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

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

Judy Merril is a Runt

Went to the Futurian club and both got drunk

And oh I don’t know why
Oh I don’t know why
Sci-fi
Oh yeah
Sci-fi
Oh yeah

Multiverse
Same as the first

Haha

This Joanna Russ short story collection I got from the library, "The Hidden Side of the Moon", has been something of a revelation for me. Having only read the few novels of hers that are widely available (The Female Man, We Who Are About To..., etc.) it's been pretty eye-opening to read such a stylistically wide-ranging set of works, and also to realize that not everything she wrote was shot through with that almost paralyzing anger and nihilism that pops up in her longer works. Some of these stories are downright whimsical, others are impenetrable academic exercises, others border on magical realism, others are discursive meta-narratives on sci-fi itself, etc. "Window Dressing" has a fantastic opening hook ("Mannequins - as everyone knows or should know - have only one aim in life: to make some pervert fall in love with them."), "The Throwaways" is a very funny dialogue between two representatives of rival ideological factions in some near-future fashionista dystopia, "Mr. Wilde's Second Chance" a wry exploration of Wilde's trials in the after life. Way more humor and affection than I expected.

Lol I have the trade pb of Cyteen. It’s a doorstop. Probably read it 15 years ago and haven’t pulled it out since. Maybe I should.

Went through an obsessive Bujold/Vorkosigan phase last year. It was fun.

i only have two vorkosigans left (the two most recent) and i am torn between reading immediately or saving for a special occasion. also factoring in is the INSANE cover of "captain vorpatril's alliance" for commuting purposes

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51imJYWcztL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

haha

Lol

Bill Campbell on another Bunch collection
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/9667757

Kind of afraid to get his book because of the cover
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/796482720

I thought Cherryh was finished with Foreigner but there's a 20th book coming in January. I doubt I'll be going there but I do have the first book. I'm more interested in most of her other stuff.

Third Clark Ashton Smith collection (of the Night Shade collected stories series) seems a lot stronger than the previous ones, 80 pages in.

Don't remember if this was noted on the obituary thread.
https://www.blackgate.com/2019/10/28/michael-blumlein-june-28-1948-october-24-2019/

I'm fairly sure he had cancer for years. Some of his stuff was reprinted by Valancourt a while ago.

it's interesting what seems to be dominating the shelves these days (at least in my local bookstores):
- loads of YA fantasy type stuff
- emphasis on formerly marginalized voices: women, people of color, etc., including many authors who are clearly (and in some cases deservedly) being retroactively canonized but in prior eras could be really hard to find (Russ, LeGuin, Delaney, etc.) I just saw two - TWO! - copies of Francis Stevens' "The Heads of Cerberus", which would have been a totally impossible-to-find obscurity 10+ years ago.
- in contrast to this, the "big" white guy names of prior eras that still get stocked: Heinlein (lol why does this schmuck still get a pass), Asimov (the majority of his writing is terrible wtf), Herbert, Tolkien.
- Apart from PKD, who still seems to have some currency, it's like the 60s/70s/80s never happened, to say nothing of the 50s. No Wolfe(!), no Silverberg, no Ballard, no Moorcock, no Malzberg, etc.

how times change

Yup

also loads of more recent "big names" I don't give a shit about like Martin, Doctorow, Mieville, Bacalagupi, etc. It's sad to see what fluorishes in the market sometimes.

Still want to do a poll based one of those mini-catalogues of an old Ballantine paperback, say.

DO IT

Maybe this weekend

Would vote

This kind of thing doesn’t need to be scheduled like the big music polls, does it?

Lol no