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

lol I got "A Time of Changes" out of the library over the holiday (one of the peak period Silverbob's I hadn't read before) and within the first 10 pages the narrator is "confessing" about his problems with premature ejaculation.

Seems like a lot of translated anthologies are produced specifically for conventions, as Hugos, Eurocon etc move all over the world; so really difficult to find some of them.

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/category/culture/international
Reading some of these entries has been fun. So many soviet countries had a serious problem with straightforward fantasy (sometimes banning speculative fiction in general) for fear of being socially irresponsible unless you were telling a beloved national fairy tale, which is treated as an appropriate way to kiss the ass of your country's history (I think China is still like that sometimes). There are remnants of this concern in most places but some countries seem to struggle more with fantasy for it's own sake. I hate that.

Jan Potocki (of Saragossa Manuscript fame) produced an early anti-Semitic dystopia about (you guessed it) jews running the world.

despite really disliking the one iain (non-m) banks novel i read 20 years ago, i tried 'consider phlebas' and it was solid! he *really* stretched out the buildup to the climax but that's okay

also read 'this is how you lose the time war', which was short, excellent and lovely, although i'm not sure its title does it any favors

I think "Consider Phlebas" might be the best title for a SF novel, but I don't know why. Maybe the word "consider" suggests a cool detached speculation and "Phlebas" sounds like a weird ass name (even though it's just a sailor's name).
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-the-title-of-the-Iain-M-Banks-novel-Consider-Phlebas

Once again I scooped up a load of stuff at charity shops. Why do all the books I'm most excited about have to be over 400 pages?

the Eaters chapter of Phlebus always feels wrong to me, like it doesn't belong. also, ick!

Player of Games is great if you want more, might be my favourite (currently re-reading them all at the rate of about one a year)

yeah it's very ick, and treated as an abberration -- would have been better more explicitly tied into the culture's abandonment of them

Been thinking a while about a difficult to pinpoint aesthetic change in sff and I wonder if its crucial in its gaining wider cultural acceptance. Did there used to be more ugly, dorky and twee stuff? Dorky is hard to define. Plenty of sff today looks ugly in a bland way and I'd argue amateurish cgi and photoshopped covers are worse than anything in the past, but most of that is from small presses.
I was watching some episodes of Prisoners Of Gravity (an 80s-90s Canadian interview show) and it was just so dorky in a way I cant imagine such a thing being today (but if there was such a thing today, I think more authors would be embarrassed to show their cover art).

If Game Of Thrones was on tv in the 90s, Jon Snow would have had a furry wisecracking sidekick called Queequar and there would have been more scenes of people laughing (especially men with beards) and dancing around a fire to quaintly merry music (all 80s-90s films set in medieval Europe have these scenes, I'm sure you could make a long compilation of them).

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2019-in-review-part-one/
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2019-in-review-part-two/
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2019-in-review-part-three/

Thanks

Sad that Haikasoru has shut down, I wasn't aware.

I can't find the sci-fi cover art thread, so will just put this here. This guy does good work

https://adamrowe.substack.com/p/im-writing-a-book?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo2MjI1ODMyLCJwb3N0X2lkIjoyMjUzOTksIl8iOiI5cTA5SCIsImlhdCI6MTU3OTExMDg2NywiZXhwIjoxNTc5MTE0NDY3LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjY2MjciLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.iEFgxhk-Mh83qevQHN-0rtzdcXdDAtLAAg_EMtYi_B8

There was a book with Adam Roberts commentary a while ago, don't know if it was funded but I don't think there was anything about interviews.

Clifford Simak - City

Important Note: the ninth story "Epilog" doesn't appear in every edition, it was written 20 years after the other stories, Simak has mixed feelings about it and so do his fans. I had to check isfdb to see which editions contained it and I bought one of them. According to that database, the Gollancz Masterworks edition doesn't have it, but I checked a copy in a bookstore last week and it actually does include it (maybe earlier printings didn't?)

My Methuen edition contains a 1976 Simak foreward included in even fewer versions of the book. He makes it pretty clear that he thinks cities should have been phased out as transportation improves. He admits that the stories are a kind of fanciful refuge and he doesn't think City is his best work. I wish he would have addressed what homes our growing population would allow for, because that's the first thing that seemed like a major obstacle preventing every family from living in their own luxurious acres.

City is a kind of mixture of wishful thinking and thinking more seriously about the potential problems of the speculated changes. Definitely not hard science fiction, so much of it is completely unconvincing (especially Joe's way of catalyzing the ants). I tend to dislike stories that go on about how awful we are as a species, they tend to be simplistic, intellectually lazy, naively idealizing other species (often ones that don't exist), but there's a lot more going on here.
Even when there's so much logic to quibble with (why does advanced underwater intelligence seem so unlikely to Jenkins? Does Geneva have to be so hopeless? What is essential to Simak's idea of human purpose?) there's so many interesting situations to ponder; it has a lot of charm and it's quite sad to see so many eras ending, one after another.
I'd strongly advise you to seek out an edition with "Epilog", I sort of understand why some people don't like it but I thought it contained perhaps the most powerful scene in the story and the thing that is staying with me most. I got a feeling that however much things change, some of those places and Jenkins will always be out there somewhere. I love Jenkins.

When I started reading the book, I was wondering whether to skip the introductions because I generally tend to read introductions and forewards after I finish the story, but most of them are part of the actual story! They're a framing a device. I wish Simak had cut out some recapping, it makes some sense for magazine serialization but it drags down the story in book form a bit.

3/4 of the way through a book that was recommended by both James Morrison and ledge and it is not disappointing. Can’t wait to see what will happen after the dust storm ends.

So far seems to be shaping up to be an instant ILB sf classic, a worthy successor to Inverted World.

Which?

Theory of Bastards, by Audrey Schulman.

Never heard of it - thx for the rec!

idk about successor to inverted world, but i liked it a lot

it's very very very good

^ just read that while listening to a song with the chorus 'very very very very very very good', solid proof i'm living in a simulation.

So far seems to be shaping up to be an instant ILB sf classic

I'd be up for a thread discussing what the ILB canon would look like, sf or otherwise.

Maybe it runs out of, um, steam slightly near the end but most of it is completely well-done and absorbing: the near future dystopia, the primatology, the pain stuff, the two, well three actually principal humans as well as the primate characters themselves.

Don’t know why I mentioned Inverted World exactly, there is not any particular similarity, maybe just trying to trade on its popularity, sorry.

Michael Dirda’s Wapo review full of spoilers.

ILB SF canon: THE ILX ALL-TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL RESULTS THREAD & DISCUSSION

a classic

Globe and Mail review has some spoilers but is otm about the different sections of the book.

love that results thread even tho I violently disagreed w the results

Robert, thanks for your take on City, and the cited Simak comments---read it so long ago that I don't remember anything, except description of "Epilog" does almost jog something. Got two editions or printings (library discards) I'll have to find, and sure hope Jenkins made it into one of them, at least.

Maybe I should finally get around to reading that. I had so much fun with the bonobos, so why not dogs.

Thanks Shakey, will check that out!

Spec fic poll above is a bit of a sausage fest - only 4 women in the top 30 and 3 of them are Le Guin. Not really ilx's fault, though there are some notable exceptions - the industry was just a boys' club for most of the last century.

As in a lot of the polls *SPOILER ALERT* I don't invest too much in the results if I can help it, but I really liked the discussion on that thread and the kind of stuff that was nominated.

I think I learned on ILX that the interesting part of polls is always 50-100 and not 50-1.

Seems to be a good rule of thumb

the industry was just a boys' club for most of the last century

don't really agree w this tbh, although it's generally true of the first half of the 20th century. But after that, outside of LeGuin (who is over-represented in the results for some reason) there's Tiptree, Brackett, MacLean, C.L. Moore, Wilhelm, Emshwiller, Merrill, Russ, McCaffrey, etc. All of these women wrote highly celebrated and popular (relative to the genre) material. Post-50s the list expands and just gets longer and longer. And of course there's a good argument to be made that the genre's foundational text is Frankenstein, written by a woman.

Of course, the results not reflecting this is more a function of the voters and their stupid priorities than anything else.

I'd have to go back and check the list but I don't recall it being dominated by pre-1950 texts, it not like ILB voters were stanning for Hugo Gernsback-certified writers

I guess that's a long way of me disagreeing and saying that yes, the sausagefest results list actually IS ILX's fault

For reference:
100 Iain M Banks - Excession
099 Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
098 Robin Hobb - The Farseer Trilogy
097 Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama
096 Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
095 Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
094 William Gibson - Pattern Recognition
093 Roald Dahl - James & The Giant Peach
092 Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth
091 Thomas Disch - Camp Concentration
090 Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan
089 H.P. Lovecraft - "The Colour out of Space"
088 Roger Zelazny - The Chronicles of Amber
087 Octavia Butler - Lilith's Brood
086 Christopher Priest - Inverted World
085 Gene Wolfe - Book of the Long Sun
084 Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds
083 Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
082 Russell Hobon - Riddley Walker
081 Cordwainer Smith - The Rediscovery of Man (1993)
080 Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
079 Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time
078 J.G. Ballard - High Rise
077 Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
076 Dan Simmons - Hyperion
075 Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren
074 John Crowley - Engine Summer
073 Lloyd Alexander - Prydain Chronicles
072 Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas
071 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
070 Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange 59
069 J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter septet 59
068 Italo Calvino - Cosmicomics 60
067 Edgar Allan Poe - Tale of Mystery & Imagination 60
066 Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth 61
065 Gygax & Arneson - 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide 61
064 James Tiptree - "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" 61
063 Glen Cook -The Black Company 64
062 Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others 66
061 John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids 66
060 Richard Adams - Watership Down 66
059 John Crowley - Little, Big 67
058 Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 68
057 Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities 70
056 China Miéville - Perdido Street Station 70
055 Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens 72
054 Adolfo Bioy Cesares - The Invention of Morel 72
053 Terry Pratchett - Small Gods 73
052 Kim Stanley Robinson - The Mars trilogy 73
051 Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination 74
050 Yevgeny Zamaytin - We
049 Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
048 Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
047 Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
046 Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
045 Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
044 Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
043 Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
042 Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
041 Edwin Abbott Abbott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
040 Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy
039 Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
038 Alasdair Gray - Lanark
037 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
036 Philip K. Dick - Ubik
035 Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
034 Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising Sequence
033 H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
032 William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
031 Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
030 Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
029 M.R. James - The Collected Stories of M.R. James
028 Fredrik Pohl - Gateway
027 Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
026 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy
025 Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master & Margarita
024 J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World
023 Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
022 Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories
021 H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
020 Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time
019 Philip K. Dick - The VALIS Trilogy
018 J.R.R. Tolkein - The Hobbit
017 Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
016 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
015 George R R Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire
014 Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
013 Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
012 Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
011 J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
010 Frank Herbert - Dune
009 William Gibson - Neuromancer
008 C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
007 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
006 Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
005 George Orwell - 1984
004 Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
003 Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
002 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Earthsea Trilogy
001 J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings

roughly 10% of the list is women, and with the exception of Shelley, all of the works written by women that appear on the list were published post-1960, when the gender balance in the genre started to noticeably shift.

But overall 70% of the winners were published post-1960. So that's some disproportionate garbage going on imo. Many of the major female figures in the genre that I noted above don't appear at all.

i don't doubt there were major female authors but what was the proportion? if you look at the nebula awards the best novel nominees are something like 80% male up till the early 90s.

tough to evaluate (lots of caveats) but there's a wiki entry on this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_speculative_fiction

first sentence of that is probably the most relevant:

In 1948, 10–15% of science fiction writers were female. Women's role in speculative fiction (including science fiction) has grown since then, and in 1999, women comprised 36% of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's professional members.

where/when that big shift happened is hard to pinpoint, but Hugo's Best Novel awards/nominations tell some of the story:
- Leigh Brackett nominated in 1956
- Marion Zimmer Bradley nominated in 1963
- Andre Norton nominated in 1964
- Le Guin finally wins in 1970 (for Left Hand of Darkness)
- Le Guin nominated again in 1972, as is Anne McCaffrey
- Le Guin nominated yet again in 1975 (Disposessed)
- Kate Wilhelm nominated in 1977
- Marion Zimmer Bradley nominated in 1978
- Vonda McIntyre wins in 1979 (for Dreamsnake. I've never read it but this seems like something of a turning point for various reasons)
- Patricia McKillip nominated in 1980
- Joan Vinge (argh how could I have forgotten her) wins in 1981
- C.J. Cherryh wins in 1982, Julian May also nominated
- Cherryh nominated again in 1983
- Anne McCaffrey nominated in 1984
- Cherryh yet again in 1986
- Cherryh again in 1989, as well as Lois McMaster Bujold

anyway you get the idea.

Of course, the boundaries of the nominee pool in the ILX poll expanded far beyond the restrictive categories of the Hugos - compared to some of the stuff that placed I don't see why the likes of, say, Angela Carter (who would never have been up for a Hugo) didn't show up.

tbf my ballot was very male-heavy as well (the only two women I voted for were LeGuin and Tiptree) but in my defense it was also limited to a handful of authors that I very much wanted to place, particularly Moorcock and PKD, so there was some strategy there that didn't necessarily reflect what I would actually consider ALL TIME GREATS as much as it reflected what I suspected other people were going to vote (or not vote) for.

thx shakes, you make a good argument that ilx is sexist after all :) if nothing else you've given me lots of names to check out.

ILX or not, thing that bugs me a lot is that after Kuttner died and C. L. Moore got remarried she stopped writing altogether.

surely we can figure out some way to blame that on ILX

Maybe the time tourists in “Vintage Season” were actually ILX0rs.

DO U SEE?

tbf half the sff books published since 1970 are by piers anthony, necessarily driving down the percentage of those published by women

There's an N.K. Jemisin profile in the New Yorker btw