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

Thomas Ligotti is releasing his first work (a book of poems) since 2014, which will have a companion album by Current 93. There was a general expectation that he wouldn't write anything again for health reasons but there has been signs that he might be able to write a bunch more.

Excited about the C93 portion!

I love Ligotti deeply but mainly for Grimscribe/Noctuary

Nicoll doesn't care for the first cover (which I've never seen before) but I think it's awesome.
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/the-flame-thats-in-her-eyes
I have the first omnibus of this series.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds
http://file770.com/the-legislative-body-problem-gop-senators-criticize-netflix-plan-to-adapt-liu-cixin-hugo-winner/
I was wondering how long before something like this came up and it happened last year and I didn't hear anything about it. Liu being supportive of the what China are doing with the Uighurs. I don't know what people can reasonably expect so maybe that's why there wasn't a bigger deal about it. Lots of people say there's huge pressure for big authors to agree with the government.

From the comments

Even supposedly progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just announced the celebration of brutal war criminal Yitzhak Rabin, guilty of ordering the breaking of bones of children, of ethnic cleansing and of organising death marches for civilians.

Not this one, though she's since withdrawn from participation in the commemoration btw.

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hessenstein_countess_gabrielle

Wow! Have you read that??

No, I just stumbled on her name and wanted to know more.

For the #WyrdWednesday crowd - Amazon Prime has a documentary about Colin Wilson!
It's got some cheapo effects, and the man does ramble on a bit, but *what a life!* and it's worth for his book sheds alone (including the Prime Shed). pic.twitter.com/hxNhupIPCq

— Remco van Straten (@RemcoStraten) October 3, 2020

Watched it last night, I have almost no reservations, I liked the new agey ambience and I could have watched Wilson talk for another hour. He comes across really nice, talks about his life, creativity, other writers and films stars, there are some claims he makes that could sound like wild boastful lying but I believed him because he just doesn't seem overly impressed about any of it. From the way he explained it I thought he was very easily convinced about poltergeists and such things but this was clearly made by occultists. I haven't read any of his books and I'm not sure I've ever heard of Spider World series but it sounds like a major work for him.

never heard of him; judging someone by their wikipedia page may be harsh & unfair but it positively discourages me from taking any interest in his life or his works.

He's a pretty interesting character! Not least because his trajectory - respectable literary beginning (The Outsider) giving way to lurid pulp - is the exact opposite of contemporaries like Aldiss, Ballard etc.

One of many interesting bits: Rasputin's daughter written to him to say that he had written the best Rasputin book ever.

His fans don't necessarily lean towards occultists and I really don't mind anymore. Tanith Lee and a lot of associated writers are into supernatural stuff and I can live with that.

Another amusing moment is him talking about deciding to become a tramp and seeming a bit surprised it wasn't always comfortable.

I've heard that even later in life he liked to sleep out in parks occasionally. I can't verify this.

http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2020/05/tim-white-1952-2020.html

I've seen this second cover so many times but only just now noticed the monster's genitals. I wonder if the editors missed it too?

Oh, good people, do I have a treat for you: the confused covers of 'Sheba Blake Publishing': (thread) pic.twitter.com/KynWe42YvP

— Caustic Cover Critic (@Unwise_Trousers) October 7, 2020

..or their travel and historical works. pic.twitter.com/aFIaneNyWF

— Caustic Cover Critic (@Unwise_Trousers) October 7, 2020

Weird, that's me.

quite enjoyed 'gideon the ninth'

very occasionally a little too over-the-top, but captivating, well-written and legit funny

Really want to read it.

http://www.elfindog.sakura.ne.jp/wgrobertson.htm
Artist who did a bunch of stuff for Algernon Blackwood. Really nice stuff.

my birthday copy of this just turned up and it's a tome two inches thick.

https://www.itsnicethat.com/news/rian-hughes-xx-a-novel-graphic-publication-200820

it is mostly text, despite the shots in that article, but it hops between tweets and email and prose and odd fonts. starts with a signal being received at jodrell bank...

Looks cool.

Oooh, that's out? I want. I got an electronic ARC but it's just too fucking long to read on a screen.

A bit dismayed to hear that Tamsyn Muir had suicidal feelings because she was put on twitter trial for how she written about rape in her fanfiction days.

XX full of nerdy details like them using the font from UFO for company logo and visiting Brewer Street car park gallery.

I've already bought another copy as a birthday present, mainly because of the heft.

Jean Ray's Malpertuis and Roland Topor's The Tenant getting reprints soon.

From Subterranean Press---of course you'd want these in more affordable editions, but see if they might be worth keeping an eye out for (sometimes even SP ltds turn up Used for nicer prices on Amazon etc.)

We’re happy to let you know that we have on hand copies of Aliette de Bodard’s classic Xuya Universe novel, On a Red Station, Drifting. Our supply is not inexhaustible, so please order soon.

About the Book:

For generations Prosper Station has thrived under the guidance of its Honoured Ancestress: born of a human womb, the station's artificial intelligence has offered guidance and protection to its human relatives. But war has come to the Dai Viet Empire. Prosper's brightest minds have been called away to defend the Emperor; and a flood of disoriented refugees strain the station's resources.

As deprivations cause the station's ordinary life to unravel, uncovering old grudges and tearing apart the decimated family, Station Mistress Quyen and the Honoured Ancestress struggle to keep their relatives united and safe. What Quyen does not know is that the Honoured Ancestress herself is faltering, her mind eaten away by a disease that seems to have no cure; and that the future of the station itself might hang in the balance.

Limited: 500 signed numbered hardcover copies: $45
Aliette de Bodard follows up her award-winning Xuya universe novella, The Tea Master and the Detective with Seven of Infinities, an even longer foray into her singular creation.

We're currently shipping all preordered copies!

About the Book:

Vân is a scholar from a poor background, eking out a living in the orbitals of the Scattered Pearls Belt as a tutor to a rich family, while hiding the illegal artificial mem-implant she manufactured as a student.

Sunless Woods is a mindship—and not just any mindship, but a notorious thief and a master of disguise. She’s come to the Belt to retire, but is drawn to Vân’s resolute integrity.
When a mysterious corpse is found in the quarters of Vân’s student, Vân and Sunless Woods find themselves following a trail of greed and murder that will lead them from teahouses and ascetic havens to the wreck of a mindship--and to the devastating secrets they’ve kept from each other.

Limited: 1500 signed numbered hardcover copies: $40

From Publishers Weekly:

“With this lush, immersive sci-fi tale, de Bodard (The House of Sundering Flames) delves into a world as gritty as it is ethereal… [R]eaders will be swept away by the vivid prose, intrigue, and romance of this intricate tale. This fascinating, unusual story is sure to entrance.”

From Locus:

“De Bodard’s work is marked by precision and delicacy of prose, by a concern with ethics and relationships, and by the presence of uncaring systems that violently resist critique from without—and even from within. Seven of Infinities is deeply concerned with relationships and responsibilities: the relationship between an older friend and her youthful ‘little sisters’; the ties of loyalty between a crew of thieves with their own ethics; the bond between teacher and student—as central to the novella’s resolution as the relationship between lovers, in this case a quasi-familial, affectionate tie that goes a long way beyond duty… Seven of Infinities is a novella concerned with forgiveness, deserved or not, about cages, self-made or otherwise. It concerns itself with growth, with grace, with ruthlessness and its costs and consequences. It’s a tightly written jewel of a story, intense and full of feeling, and I recommend it highly.”

Based on Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series, Jeff VanderMeer's The Three Quests of the Wizard Sarnod is a longer and very different version of a story published in the Dozois-Martin edited Songs from the Dying Earth.

The Wizard Sarnod has lived in isolation on an island in the middle of a lake for centuries. But one day, the Nose of Memory arrives to destroy his calm by dredging up the past, and he must send three of his familiars to the subterranean Underhinds on a quest to find two other people, long banished: his brother and a former lover. In the Underhinds they will encounter living dirigibles, fire dragons, the Bloat Toad, unimaginable perils, and long-buried secrets...

From Jeff VanderMeer’s Introduction:

“When it came time to write the story for Songs of the Dying Earth, Sarnod and his three familiars leapt into my mind, and Grod was one of them. I wrote a draft, revised it, and sent it to the editors. When I heard back, the feedback indicated they liked the story but Grod wasn’t Vance-an enough, not tied enough in his quest to Vance’s world. So, thinking that eventually I might have a chance to publish my version, I cut Grod out of the story for the version published in the anthology....

“This version is very close to my heart, and I hope you enjoy it as much as you enjoy my friend and master designer John Coulthart’s marvelous approach to book art.”

Limited: 500 signed numbered copies, bound in full cloth, in dust jacket: $40

We've restocked Ken Liu's signed limited edition novella, The Man Who Ended History, which also contains the bonus short story, "Lecture 14: Concerning the Event Cloaking Device and Practical Applications Thereof."

About the Book:

A scientific invention makes it possible to virtually travel back in time and witness historical events. It is only possible to witness it once from the same perspective, because the process eats up the record. The inventor and her husband draw attention to the atrocities of Unit 731 during WWII. They hope that eyewitnesses will shut down denialists. But Chinese versus Japanese, and U.S. politics start their own games.

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary, by Ken Liu, first appeared in Panverse Three, September 2011. The story was a Nebula, Hugo, and Sturgeon finalist.

The WSFA Press edition of The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary will be a signed, limited edition of 500 copies, with cover and four interior illustrations by Galen Dara. This edition also contains the bonus short story: "Lecture 14: Concerning the Event Cloaking Device and Practical Applications Thereof". The book will be signed by both Ken Liu and Galen Dara.

Limited: 500 signed (by author and artist) copies: $45

Also in this newsletter: Joe Hill, Alastair Reynolds. Gotta go now though

M John Harrison wins literary prize:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/11/a-literary-masterpiece-m-john-harrison-wins-goldsmiths-prize-for-innovative-fiction?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR3dJnwp-SFMIU6bU4HXrHavxF0V9DJPatjZsuMggPetetY4Lf7dW3OvgLA

Wait, he has a new book?

Tbh, got tired of stanning for him after Martin Skidmore passed.

:-)

Happily I am now the custodian of Martin's Harrison holdings.

Wait, what?

Oh, I just mean that when Martin died lots of his books were divvied up among his friends, and I inherited many of his old Harrison paperbacks.

Cool. Thanks for telling me, that makes me happy for some reason.

Glad for Harrison. I haven't read this new one, though, as I only recently got round to Light and it had rather more problems than I was expecting.

Anyone thoughts on “the sunken land begins to rise again”?

It should not do that!

this site seems to say good things about it.

Ha, I never knew that the discussion he had with Iain Banks which led to Light took place at The Groucho Club.

He apparently also has a recent career overview short story collection out, Settling the World. Loved the title story when it led off Things that Never Happen.

The Greater Trumps (1932) by Charles Williams is a powerful metaphysical thriller inspired by the symbolism of the Tarot cards. According to his latest biographer, Grevel Lindop, Williams possessed a copy of the Marseilles pack, and probably also the Rider-Waite pack. He may have learned aspects of the Tarot from A E Waite, since he was an initiate in the latter’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross.

However, his book was not the first novel to use the Tarot as a guiding motif. As a widely-read editor at the Oxford University Press, in touch with contemporary fiction, Williams may also at least have heard of an earlier novel involving the cards.

Helen Simpson’s Cups Wands and Swords (Heinemann, 1927) begins with a Tarot reading, and each chapter is named after a Tarot card. The novel follows a group of young bohemians in Chelsea and Oxford in the 1920s. Tony and Celia Riddle are orphaned twins, by turns tender and quarrelsome with each other. From an old and fairly well-off Australian family, they were separated when Tony was sent to public school in England at an early age, while Celia remained behind. He now has the Oxford accent while she still retains Australian intonations: but the differences seem to go deeper than that.

In the opening chapter, Dominick, an Irish friend of Tony, reads the cards for Celia and finds them difficult, puzzling. The book will, in oblique ways, follow the fall of the cards and illuminate what they may have meant. The ambience of the book is not unlike Mary Butts’ modernist Grail novel Armed With Madness (1930), also about tempestuous bohemians getting involved with the esoteric.

The mystical and supernatural in Helen Simpson’s novel, apart from the influence of the cards, is subtly drawn. The first hint is when Celia, looking at the sunlight glinting on a teaspoon, seems to hover close to another dimension and is briefly able to read her brother’s thoughts. Shared understandings are not uncommon in twins but here it is implied that this is more than that: she ‘receives’ a picture of what he was thinking. The possibility of telepathy between twins is strongly present throughout the novel.

Supernatural incidents and impressions continue to pervade the book, not forcefully but allusively, interweaving with the lives of Celia, Tony and their friends. There is a glimpse of the majestic figures from a 17th century grimoire, and there is a seance in which a mysterious form links three of those present.

Aspects of the book are evidently autobiographical. Helen Simpson was born in Sydney but came to England as a young woman in her late teens and made her home there. Celia’s responses to the country and its contrasts with her homeland are fresh and observant and no doubt reflect her own experiences. She also evidently had an interest in the esoteric, and shared this with two close writer friends, Clemence Dane (with whom she collaborated on detective novels) and Gladys Mitchell.
She was thirty years old when Cups Wands and Swords, her second novel, was published. It shows a keen, sophisticated understanding of the Tarot symbolism. There are today hundreds of Tarot designs and Tarot-like oracle cards, but in her time it would have been a much more arcane matter. No doubt, however, it became better-known as part of the upsurge of interest in the esoteric that followed the Great War (see, for example, my catalogue for 1920 in an earlier post). Packs could be obtained from Rider, the noted occult publisher, and no doubt from certain avant-garde emporia.

T S Eliot’s allusion to the ‘wicked pack of cards’ consulted by Madame Sosostris in ‘The Waste Land’, first published in periodicals in late 1922, no doubt gives a sense of the Tarot’s reputation just a few years before Helen Simpson was writing her novel.

As well as the Tarot and the subtle supernatural elements in the book, another attraction is the cast of picturesque characters, particularly the minor characters. These include a female conjurer, who occupies the top floor of the lodging house where Tony and Celia live, and imbibes ‘port and splash’ (of soda) for her health; and a foppish Oxford aesthete who is a connoisseur of incense and rare liqueurs. Another brief supernatural moment occurs when she burns one of the incense cones he gives her and the smoke begins to form a shape. Again, incense, now widely available in new age shops and elsewhere, was evidently still regarded then as exotic and faintly suspicious.

The emotional tension of the book derives from Tony’s dislike when his twin becomes attracted to one of his friends, Philip. He at first finds devious ways of preventing them meeting, but then acquiesces, thinking he will be able to retain his influence over her. Partly this could be due to his feeling of being ‘in loco parentis’ and responsible for his sister, who has not his experience of cosmopolitan life, but he is also presented as petulant and possessive. The plot follows Celia’s halting liberation from this. There is a powerful, eerie, well-devised ending involving an apparition that may be in part psychological in origin but yet also strongly implies a supernatural presence.

Helen Simpson went on to write ten more novels (including the collaborations), several of them historical. Boomerang (1932) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, then perhaps the leading prize for fiction, and Under Capricorn (1937) was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. She also wrote two historical studies, some miscellaneous non-fiction and a handful of plays.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography notice by Alan Roberts evokes her thus: ‘Handsome, dark, with 'bright brown eyes' and a determined chin, Helen was a fine horsewoman and fencer, who collected antiques, Elizabethan cookery books and works on witchcraft. She had great charm and vitality and developed a forceful style, with a touch of showmanship in some mannerisms such as taking snuff.’

While the Williams novel is told with his customary gusto and clamour, Helen Simpson's Cups Wands and Swords offers a nuanced treatment of the Tarot and its possibilities, but is equally compelling. It is an excellent example of an intelligent metaphysical thriller with contemporary edge, and ought to be better-known among savants of the esoteric and the fantastic.

(Mark Valentine) http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2020/11/cups-wands-and-swords-helen-simpson.html?utm_source=feedburner Lots of links to prev posts and other blogs ov esoterika (literary)

http://file770.com/last-dangerous-visions-will-be-submitted-to-publishers-in-2021/
People have a lot of concerns about this, but my biggest one is cutting out some stories because they're too outdated. Sounds like a terrible idea but I suspect it's actually because they're really offensive (or dangerous).

I like that Tartarus tells you in their newsletter what's low on stock.

xpost yeah datedness doesn't nec. go too much vs. readability, and can add to historical interest, esp. if you think something considered daring/wtf? when orig. published was a nec. precedent for something that still seems stronger---your posts incl. link reminding me of my comment from late last year:

I enjoyed just about every story in xpost The Future is Female ---a few of the Messages didn't quite make it over the finish line w undiminished momentum, but all takes remained v readable, with editor's mostly astute and always expert delving into wide span of eras and approaches. My fave discoveries are Sonya Dorman (described by ed. as New Wave vanguard, got into the first Dangerous Visions ). Here we get the affecting poetic compression of "When I Was Miss Dow," as oops upside the head to me as the relatively slo-mo, yet perfectly timed "Birth of a Gardener," by Doris Pitkin Buck (...her short story "Cacophony in Pink and Ochre" is...slated to appear in...The Last Dangerous Visions .") Dorman has several stories posted here and there, haven't had (even) as much luck with Buck yet, no collections of either, which makes me sad. Could always buy up quite a few back issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science, make my own bootleg anths, but I'm not that sad.

― dow, Tuesday, December 24, 2019 10:00 AM (eleven months ago)

Any of yall read any of these?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/28/best-science-fiction-and-fantasy-books-of-2020 Brief descriptions seem promising, though mention of one lil underdog finding his "special destiny' is an uh-oh, as describer acknowledges.

Haven’t read any, but Adam Roberts usually seems to be a reasonable critic.

I have wanted the McAuley, Callender and Pheby books, I've heard they're all great. That's a surprisingly short list, I'm sure Roberts was a judge this year on something.

Looking foward to the Strange Horizons year end list, always a fun read.

latest dispatch from Wormwoodia:

Robert Herring (1903-75) was the 23 year old author of The President’s Hat (1926), a novel presented in the form of a travel book, with drawings by Hubert Williams, about a walking tour in Andorra and the Pyrenees. They did not in fact undertake any such journey and the whole thing is imagined, an armchair spoof. It is a flippant, high-spirited jaunt that reads, however, persuasively in its light parody of the typical oblivious young Englishman abroad. It’s a highly engaging, whimsical odyssey.

Since its form is unreliable and the content a fantasia there is an experimental dimension to the novel that is not immediately obvious. It might be put perhaps somewhere in the same category as the work of Ronald Firbank, who visited places only after he had finished writing about them, or (later) Jocelyn Brooke in such titles as The Dog at Clambercrown (1955) and The Crisis in Bulgaria (1956).

Hering was later the editor of the journal Life and Letters To-Day, which also took over The London Mercury, and he was known as an early film critic, writing several books on the subject. Otherwise his bibliography is mostly of limited editions of a few plays, poems and fantasias.

However, the wartime Gollancz paperback anthology Transformation (1943) edited by Stefan Schimanski and Henry Treece includes a one act verse play, in six scenes and an epilogue, by Robert Herring, entitled ‘Harlequin Mercutio, Or, A Plague on Both Your Houses (A Ride Through Raids to Resurrection)’. It is a sort of Blitz fantasia on Shakespeare, in which characters from the plays appear in the ruins of London. It concludes with the rediscovery of Merlin, here representing ‘the good in Man, and hence his power of self-help and resurrection.’

The poetic diction and neo-Romantic style are similar to the better-known plays of his contemporary Christopher Fry (A Phoenix Too Frequent, 1946, The Lady’s Not for Burning, 1948, etc); and some of the imagery suggest the work of artists such as Paul Nash and John Piper, for example the striking idea of ruined London as a new Stonehenge. We are in the realm of what the art critic Alexandra Harris has called ‘the Romantic Moderns’.

‘Pieces of Apocalypse’, a recent critical commentary by Richard Warren on this otherwise forgotten play, remarks that ‘the overall effect – Shakespearian verse drama enacted by Jungian archetypes and set in the London Blitz – is, frankly, bizarre’ and adds that ‘ as a piece of theatre, not that it was intended as such, Harlequin Mercutio would be unperformable. As an extended poem or (hypothetically) a radio play, it is incoherent, wilfully difficult and virtually unreadable. But there is something oddly brave about it . . .’

I think that it is in fact best read as a narrative poem in the mode of ‘The Waste Land’ and indeed some of the imagery seems to have echoes of Eliot’s epochal poem. The ‘highly condensed and fractured syntax’ that Warren also notices is not dissimilar to the modernist prose of Mary Butts, allusive and elliptical. It also has its fragmented Blitz imagery in common with similar haunted fantasies such as Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Mysterious Kôr’ (from The Demon Lover and Other Stories, 1945) and G W Stonier’s The Memoirs of a Ghost (1947), both discussed in my A Wild Tumultory Library (2019). Herring's play is dream-like, eerie, strangely compelling, with many slivers of weird imagery.

It was only two years later that C S Lewis, in his metaphysical thriller That Hideous Strength (1945), also wrote about the rediscovery and revivification of Merlin, and what I remember of this scene is that he is not presented as a haughty mage but rather as a crafty, wily peasant cunning-man. Also that he speaks a tongue no-one can understand until they bring in a priest with a knowledge of Basque (since this is believed to be one of the oldest European languages). Though he is using a figure from Arthurian romance, Lewis does not depict him in the least romantically, and this is a sound artistic choice, because his atavistic Merlin has a deeper, more disorienting power.

It seem unlikely that Lewis, not perhaps particularly attuned to avant-garde literature, had heard of Herring’s play, but it is possible. He certainly took an interest in his close friend Charles Williams’ sacred dramas and his Arthurian poems, so a transcendent play with an Arthurian figure might have come to their attention. In any case it is curious that two literary figures should both decide to revive Merlin within a few years of each other. Perhaps the archetypal magician was making his presence felt.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: bibliosophy. Links, pixs:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2020/12/robert-herring-and-return-of-merlin.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

It also has its fragmented Blitz imagery in common with similar haunted fantasies such as Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Mysterious Kôr’ Really striking, incl also in Bowen's invaluable doorstop The Collected Stories.