity. And I can see why he got a lot published - even when the actual story isn't up to much, Aldiss rarely dips below a certain functional elegance, and he doesn't often descend into pure cliche or melodrama either (tho' I'm sure there are examples of such dotted throughout his career.) And when he's on song, he's really very top tier SF - Greybeard, for example, is easily one of the ten best SF novels I've ever read, brilliantly structured - and overall has a good or better hit rate than most any other genre bigname you care to toss into the mix.

Ward Fowler otm throughout post

James Sallis provides an extended review of The Water Cure, by Sophie MacKintosh, with intriguing excerpts

Don't bother, it's a thinly imagined book that isn't very good.

Re Cherryh, have a soft-spot for the vividly-imagined gritty day-to-day life on a space station stuff in 'Rimrunners'. Years ago, when trying to work out what the title of this book was (I'd read it from the library and then forgotten), and faced with the bewildering size of Cherryh's bibliography, I emailed her to describe the plot and ask which book I'd read. She was kind enough to reply with the info and without abusing me.

Cherryh!

I just finished the first of four books in the Morgaine omnibus and it's very good (sword & sorcery peppered with epic fantasy and time travel). Will write a more detailed review when I finish the whole fourogy. First book is from 1975 and also interesting because the epic fantasy boom was two years later, but already she was into the deep history stuff. Bits of it very probably inspired by Elric.

Here reviews by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy and Adam Roberts (watch out as the latter includes a ton of spoilers and slightly exaggerates the monsters, because you barely see them)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/274588056
https://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/gate-of-ivrel-cj-cherryh/

I've heard that 40,000 In Gehenna is one of many standalones in Alliance-Union. Got the impression that Cyteen, Faded Sun trilogy and Angel With A Sword are highpoints. I found her Dreaming Tree omnibus in Oxfam this week.

cyteen is on my shelf but it's fuckin huge! been enjoying the mass market papaerbacks on my commute. been buying old mass markets on ebay for basically nothing, my lois mcmaster bujold shelf groans

Bujold seems to answer every question she gets on goodreads and answers even what looks like obvious spambot questions. Someone asked her why and she gave this great answer (I wish I could find) about not being too presumptuous about those questions, which might be genuine questions from unusual varieties of people. She's amazingly patient.

https://www.theincomparable.com/hoarse/34/

Want to listen to this after I've finished Morgaine.

The only Bujold I've read is Memory, which I carried on about way upthread---still struck by how strong and translucently layered it is, how strong a stand-alone read it makes, from deep in series, with seamless backstory bits, just enough of those---amazeballs am I! (And it seems like a crucial transition in Miles V.'s life, which she did not fumble.)

the first 40 pages of downbelow station are a very dry description of interstellar trade policies.

yeah i did not make it past this

https://www.tor.com/2019/10/22/science-fictional-rulers-from-undying-emperors-to-starlike-sovereigns/

Interesting thread about rulers and systems of government.

silkpunk

wot

Usually set in something like centuries old east asia. I think Ken Liu coined it, and if he didn't, he is a famous example of someone who writes it.

refreshingly diverse list anyway, might check a couple of them out.

Although as one commenter says, they are mostly Tor books but I don't think Nicoll is under that pressure.

I use cyberpunk, splatterpunk and grudgingly acknowledge steampunk just because you cant quite avoid it. But if it doesn't have a sufficiently punk attitude or aesthetic, I say you have no business adding "punk" to the name of your genre. It makes genre names really fucking boring too.

Yeah, seems like a meaningless suffix at this point

Like you probably didn’t even notice that all my posts on this thread were Blecchpunk.

Kelly Link Is Punk