School Me On Some Sci-Fi My Astral Brothers And Sisters!

haha i want a theodore sturgeon-edited SF anthology

It's good! Only the 10% are in it!

got a title for that one? i might go amazon market / abebooks hunting

It's called 'New Soviet Science Fiction', and the ISBN of the copy I have is 0025782207. ABE has copies from $3.50.

It looks like this:
http://pictures.abebooks.com/YARROW/882386633.jpg

Fancy gettin' me some of that but no uk sellers on abebooks... have to see what other Sturgeon they have. Might stock up on Dangerous Visions while I'm at it.

Come to think of it, back in the late 80s/early 90s, at the big library across the river, I found an old paperback of the Stugartsky/-ski bros' Hard To Be A God, think that's the right title, pretty close at least. Snowballing absurdist epic, awesome and "not" political, noooo--no telling when it came out; prob on Amazon for five cents or $50.00 or both. Anybody who's disappointed by Dhalgren, should check out his earlier stuff, esp. The Einstein Intersection, Nova, Triton, Spindrift (short stories), Heavenly Breakfast (his first memoir, I guess, re the 60s--*his* 1960s)

! i had never heard of 'heavenly breakfast' — in what ways is it i) similar ii) dissimilar to 'the motion of light in water'?

I learned yesterday that Osama Bin Laden may have named Al-Qa'ida after the Arabic title of "Foundation", a novel that features the collapse of a mighty empire.

I read "Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatsky Brothers (after seeing Tarkovsky's "Stalker") and I loved it. Is any of there other stuff worth seeking out? "Dead Mountaineer's Hotel" sounds cool, but it doesn't look like anything is in print (judging from a quick glance at Amazon).

Yeah, I'd love to read more of them too.

Also, a recent SF book that I thought was fantastic: 'Blindsight' by Peter Watts: exciting exploration/nature of consciousness and sentience/biology's limits/cognition flaws/mind-boggling stuff in general.

Finished all 8 vols of Best SF of New Worlds. Pretty disappointing. Michael Moorcock keeps on going on in the introduction about how sci-fi is an inadequate term, New Worlds is also, or more, about experimental fiction. And he's right - unfortunately I just don't find experimental fiction, or NW's brand of it, very interesting. Ballard's probably the best of the bunch but his themes are opaque and his prose doesn't particularly grab me. It's interesting that virtually none of his stories printed here appear in his Collected Short Stories.

Of course this is judging from a distance. I daresay there were all sorts of cultural boundaries being broken and political issues flying around - indeed, as Moorcock says in the intro to one of the vols, one of the magazine issues was banned by WH Smiths and questions were asked in Parliament (*) - but tbh I'm not really interested in that, I just wanted some decent more-or-less traditional SF short stories, and across all 8 vols there are only about a dozen of those. The last vol is pretty much the best; it feels like Moorcock had given up in some way as there is no introduction and a full four of the stories are by Barrington Bayley, but those are all good or great stories, there are a couple of other decent ones, and the experimentation is toned right down.

(*) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1968/may/09/magazine-new-worlds-grants#S5CV0764P0_19680509_HOC_7

well, i applaud your tenacity i guess

Ehh 1-2 hours per book, not a great chore. And gems were unearthed.

i had a sci fi question i wanted to ask! on this thread! and i have no idea what it was now

did you also have to read 'descending' by tom disch btw? fukkin hate that story

u MAD, that story is great.

i just read 'whole wide world' by paul mcauley, which was interesting. kind of a cyber-noir thriller set in a future which is just a couple of tweaks more advanced than ours. he loves to have his character talk about music while narrating the thing (very "rockist" taste it seems), and the mystery isn't much of one, but he's a very good writer and i read it quite swiftly.

(xp) I didn't read Descending, but I have before, and remember it fondly. I did read The Squirrel Cage which I thought was brill, also an extended metaphor on the human condition, this time about loneliness and solipsism - similar in a way to Wittgenstein's Mistress. Two other of his stories, though, were a let down.

Haven't read any McAuley, would be interested in trying some of his harder and further-future stuff.

this thread got me into thomas disch!!

Dischism

The unwitting intrusion of the author’s physical surroundings, or the author’s own mental state, into the text of the story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision — when this is actually the author’s condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the story. “Dischism” is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome. (Attr. Thomas M. Disch)

Ooh, ooh, Paul McAuley's 'Cowboy Angels' is very good: 1960s US discovers travel to parallel histories, starts "liberating" them from Communism, complications ensue. More complex and politically subtle than I made it sound.

hoos, how? he doesn't seem to have been, um, mentioned much.

camp concentration was one of my favourite books for a while, others maybe less so. i did read echo round his bones lately and enjoy that: it's less ambitious, more a standard SF potboiler just done smart, and a very enjoyable one. one i did not like: the genocides.

ledge are these the ones?

http://www.philsp.com/homeville/ISFAC/t70.htm#A1525
http://www.philsp.com/homeville/ISFAC/t71.htm#TOP

they do give kind of a jaundiced view of 60s SF, i guess. to some degree that's what it was for, i guess.

Aye them's the ones. Any other collections you'd recommend?

(Apart from the Aldiss/Penguin ones, and Hall of Fame vol 1, which I have, and The Hugo Winners, which I ordered and hasn't arrived, and Dangerous Visions, which I might order right now, and and...)

334 is incredible.

Disch was God.

what are ppl's thoughts on this list? http://thisrecording.com/today/2010/1/18/in-which-we-count-down-the-100-greatest-science-fiction-or-f.html

Nearly gave up in disgust circa Ayn Rand (I know a few people will see Ender's Game and Stranger In A Strange Land as libertarian nutjobbery too but I'm fairly happy with their inclusion in an SF list) but there are a few things I hadn't heard of there and would like to check out.

Not much modern stuff, which I can't really complain about as there isn't much on my shelves either. Not sure I'd pick several Dan Simmons books as pretty much my only representative of the 00s, though, but I've only read one of them.

Don't read the stuff anymore.

I'm as extreme a Gene Wolfe fan as there is, but An Evil Guest doesn't belong there. New Sun > Long Sun.

That appalling crap Flatland made it to 43?

No Sheckley, but his pla weak imitator Douglas Adams makes the list? With both of them gone, can't we sort this out finally?

Pale Fire is fantasy?

Just posted this on the comments for that list...

Interesting list and one that I mostly agree with (well except for Ayn Rand), but I'm actually shocked that neither Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar or The Shockwave Rider didn't make the cut. Both have aged remarkably well - if not better than some of the books that are on the list.

Since there isn't a single J.G. Ballard book on the list, I'll simply assume that the compiler is insane. The fact that I'm the first commenter to bring up both Brunner and Ballard makes me fear for the future.
January 18, 2010 | Chris Barrus

In SF Book Club, we have just been assigned Iain M Banks' "Use of Weapons"

For me the recent hits of SF Book Club have been Jules Verne's "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" and China Mieville's "The Scar". Verne's ability to get drama and excitement without having enemies to fight against is very impressive. "The Scar", while not really SF, is an impressive imaginative work.