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

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.

Say what?

Hey this thread. I recently started Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis / Lillith's Brood on Audible. Good so far. Pretty creepy and gross in places

https://www.tor.com/2020/12/01/gideon-harrow-and-the-value-of-problematic-relationships-in-fiction/
I agree with much of this but I just can't go along with this about the standard romance genre books

it’s indeed very important to portray romantic relationships with healthy dynamics, because the relationships in romance are intended to be fantasies that readers can picture themselves in

Are there really people who think Hiddleston is too positively portrayed in Crimson Peak?

I've went back and forth on a lot stuff but I think worrying too much about how your dumbest audience members are going to take stuff will damage your art. People who take Scarface as a hero probably cannot be reached by art trying to convince them otherwise.

A lot of online erotica has disclaimers at the start saying "THIS IS NOT OKAY IN REAL LIFE, just imaginative fun" and I've been wondering how necessary it is. Does anyone really need that for Suehiro Maruo or is the horror just too obvious? I've been reading reviews of bodice rippers recently and some of them sound enjoyably nuts but some of the audience seems to treat the male characters as Real Men, should we write them off with the dumb gangster movie fans?

It's difficult to explain why off the top of my head but I also think lowering your expectations of audiences seems kind of dangerous.

I was thinking of noting in a future review what an unpleasant person a character was in a book (Tanith Lee) but I started feeling like a was making a concession to people who object to reading horrible man characters.

It shouldn't be a shock that Dracula is not nice but I have to admit it taken me slightly aback just how much of a relentless bastard he is.

Meant to say "horrible main characters" but it is funny that I wrote "horrible man characters"

You're making me remember the shit-eating apologies they used to print at the start of Palladium's role-playing rulebooks in the 1990s, along the liens of "We don't support using the Occult! This is just a game! Please don't Satanic-panic sue us!"

It shouldn't be a shock that Dracula is not nice but I have to admit it taken me slightly aback just how much of a relentless bastard he is. As well you might be. Good work, Bram Stoker.

bounced hard off this year's hugo best novel winner, a memory of empire by one arkady martine. SO MANY NONSENSE WORDS IN ITALICS. why is a doctor an ixtaplan. it's just so fucking dorky.

Haha yes exactly, I'm trying with that one too but having the same issue.

gave up on that 50 pages in or so, couldn't bear the nonsense words or silly names or incredibly irritating narrative voice.

Oops, confused it from the description with 'Too like the lightning', I did finish it! Seems like she read 'Ancillary Justice' and thought 'I can do that', it was decent YA at best and the protagonist was annoyingly 'gee whillikers!' but it wasn't half as irritating as TLTL.

I also finished Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which I might have read for the title alone if I hadn't already enjoyed her Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. But it wasn't the dark, heavy fantasy I was expecting, instead a rather thin mystery set in a vast house inspired by but not as varied or ominous as Piranesi's Prisons, with at first only two characters, and only four main ones in total, the mystery being who they are and where and what is the house. It's all narrated by one of the characters and once it become clear what was going on I didn't find it a very pleasant headspace to be in.

I heard she wrote it all with lyme disease.

https://www.tor.com/2020/12/01/five-hippie-ish-sf-novels-inspired-by-sixties-counterculture/
First cover reminds me of "mind blown" gif

Thanks! Some great comments in there too, incl. from writers, supposedly. Several mention Dhalgren. but really anything of his 60s-70s books that I've read (back when I still smoked weed and did shrooms) pertain, esp. Heavenly Breakfast, which I thought at thee tyme was fiction but have since seen it commonly referred to as memoir; also, the band Heavenly Breakfast, with whom he lives and plays in this account, may have released an albu---think I saw it listed somewhere once; anyway, gotta go but wiki sez:
Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love is a 1979 memoir by author, professor, and critic Samuel R. Delany.[1] It details the time he spent living in a commune in New York City during the winter of 1967-1968,[2] although altering some details.[3]

Heavenly Breakfast was also the name of the rock band that lived in the commune, which consisted of Steve Wiseman, Susan Schweers, Bert Lee (later of the Central Park Sheiks),[4] and Delany.[5]

The book is one of several autobiographical works by Delany.[6][7]

References---see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavenly_Breakfast

I've been reading a few stories from A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, ed. Anthony Boucher, a 1959 anthology of stories and novellas in 2 volumes, which was a hand-me-down from my dad, in what appears to be the Science Fiction Book Club edition. I enjoyed THE CHILDREN’S HOUR by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore and THE (WIDGET), THE (WADGET), AND BOFF by Theodore Sturgeon, both take place in a normal present-day world though increasingly odd events eventually reveal that not all those who walk among us are as they appear to be.

I remember those, from my childhood in the SFBC---wonder if I still have the set? Probably.

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.

paul j mcauley one looks up my street, haven't read any of his stuff before so thought i'd start with his first, 400 billion stars, as it was a bit cheaper & i'm tight. pretty good, descriptively written, bit planet bound for my liking (nothing wrong with planet bound sf but it didn't inspire that galaxy spanning sense of awe). definitely veered towards hard science fantasy - lots of plausible sounding biology and astrophysics but when it came to the crunch the main plot device was handwaved away. not as bad as peter f hamilton who actually smuggles magic into his 'hard' sf though. anyway i'll give 'war of the maps' a go, can't resist me a far-future cosmic megastructure.

Oh I also recently finished The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull, a first contact story set in the US Virgin Islands. Entirely earthbound, and the aliens mostly in the background and technologically benevolent, except when when they get insulted or attacked, when they might rip your arm off or your dog in half. Aside from that it reads like regular present day slice of life lit fic - the midlife crisis dad, the daughter who wants to escape, the mother who is uncertain how to feel about her female friend and co-worker, who once kissed her - but it ties in the alien visit with stories from the islands' colonial past. I thought its pairing of SF and regular fiction was quite original and successful.

I thought that sounded interesting too, but the aliens were so boringly unalien for the most part that I couldn't be bothered finishing it.

Singer from Carpe Noctem's novel
https://titanbooks.com/70297-shadows-of-the-short-days/
He also edits an SFF magazine in Iceland

There's been good reviews and Aliette De Bodard giving it a thumbs up.

By Douglas A. Anderson, editor of the excellent Tales Before Tolkien etc.:

RIP: Alison Lurie (1926-2020)
I'm saddened again to report another death, this time of novelist and children's literature expert, Alison Lurie, at the age of 94. A long time ago I was one of her students, and we kept in occasional touch and swapped books in the years afterwards. She gave a nice blurb for the 1996 reissue of The Marvellous Land of Snergs, by E.A. Wyke-Smith, the 1927 children's novel that inspired The Hobbit. I recall that she also asked me for suggestions for inclusion in her Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales (1993), and presented me with an inscribed copy on publication.
much more here: http://tolkienandfantasy.blogspot.com/2020/12/rip-alison-lurie-1926-2020.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TolkienAndFantasy+%28Tolkien+and+Fantasy%29

From Rolling Obits over on ILE:
Alison Lurie on 12/3 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/books/alison-lurie-dead.html

― MrDasher, Friday, December 11, 2020 11:11 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I had one of those "people you didn't know were still alive" moments with Lurie a while back; I've been referring to her academic writing on "subversive children's literature" quite a bit in my own dissertation. RIP.

― Langdon Alger Stole the Highlights (cryptosicko), Friday, December 11, 2020

http://file770.com/phyllis-eisenstein-1946-2020/
Been meaning to get Born To Exile for a while.

Wow---didn't know her or know much of her writing and other activities, but after reading that, I miss her too.

Objectifying books
https://www.instagram.com/theblackjoke/
https://www.instagram.com/mountabraxaspress/
https://www.instagram.com/weird_dark_fiction/
https://www.instagram.com/zagavabooks/

Was just going to excerpt this, but here's your Christmas feast of paste:

M R James and The Folk-Song Collector

In a bound volume of the London Mercury I have, its binding faded to madder red, there is an essay in the May 1921 issue, by I.A. Williams, entitled ‘Notes on a Small Collection of Folk-Songs’.

Williams was a regular columnist for the journal under the heading ‘Bibliographical Notes & News’, on recent book auctions, catalogues and discoveries, and was evidently himself a keen book-collector.

However, in this contribution he celebrates another interest of his. Williams recalls how last Christmas Eve two ragged and hungry children had come to his door in Surrey and sung a carol, ‘The Moon Shines Bright’, which went well enough until the last three verses, where ‘ . . .something appears to have gone wrong. The beauty is there right enough, but it has got mixed up and broken somehow’.

Indeed, a graveyard song seems to have obtruded itself on the carol with an unseasonal memento mori (‘there’s a green turf at your head, good man’), before the duo ended with more conventional hopes for a Happy New Year, and were rewarded with the food they preferred to coin.

These visitors reminded him of ‘a small collection, of about a hundred folk-songs, which I had made a few years ago during the very ample “vacs” of my undergraduate days.’ He was in fact a student at King’s College, Cambridge, during the period when M R James was Provost. His notes were contained in three notebooks, which he began to browse through, remembering the (mainly) old men and women who had sung the songs to him, in return for a sixpence or, at Christmas, half a crown.

The first thing he looked for, he tells us, was another carol, ‘taken down on Christmas Day, 1912, from a gipsy man and woman who came to our house singing to the accompaniment of a tambourine and a concertina.’ This was called ‘King Pharaoh’ and, though also muddled, proved to contain a rather curious myth.

‘King Pharaoh sat a-musing,/A-musing all alone,/Up came our blessed Saviour,/And it was to him I own.’ Where have you come from? asks Pharaoh: ‘out of the land of Egypt’ is the reply. If it is true, says the Egyptian king, that you are sprung from the Holy Ghost, why that roasted cock there will crow three times.

The bird restores all its feathers to itself and duly obliges: ‘Three times the roasted cock did crow/On the plate where [he] did stand.’ The song then veers off to another legend, about how corn was miraculously sown and reaped the same day.

‘To what antiquity does this carol carry us back?’ asks the essayist. Well, ‘Dr. M.R. James has written in the Cambridge Antiquarian Society’s Communications, Vol X’ of ‘the roasted cock crowing, and thus bringing about the conversion of an unbeliever’. The latter, it seems, is more usually King Herod than King Pharaoh. This would make more sense in the context of the song, since it looks odd to go ‘out of Egypt’ to find Pharaoh.

(Though another possibility occurs to me, which is that by King Pharaoh the gypsy couple meant, not the Egyptian ruler, but the King of the Fairies, which would make the song more interesting still . . .)

‘Dr James,’ continues I A Williams, ‘records versions of this legend from Denmark, the Faroe Islands, and Sweden, as well as similar miracles among pilgrims and travellers in France, Italy, and Spain. He also tells of earlier forms of the tale in some copies of the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus.’ In this case the cock is in a pot being cooked by Judas’s wife and pops up alive and feathered to announce the Resurrection.

Williams then quotes M R James’ theory about the story: ‘I am inclined to think’, says James, ‘that the incident has been elaborated out of the story of Peter’s denial, and that the first step taken was to connect the cock with Judas, and then possibly with Herod.’

The essayist then goes on to discuss other folk songs he has collected, some of them somewhat bawdy, others with a smattering of seemingly ancient myth. He was evidently part of the surge of interest in folk song that is now associated in particular with Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and in the next number of the London Mercury he has a letter to the editor telling readers about The Folk-Song Society.

Iolo Aneurin Williams (1890-1962) was, despite his Welsh name, born in Middlesbrough to a family of Liberal politicians, and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal candidate himself, though in forlorn hope seats. He published several volumes of poetry, and his other interests are reflected in volumes on Elements of Book-Collecting (1927), English Folk-Song and Dance (1935), Flowers of Marsh and Stream (1946) and Early English Water-Colours (1952).

I could not help wondering what M R James might have made of the first carol discussed by Williams, which so oddly changed its tone towards the end. Just as James thought that a Punch and Judy show, a Christmas cracker and a children’s game, offered opportunities for a ghost story, so might carol singers with a strangely muddled song.

The cheerful householder, perhaps with a secret past, goes out to listen with a glad heart to the youthful carollers, only to find the words of the song suddenly turning macabre and invoking the grave. And when he peers more closely at the pale ragged children glimmering in the winter dark, why they almost look as if . . .

Compliments of the season to one and all!

(Mark Valentine) w image of songbook pages etc. http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2020/12/king-pharoah.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

Mostly posting this for the clip

I am now at liberty to announce that @CLASHBooks will be publishing a new novel of mine in 2022. It's called PEST and it's about architecture and yaks. pic.twitter.com/avsSMlWWX4

— Michael T. Cisco (@MichaelTCisco) December 23, 2020

D. P. Watt -Beatific Vermin

Watt is one of the current small press strange authors I've been most eager to read and was surprised to find that most of the stories are a very contemporary urban horror which I've mostly not been much fond of, which seemed totally at odds with the titles and presentation of his books and what I had heard about his writing. Some of the other stories are often disembodied philosophical explorations of surreal concepts.

It is all very well written but more often than not, I just wasn't that interested. Two exceptions:
(1) "Serendipity" (about a highly specialized brothel from a grim future) is miserable like a lot of the other stories but it has a fashion sense, art design and an almost cartoonish brutality that I enjoyed.
(2) "Distillate Of Sin" (about a troubled boy who dreams of an orgy pit floating on human waste which creates perfumes) was quite gripping.

I've another collection by him and I'm stubbornly ready interested in some of the others which I'd heard such good things about, I'm hoping for better.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/296318/484521573
I've read a couple of stories and found them very mixed but still haven't tackled his Kane books. The omnibuses annoyingly never got cheap paperback versions.

I like that neglected dark 1970s fantasy author looks EXACTLY how you'd expect

It is sad seeing that clip of Etchison talking about writing all those scripts that will never be read (do studios own them?). There's probably a treasure trove, mountains of unproduced film scripts and all studios want is franchises, adaptations and biopics of famous people.

Some notes about Wagner for anyone unfamiliar:
It seems like Kane was fairly successful, a lot of sword & sorcery fans put it up there with the big names (I just saw that the philosophy youtuber Gregory B Sadler did a video about Kane, he is an old metalhead so it isn't too surprising).
Wagner edited Year's Best Horror for DAW for over a decade and that might be what he is best known for. Perhaps America's most famous horror anthology editor before Ellen Datlow had done so much of the same?
"Sticks" is widely guessed to be the inspiration for Blair Witch Project. It was based on an experience artist Lee Brown Coye told to Wagner (but Coye made up some stories he told people). It starts off well but I think Wagner seriously drops the ball in the second half and it becomes cthulhu mythos fluff.

I read 'Sticks' last year and immediately thought of The Blair Witch Project, without knowing that others had made the same connection. It's pretty inescapable. Wikipedia also mentions the first season of True Detective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticks_(short_story)

Forgot to mention the some of the Kane books had the advantage of Frank Frazetta.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61w%2Biz9yoUL.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/d/d7/DTHNGLSSHD1978.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/8/86/BLDSTNPJQG1975.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/2/2d/DRKCRSDGZS1976.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/4/40/NGHTWNDSC31978.jpg

Frazetta said the Dark Crusade painting was what Clint Eastwood pointed to when he was getting him to paint a film poster.

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/2020-in-review-part-one/
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/2020-in-review-part-two/
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/2020-in-review-part-three/

Love the original cover to Dragonflight
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/1/16/DRGNFLGHT1968.jpg

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/storm-constantine-1956-2021/

Oh wow I'd never seen that Dragonflight art.

Just finally got around to the Marlon James book, got about 40-50 pages left. I loved Seven Killings and I don't think this is quite on that level, but I really love the worldbuilding and the way he played with time, memory and narrative through Tracker's retelling of his adventures. The "African Game of Thrones" thing was kind of ridiculous, even James himself said it was "a joke", but if it helped steer even a few new readers his way maybe it isn't the worst marketing decision ever. I'd say the only thing the two have in common is an overload of graphic sex and violence that might not all be strictly necessary to advance the plot.

guessing "x game of thrones" in mainstream literary circles right now just means "this is about a made up world with swords and stuff".

yeah i found that james book laughably grimdark

Paul McAuley's War of the Maps: rubbish, unless you like fantasy masquerading as SF (genetically transformed monsters, a far far future that is largely pre-industrial), picaresques/fetch quests, evil geniuses and lawmen honour bound to take them down no matter the cost. Also way overwritten, e.g. "He extracted his spyglass from the flap pocket of his coat and shot it to its full length and applied it to his right eye', jfc gimme a break. and everyone wears loose white cotton tops and trousers.

I definitely prefer science fantasy to regular science fiction.

love to extract my spyglass

Lol