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

Back in the 80s. I was disappointed by the intriguingly-reviewed Mythago Wood---novel, not the shorter, previous version in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Maybe I would have liked that better (maybe I should get myself back to the novel, either way): was just now very impressed by Holdstock's "Earth and Stone," which is an excerpt or mixdown or something related to Earthwind, the second novel as by RH---Science Fiction Encyclopedia says before that, under various house and other pen names:
he published [see Checklist] at least twenty novels, novelizations and works of popular sf "nonfiction", almost all of them hasty commercial efforts but most of them infused, nevertheless, with a black intensity of action that gave even clichéd Sword-and-Sorcery plots something of a mythic intonation. At the same time, under his own name, he began to publish sf novels like Eye Among the Blind (1976) and Earthwind (1977), in both of which he uneasily attempted to accommodate the compulsive mythologizing of his dark fantasies within the frame of "normal" sf worlds. The result was a series of books whose narrative energies seem greyed down with decorum...Earthwind utters slow-moving hints at the powers of a "chthonic" atavism...(Yadda-yadda, but raves for Mythago and its most closely related kin).
So, maybe I hit it lucky with this compression of Earthwind (in an old anthology; more about that later). It does seemed like contents under pressure, shifted through data and metaphor, observation and insight, fear, anger and other things, according to what the main character is going through (via first and third person) moment to moment, and other units of time: he's researching the area around what will have been Newgrange, with fades in and out (also swift flashbacks) of his future past---he remembers that his wife will have had his number: "You won't be coming back, you'll finally get to escape." Escape the Twenty-First Century! Yes, he's a weird one.
The "greyed" cover goes with the territory, which breaks on through. Finale vision is grand (neighboring peoples view the ones our man is mainly among as "insane"), but seems earned, by traveler and his creator (the authorial one, I mean).
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/holdstock_robert_p

Does "seem," I meant: no McNultyism intended for once in there.

I know the Tiptree, don't know the other two titles mentioned:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/27/penguin-science-fiction-review-a-fresh-look-brave-new-worlds-james-tiptree-jr-andreas-eschbach-angelica-gorodischer

Eh, John Self?

Gorodischer is fairly well known because Le Guin translated Kalpa Imperial. I got the Small Beer edition of Trafalgar at a charity shop last year.

Andreas Eschbach is entirely new to me.

Am hugely pleased learn that The Valancourt Book Of World Horror Stories will feature the first english translations of Pilar Pedraza and Attila Veres.

Sadly Valanncourt said that they've been trying to get Jane Gaskell reprinted for years but she's not really interested in talking to anyone.

SP Somtow got his first new short fiction in Years Best American Fantasy & Science Fiction. He's still got it!

Reading series books is a relatively new thing for me. I wish I could read them all in a row but I always want something very different each time I finish a book. Does anyone else feel this?

I counted all my unread books and it's a terrible embarrassing number and it has stopped me buying so much but I'm also wondering why I cling to wanting to read some fiction for important context about the genres. Why do I want to be an expert when I'm so bloody slow?

Think that may well be what a lot of us are asking ourselves, despite covid isolation taking away some distractions. Time for serious self-interrogation re how many of these books, given likely lifespan, am I ever going to read, how many/which ones should I go ahead and try to sell, or just dump at the thrift stores and library? Some of this is well under way, but how to continue?

There was an interesting quote about this phenomenon in some Richard Roud book I read about Alain Resnais- and still have, I think - maybe I posted it here once or twice already, have to find.

The sad thing is for me is that there really are about 2000 books I'm genuinely itching to read.
There's maybe only 20 films I want to see that badly but most films I enjoy I could probably live happily without. But for books and music it's just really scary thinking of how many things I might never get around to.

I do try and mix it up a bit with reading, a month at a time generally.

Just finished 2nd part of the Cixin Liu* trilogy, Dark Forest and the first part of the Tade Thompson trilogy, Rosewater, who is Nigerian, but now London based. Both interesting enough and I'll continue with them both of I see them cheap.

(But august will be Dickens, as every month divisible by 4 has been for the last 5 years, or so. September, I'm not sure yet)

* Looking up Liu's name, because I can never remember if it's iu or ui only to find it's more properly Liu Cixin. Family name first.

I was going to start a whole bunch of new series but I think I'll try and finish more omnibuses that I've started.

(But august will be Dickens, as every month divisible by 4 has been for the last 5 years, or so. September, I'm not sure yet)

i want to know the rest of your schedule!

November is traditionally the month when I realise I haven't read any female authors all year and set about remedying that. Spring is large foreign book squeezed in around the other monthly reading (Anna Karenina this year, just finished part 7 of 8)

But those and the Dickens are the only semi-fixed things. Themes for a month often suggest themselves based on the to-do list, some are looser than others.

Speaking of Liu Cixin, I read an okay story by him, in terms of professionally hammering points into heads of character and reader: that's "Moonlight," in Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction In Translation, edited and translated by Ken Liu (Tor, 2019) This and several others have kind of (to me) an editorialist or lecturing aspect, although there's always sweetening for the pill---not surprising to see from bio notes that most have extensive academic and/or media pro backgrounds/dayjobs. Either that, and/or way into entertainment, like there's an example of a (whole!) subgenre based on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, albeit also way into ancient Chinese history, so again, edutainment, with plenty flavor, incl. flash filler, and shrugged philosophical ending, which, well, endings schemdings, but fits context of anth, where current specifically political situation, at home and abroad, is-isn't evidenced by attitude, historical overviews, invisible ink.
Ken Liu says up front that some of the domestic cultural context of some of his selections isn't translatable (although he does comment on each story in intros, and footnotes, in some cases), but I wonder how much of this comes from his own limits as translator, also his limits as editor, in terms of stories chosen (although of course with anthologies, there can always be limits imposed by publishers, agents, authors).
In terms of feeling like I'm missing something, especially frustrating are two stories, by Han Song, whom Liu says is intentionally elusive/challenging in the original language---a senior media figure, swimming around censors, cool, and I can see how he kind of provides a Lem-like lens, buttt--I find myself squinting more than I want to. Also get Liu's reference to another old hand, Fei Dao, re Calvino, who at least got me to read "The Robot Who Liked To Tell Tall Tales" several times, with some pleasure, but still out through the same door I came in, pretty much by evident design on the page, but wtf oh well.
Was hooked immediately by the seamless, fact-based and fictional scenes from the life of Alan Turing (segments based on Andrew Hodges' bio Alan Turing: The Enigma[1983], and subsequent research which may or may not have happened) in opener "Goodnight, Melancholy," by Xia Jia, but the framing story starts insular and gets to be like an amime parody of Sensitive Fiction, like the worst of 80s-90s Amimov's Magazine Humanism Goes To Asian DisneyWorld (literally).
But I was blown away by the title story, which is teengirl horror, with all pieces gliding into place, boggling this simple male mind as mosaic light bulb goes on: I get this one, as much as I can. (Reminds me of two female friends, who don't know each other, but maybe know me too well, and told me of stories they wrote in high school or junior high, freaking out their teachers). "Broken Stars," by Tang Fei, whose stories have also, according to Liu, "appeared in Clarkesworld, Pathlight, Apex, and SQ Magazine, among other places. More of her fiction can be found in Invisible Planets, his previous Chines SF anthology, which I've heard might be more consistently accessible. However, several stories in here do *seem* entirely understandable, just not that good.

Erm "anime," "Asimov's," sorry.

This one by the awesome Karel Thole
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/1/18/THJNRPLY7B1978.jpg

Keith Parkinson
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/a/af/BKTG23099.jpg

Cool cover on the Cherryh. How are her books? Used to see many.

I'm sure we talked about it upthread. I liked the first book in the Morgaine series and looking forward to continuing it.

A little dismayed to find that her Rusalka trilogy and Faery In Shadow got major ebook revisions (she renamed the latter Faery Moon and expanded it by hundreds of pages). Because the original paperbacks have cool covers and I'm still not quite ready for ebooks yet.
Here's the Bruce Pennington cover for Faery In Shadow
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/b/be/BKTG23181.jpg

And the ebooks are only available here, so I hope it's fully operational.
https://www.closed-circle.net/ebook-catalog/

Reading The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time. "If civilization has an opposite, it is war."

I often fantasize about being a publisher or editor but right now I'm so glad I'm not. Everybody fucking hates each other and I feel like shit today because I stayed up too late reading some of the reasons why.

gotta love SFF twitter for managing to turn every bit of drama into a 8-part saga you need a dedicated wiki to fully understand

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) July 1, 2020

Ugh

anyone read The City in the Middle of the Night yet?

SP Somtow - Utopia Hunters

According to one of the two introductions, this series was originally intended to be a trilogy and this particular book only existed because the previous two in the series were out of print (and presumably, bringing them back into print wasn't an option). So this third book was created so the fourth and final one would make sense to anyone who hadn't read the first two. Of course the fourth book isn't the final one anymore since more started coming out recently.

This is a fixup including short stories, some of which appeared before the first novel. The way this works is that these short stories are incorporated as prequels told by a historian to a young artist newly taken under the wing of the Inquest.

Somtow says that he has come to believe that this is a better introduction to the series but I vehemently disagree. It is perfectly possible I would have fallen in love with this book if it had been my first and maybe I'm being slightly precious about the way I first experienced the series, but I think the more gradual reveal of Light On The Sound and Throne Of Madness was more powerful and had far more emotional impact. I beg you to read them in the original publishing order.

The new introduction says some more sexual content was newly added that wouldn't have been allowed when the short stories appeared in magazines but there was only one scene that stood out in that way and it was extremely brief.

The key elements from the previous novels are reintroduced in a new way and I don't think any of it was done better this time around. The overexplaining was beginning to be a problem in Throne Of Madness but now it's even more persistent, especially when talking about the ways of the Inquest. And I felt quite a number of the images were underexplained.
I was wondering if this was going to be an skippable/optional book but enough new concepts and characters are introduced that I'm guessing it might be essential. A creation story is involved and as stunning as one of its revelations is, the telling of it was surprisingly underwhelming considering how operatic the series is.

Thankfully there's quite a few novelties we hadn't seen before, including a planet where life rapidly emerges and dies (similar to some early Clark Ashton Smith stories); the continual amusingly creative disrespectful way corpses are treated and now we have similar situations with people in stasis and child soldiers having strange ambitions for their deaths. The story of the rope dancer is enjoyably convoluted, in a similar way to Darktouch's origin from the first book. The story of the dust sculptress was the best section of the book and the added depth to Sajit and Elloran's relationship was probably the thing of greatest value.

Why "must" Jenjen combine approaches to art that seemingly can't be reconciled?

The appendix at the end about the rules of the highspeech are incredibly impressive but most of it went straight over my head. Among many other things it explains how an ironically polite command works.

This might seem like a a fairly negative review but it's just disappointing for something I love so much, there's still plenty to like and given why it even exists, it's more understandable why it doesn't reach the previous levels.

A word about the different reissues: a lot of the earlier print on demand (Diplodocus Press) Somtow reissues were image scanned from the original books and the more recent ones are scanned into word files with the overt gibberish removed that accompanies that process. But since Somtow is mostly doing these reissues by himself, lots of errors are still there, including missing punctuation, occasional wrong spellings but more frequently than anything were gaps in the middle of words. It's not as bad as I've seen this scanning method before but you might consider getting the image scanned Inquestor reissues from 2013 (which I find quite charming). I think the main reason Somtow scanned all his books into word files is because they work better as ebooks than image scans do.
You'll have to weigh up whether slightly revised texts with new additional introductions or a smoother print reading experience are more important to you. The new ones should make better ebooks though.

Ings's THE SMOKE, his most recent, is soooo good.

quite liked it -- beautifully written, the second-person thing was fine, left the inexplicable things alluringly weird, jar analogy was well-used

(three instances of noblesse oblige is at least two two many tho!)

started chuck wendig's 'wanderers' and it seems very ham-handed and obvious in comparison

Since I am still in comfort food mode, re-reading Lord of Light.

There's a forum and wiki called Fail Fandom Anon and the forum is one of the most comically impenetrable and difficult to navigate sites I've ever seen. Some say it's dodgy (it is an anonymous forum after all and most of the wiki complaints about Catherynne M Valente are so trivial that it seems like a pathetic grudge) but it's mostly left leaning and I've heard that a few fairly well known writers hang out there. Some people use it as a refuge to talk about harassment in the writer/fan communities.

It's like sites I sometimes have internet dreams about. Hard to find a thread you want because the titles are all so meme-laden (imagine every thread here had Orlando Bloomps and Post Here If Having Second Thoughts About Another Thread in the title or some such).

I was reading their complaints about the normalization of toxic macho language in anime/videogame circles across the political spectrum and I found that terribly depressing. Hope that shit goes away eventually.

Found this in the Vox Day wiki, "Nonnies" means anonymous posters.
"In May 2015, V.D. doubled down on his marriage = perpetual consent policy, arguing with an MRA who took the counter position. Nonnies are conflicted by this enemy-of-my-enemy situation: I must admit, "Godspeed, brave fedora" doesn't easily pass my lips."

two stories from nobel laureate olga tokarczuk. based on these and two novels of hers i've read (excellent but not sff) she's one of those writers who takes a different approach with everything she writes, though her humane and thoughtful style remains consistent.

https://hazlitt.net/longreads/all-saints-mountain
https://granta.com/borderland/

There was a mention of Robert Jordan in the "authors you will never read" thread. I remembered that I spent a great deal of time (in my teens) reading David Eddings (The Belgariad, The Mallorean, The Elenium, The Tamuli-- I remember the character names and who-ended-up-marrying-whom, but that's all I remember). Just googling now, didn't realize Eddings had died! nine years ago!

I'm curious. I found Shannara to be too fiddly, or something, and I stopped reading "The Sword Of" when I was about 2/3rds of the way through. I read the original McCaffrey Dragon trilogy but remember feeling embarrassed at how nerdy the sex scenes were and feel no desire to revisit. The Wheel Of Time? All I know is that it's long and the dude died before he finished it.

What long-ass fantasy cycles (with a YA edge) do we rate? Aside from Eddings, the series's that I have the most affection for are Piers Anthony's Incarnations series and the first Dragonlance Trilogy

I have very fond memories of Weis and Hickman's Death Gate heptalogy, but no idea whether they hold up.

i re-read the belgariad a couple years ago when i was ill; it's pretty dire, if probably par for the course -- all the people from *this* country are thieves, and all the people from *this* country are taciturn horseriders, and girls you have to let your guys *think* they're in charge after you lead them to the proper conclusion, etc.

iirc shanarra was one of several series that were utterly shameless lotr rips with the map directions changed, like okay let's put mordor in the northwest this time

recently remembered reading a margaret weis sf trilogy that was pretty much star wars with the names changed (or not). looked it up and the protagonist -- scion of a family of noble galactic monarchs cruelly overthrown by the evil republic -- is named dion starfire

it's not that long, but i will defend patricia mckillip's harpist trilogy against all haters

If I recall correctly, re: Eddings, I started to re-read the Belgariad a second time in my early 20s and was really, really impressed with how good the first novel "Pawn Of Prophecy" was, but then was reminded (when I began vol. 2) of the tone and repetitiousness of the subsequent instalments. I think often about Durnik's assertion (in book 1) that "it's important to be fastidious even when smithing a nail for the undercarriage of a wagon, otherwise you'll feel guilt when you see that wagon going by, guilt that you did a shoddy job on that nail." But then I remember that much of the levity of the later books was repetition of "inside jokes" that got tiresome, and predictable arcs of conflict and resolution.

I do think I'll re-read the first Dragonlance trilogy, I remember feeling very moved by Raistlin's arc

i think also with the first one it was human-sized -- they're just riding around in wagons or whatever, trying to escape detection -- whereas later on it's like hi this is our party of twelve and they are all princesses and kings and wizards out of legend who have no vulnerabilities to speak of

also there was an ongoing bit about how it's dangerous to bathe in winter which i never understood

I did like:

"Take a bath, Durnik. You stink. You smell."

"No, I stink. You smell."

fgti - the Robin Hobb series of trilogies all set in the same world. Farseer Trilogy comes first. We swear by these in this household.

i quite liked guy gavriel kay's fionavar trilogy; haven't read his others

bonus can-con too!

t's not that long, but i will defend patricia mckillip's harpist trilogy against all haters

― mookieproof, Tuesday, August Have only read some of McK.'s stories (all amazing) in anthologies, only full-length Winter Rose, also very satisfying,in terms of character development via plot and vice versa, also just in terms of taking my imagination around the block several times and ways without leaving home (very isolated settings, of story and me). I've avoided fantasy and most other trilogies since overloaded 80s, but will check hers, thanks for the mention.

it's not that long, but i will defend patricia mckillip's harpist trilogy against all haters

― mookieproof, Tuesday, August 11, 2020 3:25 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I will stand in this gap with you, mooks. She's all-time. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is another fave.

The Farseer books are good. Also have fond memories of the Dragonlance books but haven't reread them

I did reread The Belgariad and The Malloereon recently as I loved both as a kid. Enjoyed The Belgariad series (although probably most of that was nostalgia) but The Malloreon was incredibly dire. I then tried to read his Sparhawk books but gave up on the first one as it was even worse.

I remember The Sword of Shannara being very big and basically a LOTR clone (as mentioned above) - the Vale instead of The Shire, Brona - Sauron, Skull Bearers - Nazgul, Allanon - Gandalf, Gnomes - Orcs etc. Think Elfstones and Wishsong were a little better and fair play to the dude he's still knocking out Shannara novels now

<i>sword of shannara</i> completely blew my mind in 5th grade lolol... same with <i>on a pale horse</i>

of the two i think shannara is better, but tbh i haven't been able to fully reread either as an adult

Hate to suggest stuff I haven't read, but for acclaimed and longish YA series I have to mention Susan Cooper, Le Guin and Garth Nix.

CS Lewis and Alan Garner for something shorter.

https://csfquery.com/

Hate to suggest stuff I haven't read, but for acclaimed and longish YA series I have to mention Susan Cooper, Le Guin and Garth Nix.

i've read all three! good stuff. i've been meaning to revisit the earthsea series.

As I've said before, the heel turn in Earthsea book 4 from YA set in an unquestioned patriarchy to righteously furious adult feminist tract, and then the synthesis of both in books 5 and 6, is one of my favourite things in all literature.

DAW translations from 70s and 80s with Cherryh translating 4 books and John Brunner doing one.
https://www.sfintranslation.com/?page_id=7225

Cool. Wonder if you can get any of those Gérard Klein's easily, I've liked to one or two things I've read in anthologies.

There's a recent-ish Starmasters omnibus that features 3 of those novels and a bunch of stories.