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

Feel like I should post an excerpt from the MJH intro to that book. Anyway I was reminded of some old post of mine about M. John Harrison using a lot of big words which I needed to look up at the beginning of Viriconium and one poster who I shall not name replied and implied I was some of naive reader before I could clarify. I think what I had intended to say until I lost momentum was that the passage read really well, nice and smooth, even when I didn't know what the words meant, which was good enough, but then when I looked them up, the fact that they turned out to be genuine, if obscure or archaic words that he we using very precisely, gave me double happiness. Because sometimes the use of ye olden ten-dollar words can be kind of jarring, like Mingus on too much coffee. And it is indeed a little disappointing if you look but can't find such a word in a good dictionary, and therefore may not be able to determine if it is a made up word, or something real but just too obscure. I remember reading one Evan S. Connell, Jr. book The Alchymist's Journals, and thinking that it was on the one hand an amazing attempt to capture an earlier mode of thinking, but that on the other hand it was just kind of too hard to get a grip on, there were just too many completely obscure, impenetrable words that I could not find definitions of. Maybe he was getting them from Latin and Anglicizing them? As a sop to such mundane readers as myself, later editions of the book, changed the title slightly to Alchymic Journals and added some brief biographical info about the pastiched alchemists along with a short glossary at the end.

James, think you were the one who posted about Silvina Ocampo on the old Rolling SF etc/ From Paris Review staff picks, here's a new collection (well maybe new reissue, since Borges drops in with a preface), also new Kelly Link collection I've been hearing good things about:

Reading Silvina Ocampo’s stories—--newly collected in Thus Were Their Faces http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781590177679—--feels like looting the keep of a decrepit, moldering castle and plucking jewels from the fingers of skeleton royals. Ocampo, a well-born Argentine who died in 1993, melded the gothic and the fabulist in her fiction, writing tales of such unflinching comic cruelty that Borges had no choice but to proclaim her a clairvoyant. She does seem to see everything, and seeing everything is terrifying. In her great novella “The Impostor,” a boy narrates his journey to a remote ranch, where he’s supposed to rescue a family friend from a life of madness; by the end the narrator’s very existence is called into question, and questions of insanity are moot. In its images—damp flagstones, roaring bonfires, a portrait of a jaguar, a dead dog covered in flies—she builds a sense of dread that rises to a disturbing anticlimax. When Ocampo departs from realism, she does so casually, almost misleadingly—not to exercise her imagination but to reckon with all that we’ll never know or understand. —Dan Piepenbring

When I saw Kelly Link in conversation with Emma Straub last week, Link was dubious about ghosts: “Maybe, probably they exist,” she said. Her newest story collection, Get in Trouble, hinges on this maybe/probably dichotomy, as her characters take the fantastic for granted but also question their own perceptions. Maybe, probably, your best friend’s animatronic Ghost Boyfriend is really possessed. Maybe, probably, your spaceship won’t disappear into a black hole. Get in Trouble is one of the strongest collections I’ve recently read; each story is finely calibrated, with Link’s surreal but utterly believable logic, suspense, and heart. —Catherine Carberry

Did not know about that new Silvina Ocampo collection, thanks!

Ooh new kelly link! Good news.

Still haven't read her. Where to start?

Stranger Things Happen. Afaik all she does is short fiction, both collections i've read are v good.

Magic for Beginners is the other one. I think this latest one is her third, unless i missed something.

Saw a copy of new moorcock book today...? Which is weird. Why would it come out in the u.s. first?

Um...

Doesn't he still live in Texas?

He seems a much bigger deal in the uk than here, and afaict he's had better luck w british publishers too...?

Those pyat books were all printed in the uk first for ex.

A charity-related deal: fancy Subterranean editions, pay what you like, all formats (pay more than a certain amount, access to others; average yet another price,get yet more access): https://www.humblebundle.com/books

Nice! Interesting to see Tim Powers has a new Anubis Gates story -- that book remains one of my favorite time travel novels of all... er... time.

Open Culture ‏@openculture 52s53 seconds ago

The major films of Andrei Tarkovsky are now free online. Just an fyi:http://goo.gl/8MS5"> http://goo.gl/8MS5

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B-pxE2kUUAAPJIy.png

collected short stories of arthur c clarke (970 pages) currently £1.99 on amazon.co.uk. (and kobobooks)

a bunch of others too - city and the stars, rama, valis, ubik, do androids dream, flowers for algernon, electric sheep, revelation space, something wicked...

(most of those $3.06 on amazon.com)

Read a Kipling story called "The Return Of Imray", I didn't think it was very good. Characters rarely seemed to care when something major was going on and the main character says that dogs are better animals than women.

Didn't know Lawrence Durrell wrote sf! (I don't know much about him period, except his role as the ambitious, bossy, brainiac eldest sib in littlest bro Gerald Durrell's zoodelic beauty, My Family and Other Animals). New Clute entry is intriguing:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/durrell_lawrence

Robert, some of Kipling's other sf is better, like "As Easy As A-B-C" and "With The Night Mail."

I read another Kipling story that was okay but I can't remember the title. It was about a guy who gets cursed and becomes beast-like.
I wouldn't be discouraged by an underwhelming short by a major writer like that. Unfortunately, genre anthologies often contain substandard stories by major authors as curiosities. But in the case of Kipling it's a bit odd because he has a fairly large volume of fantasy stories that are supposed to be very good. I've got another by him coming up next.

Also read the famous "Monkey's Paw" by Jacobs and it was pretty decent.

Has it already been discussed that Gillian Anderson is writing SF now?

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/inside-your-head-conceptual-science-fiction

Wow cool! Agree on the ones I've seen, would very much like to see others, several of which I hadn't heard of. I'd add Her, and dig Clute's take (might possibly seem too spoiler-y, but worth it I think):
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/her

Plus, however much you read about it, still gotta see it to get it.

i can't even begin to describe to you how much i enjoyed the first book of the area x trilogy. i want to read it again!

i was talking to a friend of mine this morning while i ordered my bacon/egg/cheese on a bagel and she said: if you liked that you should read Nightwood.

which i never would have thought of. but maybe i should read Nightwood!

I'm curious what you (and others) think about the way the story pivots in the second and third books. It's definitely not a typical narrative strategy for a fantasy trilogy.

I'm looking forward to rereading the whole thing, but it's still a little too intensely in my head from a few months ago. It's rare for me to remember scenes and characters from a novel as vividly as I do these.

Nightwood OTOH I don't remember at all any more, except that it was pretty good. More like idk Anaïs Nin or something, not really fantastic.

Psst, I found out recently that a lot of sf titles are not original but have been taken from this book

There are several books called Nightwood.

she meant the famous one though. i guess because it's hard to figure out what is going on in Nightwood. that dream-like quality.

everyone who comes to this thread should read Area X. that's all i know.

That is the same thing as what they call The Southern Reach Trilogy, no?

Yes

yeah, sorry, the hardcover i have is all three books and they just call it area x. but also the southern reach trilogy.

Has it already been discussed that Gillian Anderson is writing SF now?

"Writing" is more like it... she made changes to someone else's manuscript and got her name on the cover

{From Dave Langford's Ansible newsletter:

Gillian Anderson promoted her debut sf novel A Vision of Fire – almost entirely, it seems, by co-author Jeff Rovin – on Front Row (BBC, 16 October), where the X-Files star explained her heavy involvement: 'I would do anything from changing a few sentences to take out a few paragraphs and rewrite them.' BBC presenter John Wilson wrong-footed her by pointing out a 3-page appendix of 'Gillian Anderson's favourite books' which was obviously news to this celebrity author. He, by now falling about laughing: 'There's no science fiction in that list.' She: 'I don't read science fiction,' and an embarrassed giggle.)

http://hyperallergic.com/181344/the-fantastical-pulp-art-of-1960s-and-70s-mexico/

http://www.gilliananderson.ws/about/favbooks.shtml

gilliananderson ws

domain names which are still true even all these years <3 u scully

Wormwoodia is a blog/emailletter I get, started by Douglas A. Anderson (editor of the excellent Tales Before Tolkien) and Mark Valentine, who posted this (I'm pasting in the original blog version, cos cool comments)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-n4IGV9f45Hg/VDzfrCs_WiI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/odLRPUsGpHE/s1600/The%2BGreat%2BGod%2BPan.jpg

THE CHALDÆAN MYSTERIES: Arthur Machen and Sherlock Holmes

In Arthur Machen's story "The Inmost Light" (from The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light, 1894), his literary amateur and occult detective Mr Dyson insists to his friend Salisbury that the strange and wonderful are often to be found concealed beneath the dreary and everyday. He exemplifies this idea by commenting on how even in mean and laborious streets there may lurk those whose occupations belie their surroundings: "You may point out a street, correctly enough, as the abode of washerwomen; but, in that second floor, a man may be studying Chaldee roots, and in the garret over the way a forgotten artists is dying by inches."

That phrase "Chaldee roots" is well-chosen. It is impressively arcane and specialised. We receive an impression, a glimpse, of some matter deep and intricate, antiquarian and mysterious. And, tantalisingly, no more is said. Salisbury is sceptical, and suggests Dyson is “misled by a too fervid imagination”, but he does not confess doubt or perplexity about the Chaldee roots Dyson has invoked. Yet it so happens that in those two words Machen was evoking and implying a great deal.

“Chaldee” is an archaicism for “Chaldæan”. It refers to a people who lived in the estuary and marsh lands between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates but is a term also often used more widely for the whole region of Mesopotamia and the empire of Babylon. Chaldee was the original language of parts of some of the books of the Bible (eg Daniel and Ezra) and is regarded as one of the root languages of the Talmud.

Chaldæan beliefs are inferred from a set of cuneiform tablets dated c. 670 BC which reported astrological information in the court of King Ashurbanipal. The Chaldæan /Babylonian system recognizes seven moving lights or forces (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) set among twenty-eight asterisms or "mansions" (manázil, in the later Arabic), different to the constellations now commonly used. They regarded the world as eternal, with no beginning or end, and the Sun, Moon, and the five planets they knew were seen either as intelligent beings, or as forces guided by some divine intelligence.

The Chaldees exercised a considerable fascination over the Ancient Greek and Latin civilisations, and the term “Chaldæan” came to be synonymous with “astrologer”, “magician” or “seer”. Their ideas found their way into the Mystery religions of the ancient world, such as those that Machen evoked in his youthful poem Eleusinia. The Chaldæan Oracles played a role in Hellenistic mystery religions of the first centuries BC and AD.

We know that Machen himself had lived in humble quarters, surviving on only dry bread, green tea and dark tobacco, and his studies were frequently esoteric. If he was not quite a “forgotten artist, dying by inches”, he was not altogether distant from that fate, living on very little. He worked for the occult publisher and bookseller George Redway, and he was in effect an unacknowledged editor of Walford’s Antiquarian, a journal devoted to obscure notes and queries about the byways of history. Is this, then, a wry reference to himself ? Or did he know another obscure scholar who was studying Chaldee roots? Or was there no such specific counterpart, even though the point might be poetically true?

Well, Machen's Mr Dyson was not the only investigator to be interested in matters Chaldee. One of Machen’s fellow members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was Florence Farr, esotericist, actor, player upon the psaltery, and author of the Nineties novel The Dancing Faun. She also wrote a 16pp monograph, as by F. Farr Emery, entitled The Way of Wisdom. An Investigation of the Meanings of the Letters of the Hebrew Alphabet, considered as a Remnant of Chaldæan Wisdom (J.M. Watkins., London, 1900). But, though she was at times no doubt as impecunious as any other artist or idealist, she was an habitué of Chelsea and does not seem to have lived in the obscurer quarters Machen pictured.

The aesthetical Irish poet Herbert Trench (1863-1923), a contemporary of Machen, in his ‘To A Dead Poet’ a paean to Edgar Allan Poe, evoked him as a “seer Chaldæan belated”, “Hymning Terror and Chaos”, but this may have been purely a literary flourish. He was a Fellow of All Souls’, Oxford, and later a public official, and, though his work was often ethereal, he does not fit Machen’s idea of the starving scholar.

However, some years after Machen’s story, Sherlock Holmes conceived the idea that the Cornish language is akin to the Chaldæan, and had been largely derived from Phoenician traders in tin visiting these shores in ancient times. His interest is noted in the story "The Devil's Foot" (Strand Magazine, December 1910):

"In every direction upon these moors there were traces of some vanished race which had passed utterly away, and left as it sole record strange monuments of stone, irregular mounds which contained the burned ashes of the dead, and curious earthworks which hinted at prehistoric strife. The glamour and mystery of the place, with its sinister atmosphere of forgotten nations, appealed to the imagination of my friend, and he spent much of his time in long walks and solitary meditations upon the moor. The ancient Cornish language had also arrested his attention, and he had, I remember, conceived the idea that it was akin to the Chaldæan, and had been largely derived from the Phoenician traders in tin. He had received a consignment of books upon philology and was settling down to develop this thesis when suddenly, to my sorrow and to his unfeigned delight, we found ourselves, even in that land of dreams, plunged into a problem at our very doors which was more intense, more engrossing, and infinitely more mysterious than any of those which had driven us from London."

At the conclusion of this case, Dr Watson is reassured to see Holmes resume his earlier interest. He notes: “we may. . .go back with a clear conscience to the study of those Chaldæan roots which are surely to be traced in the Cornish branch of the great Celtic speech”. Holmes’ interest in Cornish miracle plays, also evinced in the story, may also have been in quest of survivals of Chaldee lore. A (possibly apocryphal) monograph on Chaldæan Roots in the Ancient Cornish Language has since been attributed to Holmes.

There cannot have been many researchers into Chaldee roots in London in the early 1890s when Machen wrote his story, and Watson does not say that Holmes had newly discovered this interest, only (by implication) the Cornish connection. What is more likely then that Machen, an inveterate wanderer in the byways of London, and a connoisseur of eccentrics, had encountered Holmes and drawn him out on matters Chaldee? Perhaps in 1890 when Holmes had only a few cases at hand and may have taken himself off to pursue his studies incognito? Or just possibly, after the detective's Great Disappearance in 1891, some part of his time was spent not only in Tibet but also under another guise, as a poor scholar in washerwomen's rooms?
Posted by Mark V at 4:36 AM
Labels: Arthur Machen, Florence Farr, Mark Valentine, Sherlock Holmes
3 comments:

Roger AllenOctober 15, 2014 at 9:11 PM

"There cannot have been many researchers into Chaldee roots in London in the early 1890s when Machen wrote his story"
Researchers, no, quoters, yes.
The Chaldaean Oracles of Zoroaster by W. Wynn Westcott was a popular book among nineteenth century hermeticists and theosophists. Yeats used it in his poetry.
Reply
AnonymousOctober 19, 2014 at 9:00 PM

GRS Mead researched it and published a book. That's another public domain goodie.
Reply
Roger AllenNovember 5, 2014 at 8:33 AM

...and an unlikely user:
Philip Larkin speaks of "Chaldaean constellations" in Livings III in High Windows. It's an small dramatic monologue by an eighteenth-century academic.

That. Ruled.

Glad you liked it. Too far into the weeds sometimes, but the latest is good too:

Friday, March 6, 2015
R.I.P. J.B. Pick (1921-2015)
Though his passing six weeks ago seems to have been ignored by the London press, there are two fine obituaries of John Barclay Pick in the Scottish press, one in The Scotsman and the other in the Herald Scotsman.

Here I wish to praise two particular aspects of Pick's literary work. He was the first critic to champion the greatness of David Lindsay (1876-1945), and for his work on Lindsay we should all be very grateful. His first article on Lindsay appeared as long ago as 1951, and he had several important articles and introductions appear in the 1960s through the 1980s. I think Pick's last writing on Lindsay appeared in his story of the metaphysical tradition in Scottish fiction, The Great Shadow House (1993), which contains two chapters on Lindsay, and which takes its title from a variant of a passage in chapter eighteen of the manuscript of Lindsay's The Witch, referring to the universe as "the vast shadow-house of earth and sky" (later referred to by Lindsay more simply as "the great shadow-house").

Besides Pick's work on Lindsay, I'd like to call attention to one of his novels, published in the UK as The Fat Valley (1959) and in the US as The Last Valley (1960). Not only is it a fine and haunting novel set in the 1637-38 in southern Germany during the Thirty Years War, it is, as C.P. Snow suggested, "an excellent example of the historical novel used as a symbol of our present condition." It has only a very slight literary tinge of Lindsay, but it shares its roots in each writer's dissatisfaction with reality. It was also made into a fine film, under the US book title, starring Michael Caine and Omar Sharif, directed by James Clavell, and released in 1970. It's well worth watching, a fine adaptation of the novel.

I exchanged a few letters with Pick back in the early 1980s. He was very kind and helpful to me, and in response to one of my queries about other writers whom I should read (besides Lindsay and Neil Gunn, about whom Pick had also written), he recommended John Cowper Powys, beginning for me another enthusiasm. I've felt grateful to him for many years.
Posted by Douglas A. Anderson at 7:00 AM
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Jl48tUIUra0/VPjb0SDFGFI/AAAAAAAAA3I/sTGUH82p92w/s1600/Pick%2BThe%2BLast%2BValley.jpg

Also from this week's Wormwoodiana:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j4TeyCZU4bg/VPjRv7K-ctI/AAAAAAAAA2k/Bo6Jhqh2m_c/s1600/Ligotti.jpg
The striking cover by Serhiy Krykun

Thursday, March 5, 2015
Ligotti in Polish

Just a quick look here at the new translation of Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco into Polish from the publisher Okultura. Not only is there a new three-page Preface to the Polish Edition by Ligotti himself (translated by Mateusz Kopacz), but there is a fourteen page foreword by Wojciech Gunia and Slawomir Wielhorski and a very extensive Ligotti bibliography by Wielhorski.* Congratulations to all involved on this fine production!

*Note: Wielhorski also did an excellent interview with Ligotti that first appeared in Polish in 2012, and has now been collected in Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti (2014), edited by Matt Cardin. Weilhorski's interview, with an extra bonus answer at the end, also appears at Matt Cardin's blog, The Teeming Brain. Click here to see it.
(See blog version for this and other links, also table of contents for Polish edition of the Ligotti)
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2015/03/ligotti-in-polish.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

The second post was also by Douglas A. Anderson.

So should I read Lord of Light?

idk I'm still waiting for your report on report on probability a

Ha. Think I gave it an 'A' upthread. Liked the fact that it was basically a Nouveau Roman but written in English, and that there was a sense of humour behind the poker-faced repetition- laughed out loud at the point when one the observers says something to the effect that "the report is too detailed!" Finally, thought the bit about the painting was a good way of tying it all together. Think I read that that was added later.

Btw, just returned a few days ago to the Aldiss best-of story collection, Man In His Time, which I still have to finish.

to keep the xgau flames going, someone has to read wife of xgau's dystopian novel and report back:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Only-Ones-Carola-Dibbell/dp/1937512274

Ha, was wondering about that.

New Datlow anth, The Doll Collection. As described on this blog, looks like good variety of variations on the theme (scary dollness), and since it's not a Martin-Dozois, prob not 1,000 pages with muddy Martin slog as finale (does incl. a couple of the better writers from M-D's usual crew, like Carrie Vaughn)(also got Joyce Carol Oates etc)http://www.thirteenoclock.com.au/the-doll-collection-ed-ellen-datlow-review-by-mario-guslandi/

Used to read a lot of Karen Joy Fowler's stories in 80s-90s sf mags, and her 1991 full-length debut, Sarah Canary, might be about The Woman Who Fell To Earth, way back in a 19th Century Pacific Northwest backwoods Chinese railroad worker settlement. She's white, she doesn't talk, she's just passin' through and/or totally at home, none of which makes any sense. She has to be taken to a white settlement, and along the way she's a magnet for every other kind of misfit, which is most folks (and critters), when you get down to the available references. Chapters recalling good silent movie comedies and their influence on Beckett alternate with what seemed kinda lecture-y to me, but overall it worked a lot better than I expected.

2013's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselvesmakes an anomalous female the narrator, and though I'm really tired of first-person narratian, this also works (for the most part) better than expected. Mostly, she feels herself to be an anomaly, although she's learned to hide some of it, to play fairly well with others, after starting school in the valley of the uncanny, tagged by other kindergartners as a monkey girl, imperfectly mirroring human behavior, not quiiite getting it right. And this, she says, is because she was raised from infancy with a chimpanzee of the same age, whom she regards as her twin sister, her true mirror.
Her family is famous for this grand experiment, but can't be that, no, it's gotta be her own star weirdness that makes the other kids go speciesist on her; of course it doesn't help when she teaches them words like "estrus," and corrects them, like in pointing out that chimpanzees are apes, like us, they're not monkeys. So the kids infer that she would be okay with "ape girl," which does not help her acceptance-wise, and "an entire Sunday School class was taught against me" for the human-ape thing, she claims (the 70s in Bloomington, so maybe).

The lecture bits here are effectively deployed in context. For instance, the narrator, Rosemary, while pilled and drunk, drops science on the knucklehead boyfriend of Harlow, Rosemary's new monkey sister; Harlow wasn't raised that way, just has the monkey in her soul, as Steely Dan would say, but when they go swinging off into the trees together, tend to land in Collegetown jail.

The story begins in the middle, as I should have, but deals with the resurfacing trauma (once Rosemary gets away from home, from familiar shields) of having Fern, her chimpanzee twin, taken away in early childhood. Index cards from the history of science and of Rosemary's family get reshuffled, get their recombinant info re-figured in ways that add up---not too much time or space for meta-games here---but some readers get way different takes than I did (h'mm, I suppose Harlow *could* be a diversion; the animal liberation underground and alibis are part of the reshuffling, for sure).

Dr. Cooke, Rosemary and Fern's Dad, certainly seems like some profs I've known: he's equally dedicated to the principle of irrationality as prime mover in all primates, def. incl. Man, and to the rigors of science. The question of just what the hell he and his tribe were thinking/not-thinking when they brought it all back home, and actually "adopted" apes, is left a subject for further study, as Rosemary restlessly delves into the history of this mystery trend. Which I guess is over, right? The money got turned off, for these and other interspecies communications experiments (prob not enough CIA etc usefulness; Jon Ronson to thread).

Rosemary does mention one (only one) case that turned out relatively well: Washoe the chimp came into the care of Roger Fouts, the researcher who was the consultant for Greystoke, a movie which depicted ape behavior in a fascinating, seemingly plausible way, among the troop who raised Tarzan. (Although somehow, he has no prob with acting human either, it's not Tarzan In The Valley of the Uncanny.) Anyway, Fouts was the one who, back in the day, really got me trying to follow modern primate studies, especially communication experiments, but then the plug got pulled.