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

I can think of near-examples in graphic novels - for example the psychic realms visited in things like Sandman and Prometheus (while both have scenes set in the real world) do well to convey the idea of universes outside the physical dimension - arguably something you might not be able to do so effectively with writing.

"Could anyone a bit more knowledgeable than I am maybe point me to examples of fiction that is completely unrelated or disconnected to the physical human world? I'm thinking stories where none of the characters are humanoid and/or the territory and setting is completely unlike Earth or habitable planets."

i started a thread like this a long time ago! but about movies...

When Is Someone Gonna Make A Sci-Fi Show Or Movie Without Any People In Them?

Somebody somewhere mentioned a Brunner story with an all-*alien*-alien cast---not seeing it on the old Rolling F etc., maybe another thread/site

one of my fave books that i have read in the last couple of years was The Companions by Sheri Tepper and that book had SO many awesome non-human life forms in it and i wanted the whole book to be about them. i think she could write a great non-human SF book.

i know i have definitely read sf short stories with no humans in them. but i can't think of titles.

I was going to say Mission Of Gravity by Hal Clement and someone said it on that thread just linked by Scott. Isn't that book fairly famous?

I think Lesabendio sounds pretty cool.

would totally read a book about microbes. in theory...

kinda can't believe nobody as written epic microbes hurtling through space on an asteroid and landing on uninhabited planet and creating life kinda thing. come to think of it.

kim stanley robinson should get on that...it's trilogy time...

"Common Time" by James Blish is a trippy short story about contact with a thoroughly non-human race, and the inability to communicate the experience.

I also think by the point you're writing about creatures detached from human concerns, many would not consider it SF, but just pure fantasy or surrealism.

Verner Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" and Pohl's "Jem" spring to mind - although both (eventually) bring humans into it. But the conception of a totally alien life told from the alien's perspective is a central narrative conceit of both, and they do it really well.

idk how interesting it would be to read something totally divorced from human experience though. I mean, to really achieve that would result in something that's total gibberish (nothing more human than language amirite)

I thought if Vinge and his creatures are pretty odd but they're still planet dwelling, warmongering, empire building, and basically mammalian with one albeit major quirk of physiology/psychology.

? spiders aren't mammals

planet dwelling and war mongering don't seem v species-specific to me

My mistake, I was thinking of the dog things from "A Fire upon the Deep", I haven't read Deepness yet.

Xp no, but they're arguably a mark of a certain kind of intelligence or way of experiencing and reacting to the world, which is maybe what dog latin wants to get away from.

Nothing to see here (speaking of dogs):
http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/188296828X.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

stories where none of the characters are humanoid and/or the territory and setting is completely unlike Earth or habitable planets.

the more I think about it, yeah on some level any story operating under these conditions would be totally incomprehensible and uninteresting to the human reader. Without anything analogous to human experience, no identifiable frame of reference, it would just be gibberish. Even "Flatland" - which is probably closest to this - uses the prospect of human (3D space) interaction to drive the plot and uses a human conceptual framework (math) to convey its ideas.

Also the flatlanders as characters are quite recognisable, and awful, iirc.

Feel like there a few short stories with a similar gag where a non-humanoid, spacefaring race come upon a planet which upon examination, for the good of the galaxy and its diverse occupants, they decide to quarantine or destroy which turns out to be *SURPRISE* (SPOILER WITHHELD)

in The Companions book by Tepper there is a planet where most of the action takes place and all the plants and trees are the sentient life-forms there. they think and learn and end up communicating with the humans. they are cool things! i highly recommend that book if you like weird life. weird creatures. very cool. it's filled with politics and sexual stuff too in a radical eco-feminist kinda way too, but in a good way. one group of aliens puts all these humanoid sex slaves onto earth and earth falls in love with them and becomes addicted. and there are genetically modified dogs and humans that can turn into dogs and also nighmare dog-like creatures. and one lizard-like alien race that is war-like and kinda insane and they kill all their women and breed in an insane way. oh, it's loaded with weirdness.

my favorite sf books are the ones where every chapter could be someone else's epic novel or series of novels. just a million ideas. how she threads it all together is some sort of feat.

sounds good, xp

picked up a few cheap early 60s things:
Kornbluth/Pohl - Wolfbane (just started this, the premise is bizarre)
Damon Knight - Hell's Pavement
Damon Knight - Beyond the Barrier

Didn't know Damon Knight was also a translator. Been looking through Black Coat Press catalogue (talked about them in the previous thread, the Aloysius Bertrand and Villiers De L'Ilse-Adam books), they mostly translate French SF, fantasy, horror and mystery, with a big focus on pulp heroes in a large part of their books. Brian Stableford seems to do most of the translations.

Unfortunately the site is not very well designed and some of the author pages don't include all the books containing their work. It's not easy to tell which books are novels, collections or anthologies until you see the table of contents.

I read about Nathalie Henneberg recently, she's known for lush fantasy and Green Gods is a collection translated by Damon Knight and CJ Cherryh.
http://www.blackcoatpress.com/greengods.htm
The One really good thing about this site is that it shows you the original French cover art.

the handful of Knight's short stories that I've read have been great. Started Beyond the Barrier last night and loved it so far - sort of a bridge between Van Vogt and PKD (which is ironic given Knight's legendary pillorying of Van Vogt), with this paranoid "everyone's out to get me!/ohmigod what is REALITY!" underpinning.

Just saw that those Damon Knight translations of Henneberg are from his book Thirteen French Science Fiction Stories.

I raved about DK's Rule Golden and Other Stories on the old Rolling F thread; be sure you get the 1979 five-novella edition (with the suthor's intro, specifying that several were written with "FU, John W. Campbell Jr. and fascist pals" in mind). So, they're all from the early Cold War, I think, and a couple are a bit dated in spots, but ultimately pretty strong. And more intense, inventive, imagistic, speculative, than satirical or village (or Village, maybe) liberal.
Currently, Amazon prices start at $0.01 ( there's also a Kindle, James). No good cover art, apparently, so I chose the dumbest I could find (for this edition).
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51GsmOFKyzL.jpg

And of course scarf up any Orbit (his very picky anthology series) you can find; hit those yard sales, son!

lol @ that cover

yeah that's on my list to get

Just pasting something I said on another forum:

There's so much poor cover art on so many genre books that I despair.

I sometimes think of ripping the front cover off but that might leave the pages too vulnerable.
If I cover the front cover in India ink, it might rub off on other books even after it is dry.

But if I do either, I can't give the book away if I don't like it. Hmmm. Wonder if I could paper over it without damaging it?

I really hate those covers with CG models. I'm ruling out that technique completely but the way most of them look, they'd do a disservice to most writers.

I meant I'm NOT ruling out that technique completely. Fuck, of all the words to skip over.

Could anyone a bit more knowledgeable than I am maybe point me to examples of fiction that is completely unrelated or disconnected to the physical human world?

Greg Egan's most recent trilogy (The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame, The Arrows of Time) is set in another universe with different physics and very non-human characters. unfortunately it's also boring and quite heavy-going, a sort of thinly-fictionalised physics/maths thought experiment

Philip Jose Farmer's Love Song is on ebook, I've heard it was a rarity for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Stableford

This guy has one of the most insanely huge outputs of any SF/fantasy writer I've heard of, including novels, short stories, editing, translation and non-fiction.

I've mostly been interested in his translations but the Dies Irae series is supposed to be a sort of classic.

Any Stableford experiences?

Read a few short stories and a novel, blanking on the title, which is typical of my experiences with him: no lasting (or even initial) impressions. Maybe it's just a matter of taste, but I look for writers to pull me from my usual limits.
Just finished Old Mars, George RR Martin & Gardner Dozois-edited anthology of new stories, "For Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, Catherine Moore, Ray Bradbury, and Roger Zelazny, who inspired this book, and Robert Silverberg, who should have been in it." Guess he didn't file copy, but may be just as well at this point. Authors are popular, but most (incl. Martin/Dozois regulars) are best known and/or cared about by their mass niche fans----not meant in a snobbish way, just how it is on a well-populated planet.
Moorcock is the only Grand Master type, and his "The Lost Canal" combines classic action-suspense with our currrent trends: for instance, as individuals, anarcho-syndicalist Earthlings may present existentially justified privateer/pirate swagger and swag, but they also tend to swarm like insatiable eco-junkies, running through planets, moons and others like doubloons and ampules and candy bars. Tremendous build-up, then quick glib pulp resolution. Oh well, like several others, it does make for good promo, and i wanna check the new series he's working on now (having moved from London to a small Texas town, according to editors.
One (of the most) that def works all the way through is Ian McDonald's "The Queen of the Night's Aria," which takes the Martians beyond this anthology's usual Egyptiod/Native American nexus to a species and civilization inspired by HG Wells and HP Lovecraft, but also with McDonald's own rueful humor and lyricism.
A few stories don't sufficiently deal with the familiarity of red sands, exploited natives, canals, weathered remnants, secret depths, but then, you get something such as
"A Man Without Honor," by James S. A. Corey:
Imagine if you will, Your Grace, the vast Martian sky, as purple as a lilac, with the same sun that shines on Westminster and London here taking on a wholly foreign aspect, with wide tendrils of rainbow snaking from its centrally glowing orb. See, if you will. the vast ruins that had once been the pride of seven races with their crystal hearts laid bare by storms and war; the massive, dying river, slow as an old man's blood; the bleeding and desperate crew handing the hope of survival on a half-shattered cart that struggled and failed to rise from the ground like a wounded moth. The air was thin and held the scent of metal and spent gunpowder. The heat of the sun oppressed as powerfully as a tropical noontime.
Now hear the familiar cry of Quohog--awch loy---smoke ahoy. Picture a storm of dragonflies, each as large as a man's arm. They rose in the East, thick as the billows of a vast conflagration, and spread out across the sky. I heard Carina Meer's cry when she caught sight of them and saw the blood drain from her tawny face.
"We must hurry," she said. "The central hive has discovered us...." Must say," Master Darrow said, "I'm beginning to dislike these buggers."

in McDonald's story, the Martian species (and its cyborgs) seem more evocative of HP; the human species and both sides' war-based civilizations seem Wellsian, def incl. his POV in WWI--foreseeing "The Land Ironclads."

having moved from London to a small Texas town, according to editors

I thought he'd moved back and forth between Texas and London for decades now

Stableford has some good ideas but a sort of workmanlike style. I've read a book of his short stories about genetic meddling, 'Sexual Chemistry', and a novel about scientifically rationalised vampires that google is failing to call up.

I used to think Octavia Butler, Norman Spinrad, Janny Wurts and Owl Goingback were odd names but Gwendolyn Ranger Wormser takes the biscuit.

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/arthur-machen-collection-at-risk.html
If you like Arthur Machen please read this short piece and there is a super easy super quick way to protest the closure of the collection to scholars and public.
It'll barely take a few minutes.

Will do, thanks for the word. Also signed up for newsletter (I see that one of the main contributors is Tolkien expert Douglas A. Anderson, whose anthology Tales Before Tolkien was extolled by me on the previous Rolling F)

Done. Oh yeah, think I didn't quite indicate the range of Old Mars. For instance, Allen M. Steele's "Martian Blood" is introduced in a way that makes it seem like it'll be Heinlein homage--but while the narrator does rail against the tasteless rabble, he's also alienated by the results (and even worse potential) of capitalist-colonial exploitation. And his isolation doesn't make him One Man Rising against tasteless rabble, like Campbell's crew and other problem-solving writers valorized, it makes him slow-thinking and otherwise ineffectual. So it's really more like one of those xpost Damon Knight critiques of 50s capitalist-colonialist-Campbellian crapola.
Also, Howard Waldrop has one about an ancient diary of an august Martian making a pilgrimage, and along the way he experiences meiosis, then trains his Bud to help him steer the sandcraft, and notes with satisfaction how new Bud is "flourishing in a twilight world" (diary ends soon after). I found it very relatable, as the kids say (spellcheck doesn't agree, but then it doesn't like its own name either).

Oh Robert, speaking of newsletters etc, do you know Subterranean Press? Lush special editions, some lush list prices too, but they have sales, also interviews and profiles of authors and illustrators, other good stuff. Mostly science fiction, fantasy, horror, some noir. Can check 'em out and sigh up here:
http://subterraneanpress.com/

Yeah, I've been checking them out recently. I've been interested in the Caitlin R Kiernan books in particular.

Was looking for ETA Hoffmann in the shops yesterday, both the Penguin and Oxford editions had a surprisingly small group of stories. I thought everything would be collected in big complete editions but there are 7 recent-ish collections with very different contents.
There are quite a lot of stories that don't seem to have been in English since Victorian Times.

did anyone see this baffling document: http://atseajournal.com/mjh-study/

Over the next ~25,000 words we will try and figure out how to get some of that rigor in our own work. No thanks. At least he got me to look up "zeugma."