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

Mr Martin not happy:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/09/george-rr-martin-right-wing-broken-hugo-awards

That comic strip might be worth a gold star in daycarey. There's a pretty good action story by Jim Butcher in the Martin/Dozois anthology Dangerous Women, and it seems favorably disposed re women (although the young female detective is maybe minding the store for the series hero, currently dead). Too bad if he's being misrepresented by these folks. Not a big Martin fan (incl. degree of GoT reliance on basic diet of boobs 'n' blood), but his comments here are pertinent.

Not a big Martin fan (incl. degree of GoT reliance on basic diet of boobs 'n' blood), but his comments here are pertinent.

cosign

(1-sine ^2)

= cosign^2

(should have spelled the first one "sign" I guess)

Just saw Interstellar last night and didn't really like it and couldn't help thinking that Gateway, which I recently reread, did a much better job with similar material. Probably won't like the movie of that either though. Is this a deformation from reading sf, that you end up not liking the film variety much, holding it to the wrong standard. Or maybe there are plenty who just eat it up all the same. Only saw the second half, I should add, perhaps first half is better.

they're not really making a Gateway movie are they

I thought so. Or maybe a miniseries even. I believe I read about it on The Way The Future Blogs.

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2014/03/good-news-gateway-tv-series-in-the-works/

Re discussion Ligotti discussion upthread, I see in the new Penguin Classics catalogue that Ligotti, Ray Russell and Charles Beaumont are all getting book. Covers are pleasingly mental, esp the Beaumont:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/B00TY3ZQZI.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143107658.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143107763.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Glad you saved me the bother posting these, yes they are very good and refreshingly unclassy for Penguin.

There's some talk of a follow-up Ligotti book. That should make his work far more findable than ever.

Ligotti cover is by Chris Mars.

Wow the long awaited ligotti-replacements link has been forged

Pretty interesting podcast about the Hugo nominees here: http://pexlives.libsyn.com/shabcast-3

(xpost) lol. But will it prove to be as strong as the Jack Vance - Robert Palmer link, or R.A. Lafferty - Steely Dan?

I know Beaumont wrote for Star Trek but lol at "afterword by William Shatner"

glad to see those Russell and Beaumont volumes as well as the Ligotti, all those guys should be in print

Didn't know Beaumont wrote for Star Trek, but it goes with his other activity, and he may have written some of the Twilight Zones Shatner was in; anyway I'm sure Shatner was aware of him back then, since CB (and Richard Matheson) wrote several if not most of the best TZ scripts. A re-post, incl. a re-re-post, of our prev. Beaumont discussion:

What do you know? Charles Beaumont is getting his own Penguin Classics book too.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, January 31, 2015 8:36 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yay! From the old Rolling Science Fiction etc A book on my shelf twenty years before I read it: The Howling Man, short stories by Charles Beaumont. Title tale (later a Twilight Zone script, like several of these, most even better in the original) is the one about a traveler in bad weather, who stops at a monastery. Very hospitable to him, but why is that poor gentle man locked away? The traveler is increasingly troubled--he's also the first-person narrator, a nice, humble guy himself, which often means trouble up ahead, when a oh-so-non-literary, nice li'l narrator also has to convey the anxious spoon-feeding exposition and underscoring of the "literary"-as-fuck author. But *this* narrator, tortured by his conscience and his fear, his certainty, has obsessively drawn himself into hard-learned, self-taught eloquence, right from the beginning. How often does this happen?!
Beaumont was Hollywood king of the killer opening, though some of these come off too slick. And his sardonic-to-macabre humor , though often agreeable, even empathetic, could shade into something more repellent--misogyny, for instance: slick and shallow and sincere. Seems, according to William F Nolan's intro, that he came from some kind of boondocks gothic situation (orig name: Charles Nutt, a prodigy with sev. false starts before he made it, still youing, as a writer). A bit like Saki, H.H. Munro, whose sister confirmed that the aunts who raised them could be sadisict. Dunno about Nutt/Beaumont's alibi, but in any case, you could say the last laugh was on him: he died of Alzheimer's at age 38.
As Nolan tells it, he was a complex person, mercurial, but close and considerate to his wife, kids, and friends, with great enthusiasm beyond or along with the facility. I'd even like to read his damn car books! Also need to check out some of the b-movies he scripted, fairly well-known but not to me.

― dow, Thursday, August 23, 2012 10:29 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nice

― the late great, Thursday, August 23, 2012 1:51 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was just listening to a long Harlan Ellison interview and he namechecked Beaumont a couple times. Need to investigate...
---Elvis Telecom Sorry Elvis, my first time doing cutnpaste on Mac, but he prob posted that during the same week of Aug '12. Thanks Ward, I will check out Farmer.

― dow, Saturday, January 31, 2015 12:02 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The aforementioned Valancourt Book published a Charles Beaumont collection a little while back, The Hunger and Other Stories, which I considered getting.

― Number Nine Meme (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:03 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd expect any Beaumont collection to be a bit uneven, but worth reading (at the very least).

― dow, Saturday, January 31, 2015 9:23 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There can be a driving, even exploratory quality to his writing, along with the sardonic tendencies, an unusual combination, I think (maybe more unusual in fantasy than science fiction, in that era, anyway).

is the ligotti using the original texts or his revisions?

I'm sure it's revisions.

was nightmare factory orig or revised?

my first ligotti was carroll & graf grimscribe c 1995, obv that was orig texts

I don't know about Nightmare Factory. I might be wrong but I think revisions started coming with Shadow At The Bottom Of The World.

what was I thinking, Beaumont didn't write any Star Trek episodes ... his Shatner connection is The Intruder

The $6,000 paid by the recent documentary Charles Beaumont: The Twilight Zone’s Magic Man finally put it in the black.[6] Gotta see both of those! Description of the film is really appealing.

Just got this at the library shop:

Michael Moorcock's Legends From The End of Time

This thirteenth volume in Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion series, newly revised for its U.S. publication, collects probably the final "Legends from the End of Time," being further adventures of the Iron Orchid, the Duke of Queens, Lord Jagged of Carnaria, the Everlasting Concubine, Lord Mongrove, My Lady Charlotina, Bishop Castle, Werther de Goethe, Lord Shark, Doctor Volospion---time travelers Dafnish Armatuce and the appalling Miss Mavis Ming---as well as some unusual visitors, like Elric of Melnibone.

Introduction by Michael Moorcock

Pale Roses

White Stars

Ancient Shadows

Constant Fire

Elric At The End Of Time

299 pages hardback, first ed. 1999, White Wolf.

listed as WW12515.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pkpgg

Left Hand Of Darkness on the radio

Michael Moorcock's Legends From The End of Time

*love* this stuff - altho I haven't read the Elric one

xpost Wow, thanks koogs! Sure wish NPR would get into radio drama (get back to? Think they did some radio science fiction long ago)(the 70s PBS mini-series of Lathe of Heaven still shows up on YouTube)

I wanna read this---reviewed by Wall Street Journal's Tom Shippey:

Everyone has heard of Schrödinger’s Cat. There’s a cat in a closed box with a flask of cyanide, which has a 50-50 chance of being broken, depending on whether an atom happens to undergo radioactive decay. Until an observer opens the box and forces the system to resolve to a single state, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead—in “superposition.”
That’s just a thought-experiment, a way to connect an event on our scale with something so incomprehensibly sub-atomic it hardly matters, right? Wrong again, in David Walton’s engrossing and illuminating sci-fi thriller “Superposition” (Pyr, 304 pages, $17).
The trouble starts when Brian from the New Jersey Super-Collider turns up on his college friend Jacob’s doorstep in a state of terror. Brian is not quite a mad scientist, just believably unreliable and irresponsible. Not only has he realized that the universe is a quantum computer, he’s discovered some of it is sentient, and he’s made contact.
What he’s made contact with are “self-aware intelligences generated from the complexity of particle interaction on a large scale.” They promised Brian immortality, but now they see him as a threat. They first manifest as a “man with no eyes,” but Jacob’s friend Marek, a down-to-earth Romanian carpenter, uses his own folk-tale vocabulary to call them “varcolacs.”
Soon Brian is dead, in a locked-room mystery. Not much of a mystery to the police: The room can be unlocked only by fingerprints; the only two people with prints on file are the dead man and Jacob; and Jacob is found with the gun that shot Brian, firearm residue on his fingers, and Brian’s blood on his shoes. A complete no-brainer.
Except for quantum entanglement. Jacob and his whole family are in superposition, which means there are two of each of them (Brian was, too, until he “resolved” to being dead). So “Down-Spin” Jacob is on trial for murder while “Up-Spin” Jacob is still at large, and both are trying to figure out what happened.
How is this going to play in court, one may well wonder? Mr. Walton’s narrative keeps switching from the incomprehensible world of far-out science and demonic “varcolacs” to the familiar but tense world of courtroom battles. The scenes where scientists try to explain things to the defense lawyer, so he can try to convince the jury, go far beyond Schrödinger’s Cat.
At the same time, there’s a running contrast between the science and both Marek, who doesn’t “talk professor,” and Jacob’s tough South Philadelphia background. He escaped from it into science, but now it turns out useful. Who really did shoot Brian? A thriller full of hard-science explanations, with the two strands eventually “resolved”: This is the way sci-fi ought to be. Shouldn't say "sci-fi," but I think he's right. It's one way SF should be.)

Just started my first Jo Walton. Good so far!

Cool, which one?

Tooth and claw. Is it representative?

I've just read about her work here (my local library has Farthing):
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/walton_jo

For a second I thought you guys were talking about a Gene Wolfe book.

Tried to read the recent Hugo Winner, afraid I did not make much headway.

the second part of the bbc left hand of darkness should be up now. it's part of a a bigger le guin season, including something similar done for earthsea.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pkmyg

(bloody bbc pages that insist on loading a large swf player where a jpg would do)

Cool, thanks for keeping us current.

Jeff VanderMeer ‏@jeffvandermeer 2m2 minutes ago

While I've been writing Southern Reach science fiction, my dad's been fighting fire ants using poison frogs: http://entomologytoday.org/2014/12/02/compounds-from-poison-frogs-may-be-used-to-control-fire-ants/
https://entomologytoday.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/fire-ants2.jpg?w=618&h=396

Just read Algernon Blackwood's "Anicent Sorceries" last night. It starts off great with the beautifully evoked town and impressive description of ancient memories. But I felt he spolied it with constant reminders of how timid the main character was, how catlike the other characters are and being generally too long winded and repetitive. The big climax was unexpectedly cliched too but there is an interesting aspect added at the very end that complicates the whole thing.
Blackwood sure can write, when his bad habits aren't getting the better of him.

me and the boys did sci-fi creature paintings today.

mine

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xat1/v/t1.0-9/10915258_10153868984772137_7032079947527538038_n.jpg?oh=b372008d10ee2457b196c0c32572d71e&oe=55A130A0&__gda__=1436278370_1ceb361f9622d7649d280d4c7f01b7cb

rufus's

https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/11150832_10153868656372137_1472511509627354177_n.jpg?oh=f7d01a7a090634a92eb3b0b2a8ce1b85&oe=559D1633&__gda__=1440352086_5d7975d2380d7fd234ea1973e329ea47

cyrus's

https://scontent-atl.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/11159500_10153868433017137_3157729600342907999_n.jpg?oh=5336c96df7da660b8b2e1bda7154ddcc&oe=55A449E8

Nice, that first guy looks like he's got an owl tattoo with a really long beak.

Those are amazing. Y/all should do 50s paperback covers.

Especially since Rufus has invented his own language.

what is rufus' saying

Rufus's painting is great!

the only Jo Walton book I've read (many xposts) is Among Others, which is a sort of nostalgic companion piece to her tor.com essays: it's a semi-autobiographical diary of a 15-year-old book nerd, containing lots of capsule reviews/impressions of '70s sf novels + some fantasy elements. It's not bad, but as I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of old-school sf, most of the references went over my head. the 'novels mentioned' list is enormous, and I'm not even sure if it's complete.

Jeff Vandermeer thinking out loud about challenges of writing (and reading) fiction, def. incl SF, in the present and coming up (heating up) era. Really want to read this book he's reading, The Geological Imagination
http://electricliterature.com/the-slow-apocalypse-and-fiction/#.VTm2ejO284s.twitter
Re what he says about the wheel of life and what we may now understand better about other critters' understanding, got me thinking again about human x chimpanzee characters in Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, mentioned upthread.

The Geologic Imagination, that is.

John Crowley's 'Beasts' did a very good job at looking at the world from some non-human (esp. canine) viewpoints

gene wolfe invented pringles? i did not know that.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/sci-fis-difficult-genius

Whoa Wolfe profile in the nyer?

Godwhale by TJ Bass is a sequel but does it stand alone too?

His books contain all of the nasty genre tropes—space travel, robots, even dragons

oh fuck you