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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ-r0bilzhU

I've never bought Locus but I'm pretty sure they miss a lot of small press stuff.

They're pretty conscientious, and there's a lot of small press stuff in there.

2019

- severance by ling ma: funny!
- the dispossessed - le guin: quite good? not my favorite of hers.
- melmoth by sarah perry: absolutely loved this! ridiculous camp gothic. great fun.
- where late the sweet birds sang by kate wilhelm: complete pony, nearly threw in the towel around 50 pages, shouldn't have bothered finishing it.
- interference/semiosis - found these quite bleak but very good

2020 so far

- Borne: not as good as the southern reach trilogy, won't bother with the rest of the series
- Roadside Picnic: wonderful obviously, but especially good because I listented to the audiobook, which is read by robert forster!!!
- the city and the city: very good!

(Robert Forster!)
Hey I came across the two volumes of xpost Galactic Empires in storage, and looks like it might be alright: authors incl. RA Lafferty, Arthur C Clarke, Cordwainer Smith, Iris Seabright (Margaret St. Clair), John D MacDonald, AE Van Voght, Algis Budrys, James Blish, Avram Davidson, nand Fredric Brown, just to name most of those whose writing I've liked elsewhere. (Also incl.bunch other randos, maestros, who knows.)

Skimming intro to Vol.1: "Tumbledown squalor is often an attraction in the galactic story. The streets of Rael are depraved with good intentions, but they take place to the picturesque...The story itself is generally fairly traditional, the crux being resolved by quick wits, courage, and brute courage. If this sounds like a fairy tale, the point about fairy tales is that they enchant us and enlarge our perceptions.
...I say that this is what the authors give us in the main. Yet there is a moral which blows ever and anon like a chill wind down Rael's High Street, through the galactic tale: that it is better to govern than be governed.
...Morality is all very well, but give me luxury every time. There is an undeniable luxuriousness in the most characteristic of these stories, which shows itself in the asides. You have to love the throw-away explanation..."
(Also quotes CS Lewis quoting Tolkein on "escapism" (says jailers are the most "preoccupied and opposed.")

"...take *second* place to the picturesque."

Also says that these were published during the 1950s, Cold War taking hold, "The Earth was not particularly habitable to the imagination; it was a relief to go a-voyaging." Okay okay

(The link ledge posted isn't the same Galactic Empires - the Aldiss edited 2 volumes Vs a "box" of 7 ebooks)

As an aside, I like the covers of the Aldiss short story reprints. I have the 50s one and there are 4 large volumes of the 60s and misc others all done in the same style with slightly different colours. Simple and extendible.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51H0giAxrzL.jpg

LOOK!!!
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Lunar-Trilogy/Jerzy-Zulawski/9781950423163

Which was the source of the film?

Yes.

The first volume.

That sounds interesting, but that cover is absolutely terrible. "Why do more than 15 seconds of work?"

RB Russell on Sarban
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIH5qt4n1DY

RIP Joe Pulver. He was quite a big personality in the weird fiction scene, he was in hospital for years and now he's gone. Sad he didn't get the big comeback and I don't really know what his chances of recovery were.

Another big translation coming up: Alfred Doblin's Mountains Oceans Giants.

This is the blurbs from amazon

"The 27th century: beleaguered elites decide to melt the Greenland icecap. Why? – to open up a new continent, for colonisation by the unruly masses. How? – by harvesting the primordial heat of the Earth from Iceland’s volcanoes. Nature fights back, and it all goes horribly wrong...

Readers accustomed to following a story via Plot and Character may at first be disoriented by this epic of the future. Its structure is more symphonic than novelistic, driven by themes and motifs that emerge, fade back, emerge again in new orchestral voicings and new tempi. The prose – supple, rhythmic, harsh, elegiac, tender, unsparing – propels the reader on through scene after vivid scene. Mountains Oceans Giants is a literary counterpart to the painted dreams and nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch, in The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Last Judgement.

Alfred Döblin, born in Szczecin in 1878, initially worked as a medical assistant and opened his own practice in Berlin in 1911. Döblin's first novel appeared in 1915/16. In 1933 Döblin emigrated to France and finally to the USA. After the end of the 2nd World War he moved back to Germany, but then moved in 1953 with his family to Paris. He died on June 26, 1957.

Extravagant praise for this novel:

"I know of no attempt in literature that pulls together so boldly and directly the human and the divine, piling on every kind of action, thought, desire, love... Here perhaps the true face of “Expressionism” reveals itself for the first time. – Max Krell

“The account of the expedition to Iceland and the defrosting of Greenland … generates a poetry of fact that deserves to be considered a major literary achievement. … Döblin and Høeg remind us that man is not the centre of a divine cosmos but simply a phenomenon, an unruly and destructive one, within the unimaginably larger system of nature.” – Richie Robertson, 2009, comparing Mountains Oceans Giants with Peter Høeg’s 1993 novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow

“…this extravagant book, whose theme is the heaven-storming extravagance of humanity, written as if under a visionary over-pressure…” – Gunter Grass 1978

“A unique and mighty work. The writer has created a gigantic animated teeming living world-picture, analytical and mysterious, mythical and scientific. He has unsealed a flask of powerful potion.” – Ernst Blass, in Die neue Rundschau 35 (1924)."

and this is John Clute on SF Encyclopedia

"Of direct sf interest is Berge Meere und Giganten ["Mountains, Seas and Giants"] (1924; cut vt Giganten ["Giants"] 1932), an extremely ambitious Future History, which extends from the aftermath years following the Great War into the twenty-seventh century CE. In the later years of the twentieth century the world, already plagued by Overpopulation and racism due to worldwide economic migrations, becomes a rigid, polarized Dystopia, a fixity (see Roderick Seidenberg) only to be shaken centuries later, when an indolent but restive underclass, locked into a Machine-driven culture that fails to supply its needs, inadvertently foments a world War whose advanced Weapons cause huge damage. Meanwhile, the Japanese have occupied much of North America, and the focus of the History shifts westward from Eurasia. A campaign to settle Greenland results in the melting of its icecap, and attendant Disasters; connected to this, giant Mutations in plant and animal life threaten the human world, and Monsters roam the transfigured islands that have emerged from what was once Greenland. As in more recent Zombie Apocalypse tales, contact with these Mutants is instantly fatal, and Homo sapiens moves Underground, constructing at the same time giant quasi-living defensive towers. Eventually humans and others tentatively join together to begin to reinhabit the Ruined Earth."

Scientific Romance: An International Anthology Of Pioneering Science Fiction edited by Brian Stableford

The title is a bit misleading because it really is just two languages (English and French translated by Stableford) and three countries (UK, USA and France). This doesn't cover the entire pre-pulp period of science fiction, Stableford chose to focus on the era (1830s-1910s) that most epitomized the term "Scientific Romance" and explains the characteristics of this era. It's more earth bound, philosophical and more likely to use satire than the next generation of science fiction. Stableford says the list of novels at the end is a compensation because an anthology of short stories gives a slightly distorted image of the period.
At the end of the introduction he says that science fiction is in decline now but he doesn't really explain what he meant. Given that the english language editors and reviewers are unable to keep up with even the half of prose science fiction every year and the continual explosion of new writers, it's hard to take anyone's word for any decline in quality and it's hard to imagine that the genre has declined in popularity when it's everywhere in every creative medium now. Perhaps it's that the early science fiction writers tended to be extremely educated and the general level of prose would have been higher than the pulps and the more wildly varying quality of today?

This would have been a much lesser book without the introductions and footnotes and I could see some people enjoying these parts more than most of the actual stories. Stableford often notes the scientific and historical context of the tales. There were a few that I considered to be outright supernatural stories (including novels listed at the end) but he notes how at the time seafaring and air travel was not unlike space travel back then because just how much more of earth was uncharted. So monsters of the sea and air were not so different from space monsters in this way.

Here's some of the most noteworthy stories for me...

"Artist Of The Beautiful" by Nathaniel Hawthorne is really nice and has a different flavour from everything else.

"End Of The World" by Eugene Mouton is a gleefully detailed and miserable story of death by global warming caused by human activity from 1872.

"Child Of The Phalanstery" by Grant Allen is quite a moving story about eugenics in which people are discouraged from loving too much and a couple are expected to let their disabled child die for a supposedly greater good.

"The Salvation Of Nature" by John Davidson has Scotland evacuated, destroyed then turned into a pleasure park. Other countries follow this example until a virus kills nearly everyone. The end resembles an adventure quest fantasy that stops very quickly. Kind of strange but nice to see a story like this end in Arran island.

"Tornadres" by JH Rosny has a very strong resemblance to Lovecraft's "Colour Out Of Space" but this was several decades earlier and I doubt Lovecraft ever read this. Other people have called Rosny one of the earliest writers of cosmic horror.

"Professor Bakermann's Microbe" by Charles Epheyre is a comedy about a man who creates deadly viruses as a egomaniacal hobby but doesn't worry about whether they ever escape his lab and kill everyone.

"In The Year Ten Thousand" by Edgar Fawcett is the story that most made me want to read more by an unfamiliar author (I already liked Hodgson, papa Hawthorne, Poe, Wells, and had planned to read Rosny, Renard, London and Doyle before). It's a really baroque and beautiful socialist utopia in a very short poetic conversation form. I know other science fiction authors have done extravagant socialist utopias but rightly or wrongly I generally expect socialist fiction to be pathologically drab and afraid to dream this much; so this is lovely.

In Julien Hawthorne's "June 1993" there is a similar idea to Simak's City in that advances in air travel would make cities unnecessary; I wonder how common this idea was?
Stableford notes (with presumably a lot of amusement) that this story is written for Cosmopolitan magazine (and the story even takes the explicit form of an article for the magazine) and J Hawthorne spends quite a lot of the story talking about how awful fashion and shopping are, obviously unaware what the magazine would turn into. Some of the story is supposed to be comedic and that is how I taken the aggrandizement of Cosmopolitan magazine within the story.

Jerome K Jerome's "The Dancing Partner" is macabre and funny.

"The Conqueror Of Death" by Camille Debans is a really good piece about someone withholding the secret to immortality for humanitarian reasons.

"The Star" by HG Wells was probably pioneering but I got really bored by the telling. I think Clark Ashton Smith's "The Eternal World" was inspired by this but I prefer Smith's story because it takes away all realism and goes extremely outlandish.

Jack London's "Shadow And The Flash" is well told but despite my lack of scientific education, I didn't have much confidence that it made sense. Even if a house was invisible, surely the ground it was built on would be a giveaway? Wasn't it upon grass?
If you were expecting the possibility of racism from London, he fulfills this by giving us a man so dark that he is practically invisible in a darkened room.

Edmond Haraucourt's "Gorilloid" has an extremely advanced civilization of apes and a scientist discovers a degenerated survivor of the human race and tries to convince the ape civilization that they are related to humans, in a lecture theatre of apes who are either outraged or delighted by the controversy. It's really well done.

I was already familiar with William Hope Hodgson's "Voice In The Night" and it's rightly considered one of his best stories.

Maurice Renard's "Singular Fate Of Bouvancourt" has quite a cool depiction of what it might be like if a man could walk into a mirror.

Arthur Conan Doyle's "Horror Of The Heights" was dragged down for me by the technical detail but the visions at the end were enjoyable.

Been unsure how to rate this. Towards the end I felt like I was really having to push through this and I wasn't sure the stories were strong enough to really recommend it a great deal. It's consistently interesting and at worst the concepts seemed a little too modest unless you keep the context in mind. But on examining the stories again and considering the scarcity of anthologies serving this era, I think this deserves four stars even if I don't love it as much as four stars usually indicates.

I forgotten to mention that in the Julien Hawthorne story, there is the idea that everyone around the world looks whiter as their life improves.

Thanks for another set of appealing descriptions, Robert. The only one I'm sure I've read is the Wells, which I enjoyed more than you did, referring to it way up thread, in passing W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Comet" builds on the eerie, human-cosmic scale, austere grandeur of Wells' "The Star" through The Big Book of Science Fiction, which eventually gets as wobbly in quality as it does in the hands (monster trade paperback), but is pretty good-to=great for quite a while.
Science Fiction Encyclopedia is good on scientific romance, citing Dune as a good later example--I guess some things marketed as fantasy might also be considered s.r., even now?

I mean, some things marketed now as fantasy.

https://thequietus.com/articles/28209-ramsey-campbell-interview-horror-weird-books?page=1
Interesting list/good interview

good list!

i'm on a roll of giving up on recent "mainstream"/"hugo-friendly"(?) scifi after 20-50 pages. i've abandoned all of these recently:

NK Jemsin
Too Like the Lightning
The Power
Ancilliary Justice

the reason was pretty much the same for each of them: they seemed like adequeate YA fiction. i was genuinely baffled that adults get anything out of them other than technical admiration. it feels like a joke? do they get better? am i just doing recent scifi wrong?

i don't think the problem is that i don't like scifi. here's some recent-ish scifi that i did like.

the city and the city
station eleven
the southern reach trilogy
sue burke
ted chiang

interested in defenses of the books i abandoned, explanations of what's going on in my head, explanations of what's going on with scifi awards that this kind of stuff gets elevated, and ideally just recommendations of what else to try.

I tend to agree with you.

Station 11 was very YA as well, i thought. I lump it in with The Power for some reason (read at around the same time?). Prefer S11 though.

The Power wasn't just winning SF awards either. It won the big UK women's fiction prize too (was Orange Prize, not sure it is now)

The power was the one out of those four i came closest to throwing across the room

Once again frustrated by my reading slowness, because I really want to read the Palmer and Jemisin books but they're still far away at this point.

There's been a lot of conversations about YA in fantasy and people can be quite touchy about it. My theory about it is that a lot of writers feel they never had enough decent books as children that were aimed at their specific group(s). My worry is that people are increasingly going for comfort reads. Maybe they've always been like that; I've been a horror reader for longer and most horror people were willing to read any level of horrible, so coming into sff world, I'm struck by the number of people who have vast territories they wont go near and I have no idea when its because of really difficult trauma challenges or when its just general timidity.

On the other hand Tomi Adeyemi's Children Of Blood And Bone is supposed to be particularly brutal and it was a big success.

Somtow just released the fifth Inquestor book and is a few chapters into the sixth one. I kinda wish I could binge on a series but I tend to want as much variety as possible, so never read a series right through. I should start the third book soon.

Annoyed how many of my priority books are huge (Crowley's Little Big for instance).

i enjoyed the jemison series and thought the first ancillary book was interesting (the sequels were like miss marple mysteries set in space, with tea)

ted chiang i'll definitely give you, but i don't really see station eleven or the southern reach as leaps ahead? (haven't read the others)

as for what wins awards, well, they've never been fair and i'm not sure they're any more so now. but i don't read enough to say that certain works or authors have been robbed, so

Station eleven is kind of David Mitchell level for me. Very enjoyable and not completely vacuous.

Southern reach was partly appealing to me because of its prose (especially the first one iirc). One thing I will say about my list of four “bad books” up there is they are all completely uninteresting in terms of style, which may be why they feel young adult to me as much as their plot/themes.

I guess I’m being unreasonable in expecting to like award winners. I don’t like the Grammy award winners so why should genre fiction be any different. I guess my question then is where do you find “good” new sci-fi/weird (caveat: I don’t know what “good” means here)?

the jemison series does experiment with first/second/third person. i won't go so far as to say those experiments are necessary or successful, but nor is it lowest-common-denominator stuff

where do you find “good” new sci-fi/weird

here, of course

also silverbob deep cuts

Clarke, Nebula, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson (horror), Otherwise (formerly Tiptree) awards all have pretty good reputations.

As for flat uninteresting styles, that's been a complaint of mainstream sff since the pulp era. Some say it's gotten worse but I don't know.

I don't know the other work of several contributors to The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, guest edited by Karen Joy Fowler, but it *might* be a good gateway, and is certainly one of the most consistently satisfying anthologies this short story junkie has ever experienced. Won the 2017 World Fantasy Award; the SF is good too. Fowler is the co-founder of the Tiptree, and has won other WFs, Nebulas, the Shirley Jackson--oh yeah, and the PenFaulkner for her most recent novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, about a family that incl. a chimpanzee, raised from birth, until---well, scientist Dad thought it seemed like a good idea at the time. (This actually used to be a thing; Fowler did a lot of research, and didn't have to look far.)
Not science fiction in the usual sense, but she goes wherever a story takes her---anyway, maybe take a lot at her Best American SFF (subsequent volumes in that series have been more uneven, but always at least a few amazing keepers)(haven't tried the one guest ed. by Jemison).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Joy_Fowler

Anyway, trawl this thread and its distinguished namesake; you might find contemporary that appeals. I tend to favor the weirdos with some lit literary flair: Peter Watts, Kelly Link...

Opps, "namesake" would be the next one; I meant the previous:
rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

If you are interested in chimps being raised by humans, don, I highly recommend the book Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human,
by Elizabeth Hess, as well as the related documentary Project Nim. For a novel about primatology, see Theory of Bastards, by Audrey Schulman, as mentioned upthread.

Not as much in the subject as the way Fowler deals with it, esp. the ongoing repercussions, but may check Hess and Schulman as well, thanks for reminder of latter.

thanks for all the suggestions!

thanks caek for putting into words the vague thoughts I've been having. "too like the lightning" stylistically uninteresting though? i thought it was highly distinctive - just unreadable.

i enjoyed the ancillary justice series, mrs marple in space sounds fine to me! it felt like a sort of critique or subversion of traditional space opera - the third one seemed to be building up to some huge space battle finale, which was defused (and a victory achieved) with a brief conversation in an elevator.

Also: since the Hugos were attacked by right wing trolls (some of whom oddly complained that GRR Martin and Jemisin are too morbid), it attracted the opposite demographic to protect it, who perhaps prefer YA leaning fantasy?

mrs marple in space sounds fine to me! it felt like a sort of critique or subversion of traditional space opera - the third one seemed to be building up to some huge space battle finale, which was defused (and a victory achieved) with a brief conversation in an elevator. That sounds great!
I confess that I find myself attracted to private eyes and cops going down in mean streets in space, alt-history etc.---The Yiddish Policemen's Union seemed pretty good of its kind, with no noob-to-the-genre(s) groaners---but having some doubts about the possibly (I'm not that familiar with Grisham etc) genre-related speedbumps in near-future dystopian legalistic thriller, or semi-thriller, anyway truly creepy mystery-sniffing Rule of Capture: Author Christopher Brown seems to know his courtrooms, and crisply conveys what and how and why shit happens there---mostly from observant, though sometimes drugged, POV of a scruffy public defender---but why would his colleagues be so helpful to this pariah-in-the-making (who can't afford an investigator, is doing his own maiden voyage snooping), when being on the phone contact lists of his clients---one of whom has just been executed, another is being denaturalised---he's a great lawyer!---increasingly means major culpability---I mean, why does author increasingly resort to righteous tough talk beanspilling, in longass scenes-as-chapters, when he does better with relatively concise third person tracking, and relentlessly logical extrapolations of current trends---also good use of his well-chosen setting: Houston, in holy roiling Texas, is indeed built on a swamp and has no zoning, or de facto only.
Having lost a brief near-space (man-made sats, Moon as real estate) war with (so far offstage) China,, America devours its own in grinding "civil war" (vanguard Lone Star patriot suits citing Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus as crucial basis of new freedom fries). Also martial law re claiming eminent domain over ecotastrophic areas and eco-terrorists(?), with process of the former's redemptive privatization---so as happens so often in SF, he's on the right track, despite stumbles---but they aren't so terribly bad: I'll make it to the end, I'm sure, even though I'm more likely than ever to toss the stumblers (even Jeff Vandermeer's xpost Dead Astronauts---maybe too soon, but not ain't sorry).

Might should have started with Brown's Tropic of Kansas, which introduces this era, and has about five pages of blurbs in this volume (first of a trilogy, uh-oh). Seems like a fairly sturdy stand-alone

but *aint* sorry, no not about it!

*This one* seems like a fairly sturdy stand-alone.

of course, the defender's colleagues could be helpfully steering him in a direction that's not what he would prefer to have in mind (so protagonist and reader slip into more of a paranoid groove thing, no less unpleasant for being expected by reader, as much as it shoulda been and kinda was by protag, but he is on drugs pretty often)

The series of 10 minute interviews has been really quite good (it's been on for at least a month) and I listened to one of their older Lavie Tidhar interviews (mostly about holocaust fiction) was really engrossing for me.
https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/