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)
― koogs, Saturday, 11 January 2020 04:59 (four years ago) link
yeah it's very ick, and treated as an abberration -- would have been better more explicitly tied into the culture's abandonment of them
― mookieproof, Saturday, 11 January 2020 05:20 (four years ago) link
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).
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, 12 January 2020 12:51 (four years ago) link
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/
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, 12 January 2020 17:32 (four years ago) link
Thanks
― The Soundtrack of Burl Ives (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 12 January 2020 21:43 (four years ago) link
Sad that Haikasoru has shut down, I wasn't aware.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, 12 January 2020 21:44 (four years ago) link
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
― Οὖτις, Wednesday, 15 January 2020 17:55 (four years ago) link
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.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 17 January 2020 18:35 (four years ago) link
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.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 17 January 2020 23:24 (four years ago) link
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.
― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:17 (four years ago) link
So far seems to be shaping up to be an instant ILB sf classic, a worthy successor to Inverted World.
― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:23 (four years ago) link
Which?
― change display name (Jordan), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:24 (four years ago) link
Theory of Bastards, by Audrey Schulman.
― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:29 (four years ago) link
Never heard of it - thx for the rec!
― Οὖτις, Thursday, 23 January 2020 02:46 (four years ago) link
idk about successor to inverted world, but i liked it a lot
― mookieproof, Thursday, 23 January 2020 02:51 (four years ago) link
it's very very very good
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Thursday, 23 January 2020 03:11 (four years ago) link
^ 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.
― Paperbag raita (ledge), Thursday, 23 January 2020 09:41 (four years ago) link
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.
― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 23 January 2020 10:09 (four years ago) link
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.
― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 15:13 (four years ago) link
Michael Dirda’s Wapo review full of spoilers.
― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 15:14 (four years ago) link
ILB SF canon: THE ILX ALL-TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL RESULTS THREAD & DISCUSSION
― Οὖτις, Thursday, 23 January 2020 16:11 (four years ago) link
a classic
― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 16:25 (four years ago) link
Globe and Mail review has some spoilers but is otm about the different sections of the book.
― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 20:12 (four years ago) link
love that results thread even tho I violently disagreed w the results
― Οὖτις, Thursday, 23 January 2020 20:49 (four years ago) link
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.
― dow, Friday, 24 January 2020 00:28 (four years ago) link
Maybe I should finally get around to reading that. I had so much fun with the bonobos, so why not dogs.
― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 24 January 2020 01:43 (four years ago) link
Thanks Shakey, will check that out!
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 24 January 2020 10:03 (four years ago) link
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.
― Paperbag raita (ledge), Friday, 24 January 2020 10:45 (four years ago) link
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.
― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 24 January 2020 11:56 (four years ago) link
I think I learned on ILX that the interesting part of polls is always 50-100 and not 50-1.
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 24 January 2020 12:57 (four years ago) link
Seems to be a good rule of thumb
― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 24 January 2020 14:28 (four years ago) link
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.
― Οὖτις, Friday, 24 January 2020 16:31 (four years ago) link
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
― Οὖτις, Friday, 24 January 2020 16:32 (four years ago) link
I guess that's a long way of me disagreeing and saying that yes, the sausagefest results list actually IS ILX's fault
― Οὖτις, Friday, 24 January 2020 16:33 (four years ago) link
For reference:100 Iain M Banks - Excession099 Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human098 Robin Hobb - The Farseer Trilogy097 Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama096 Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels095 Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon094 William Gibson - Pattern Recognition093 Roald Dahl - James & The Giant Peach092 Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth091 Thomas Disch - Camp Concentration090 Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan089 H.P. Lovecraft - "The Colour out of Space"088 Roger Zelazny - The Chronicles of Amber087 Octavia Butler - Lilith's Brood086 Christopher Priest - Inverted World085 Gene Wolfe - Book of the Long Sun084 Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds083 Joe Haldeman - The Forever War082 Russell Hobon - Riddley Walker081 Cordwainer Smith - The Rediscovery of Man (1993)080 Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man079 Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time078 J.G. Ballard - High Rise077 Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game076 Dan Simmons - Hyperion075 Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren074 John Crowley - Engine Summer073 Lloyd Alexander - Prydain Chronicles072 Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas071 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven070 Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange 59069 J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter septet 59068 Italo Calvino - Cosmicomics 60067 Edgar Allan Poe - Tale of Mystery & Imagination 60066 Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth 61065 Gygax & Arneson - 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide 61064 James Tiptree - "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" 61063 Glen Cook -The Black Company 64062 Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others 66061 John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids 66060 Richard Adams - Watership Down 66059 John Crowley - Little, Big 67058 Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 68057 Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities 70056 China Miéville - Perdido Street Station 70055 Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens 72054 Adolfo Bioy Cesares - The Invention of Morel 72053 Terry Pratchett - Small Gods 73052 Kim Stanley Robinson - The Mars trilogy 73051 Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination 74050 Yevgeny Zamaytin - We049 Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle048 Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana047 Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said046 Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash045 Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time044 Stanislaw Lem - Solaris043 Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz042 Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49041 Edwin Abbott Abbott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions040 Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy039 Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five038 Alasdair Gray - Lanark037 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein036 Philip K. Dick - Ubik035 Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass034 Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising Sequence033 H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories032 William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch031 Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch030 Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale029 M.R. James - The Collected Stories of M.R. James028 Fredrik Pohl - Gateway027 Aldous Huxley - Brave New World026 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy025 Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master & Margarita024 J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World023 Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games022 Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories021 H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness020 Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time019 Philip K. Dick - The VALIS Trilogy018 J.R.R. Tolkein - The Hobbit017 Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly016 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia015 George R R Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire014 Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?013 Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones012 Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle011 J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard010 Frank Herbert - Dune009 William Gibson - Neuromancer008 C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia007 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness006 Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials005 George Orwell - 1984004 Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy003 Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun002 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Earthsea Trilogy001 J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
― Οὖτις, Friday, 24 January 2020 16:35 (four years ago) link
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.
― Οὖτις, Friday, 24 January 2020 18:29 (four years ago) link
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.
― Paperbag raita (ledge), Friday, 24 January 2020 20:04 (four years ago) link
tough to evaluate (lots of caveats) but there's a wiki entry on this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_speculative_fiction
― Οὖτις, Friday, 24 January 2020 20:10 (four years ago) link
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.
― Οὖτις, Friday, 24 January 2020 20:22 (four years ago) link
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.
― Paperbag raita (ledge), Friday, 24 January 2020 20:41 (four years ago) link
ILX or not, thing that bugs me a lot is that after Kuttner died and C. L. Moore got remarried she stopped writing altogether.
― TS: Kirk/Spock vs. Marat/Sade (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 24 January 2020 20:46 (four years ago) link
surely we can figure out some way to blame that on ILX
― Οὖτις, Friday, 24 January 2020 21:07 (four years ago) link
Maybe the time tourists in “Vintage Season” were actually ILX0rs.
― TS: Kirk/Spock vs. Marat/Sade (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 24 January 2020 21:25 (four years ago) link
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
― mookieproof, Friday, 24 January 2020 21:29 (four years ago) link
There's an N.K. Jemisin profile in the New Yorker btw
― change display name (Jordan), Friday, 24 January 2020 21:37 (four years ago) link
Always frustrates me wondering how to handle short stories and poetry into these polls and lists, often collections and anthologies are too uneven to put forward with confidence.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, 25 January 2020 00:09 (four years ago) link
As far as I know about CL Moore, she did tv writing until her health prevented her writing but she did attend conventions. I don't know if there's a firm basis for stories of her last husband discouraging her from writing (very grim if true).
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, 25 January 2020 00:13 (four years ago) link
jeez, Silverbob's Time of Changes has to be the worst of his New Wave-period novels. A clumsily executed central premise (a culture where the first-person is grammatically verboten) that doesn't make any sense, tons of exposition, cardboard characters, tons of lame sexual stuff. I don't think I'm going to be able to finish it.
― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 28 January 2020 16:27 (four years ago) link
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/joanna-russ-the-science-fiction-writer-who-said-no
thought provoking piece on russ & feminist sf - spoilers within.
― Paperbag raita (ledge), Friday, 31 January 2020 13:36 (four years ago) link