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

The blog Marooned Off Vesta has been doing monthly roundups of science fiction short stories this year.
He's trying to read every SF story that gets published online each month and posts short assessments and links to his favorites.

http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.no/search/label/short%20fiction%20recommendations

This is making me consider buying an e-reader.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/business/media/science-fiction-writer-signs-a-3-4-million-deal.html

As noted in the obituary thread, Tanith Lee passed away.

There's a writer I'm really curious about and have no clue where to start.

I haven't read them yet (only a short story that impressed the hell out of me) but Secret Books Of Paradys (easy to find in an omnibus book) and the Flat Earth series (I got the two omnibuses of that but there's ebooks of it) are what she was best known for. There's a 2 volume Select Stories collection too.

Flat Earth was going to get another two books but I don't know if she had finished them. A few years ago she said she was having trouble selling a few finished books but I think Storm Constantine might have changed that because she seemed to be publishing as much Tanith as she could. But she did have loads of books recently and she was constantly featured in horror and fantasy anthologies.

Recently updated entry, lotta links down in here too:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/lee_tanith
I read this and went straightaway to grab several that had been on my local library's shelves for years, but they had suddenly vanished. None left in catalog, in the sell-off shop, nada.

RIP

Dreams of Dark and Light seems to be the only comprehensive collection of Tanith Lee's early stories, but it's OOP and is selling for crazy money on Amazon. the only book I've read by her is The Book of the Damned, the first volume of her Secret books of Paradys — gothic novellas set in a fictionalized Paris, kind of similar to Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen in the way it uses multiple narratives set in various time periods to show how a city can impress itself on the human psyche (and vice versa). parts of it were too melodramatic and 'erotic' for my taste, but I'd recommend it. her Flat Earth stories might also be a good introduction, but idk.

uh xpost

Probably selling for high prices because it's an Arkham House book. But considering it's over 500 pages and the original price was $21.95 in the mid 80s, $35 aint bad at all for the cheapest copy.

anything that sells for more than $15 used is 'crazy money' by my own frugal standards. but apparently it was a limited edition of 3,957 copies (is that typical for Arkham House?) so yeah, I guess $35 isn't too bad considering.

Three volumes of Lord Dunsany's Lost Tales---intriguing; I really need to read more of his stuff:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2015/05/dunsanys-lost-tales.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

ok, $175.00 for a chapbook is definitely crazy money. judging by some of the titles, a lot of these stories are probably non-fantastic. with all this revived interest in Dunsany, hopefully someone will publish an affordable collection of his late-career realistic fiction. I really enjoyed his novel The Curse of the Wise Woman (basically a memoir of his early life in Ireland, with some fantasy elements mixed in) and I'd like to read more Dunsany in that vein. I'm not really a fan of his early whimsical wonder tales, but his postwar novels The Charwoman's Shadow, The Curse of the Wise Woman, and of course The King of Elfland's Daughter are all excellent.

Obituaries with comments highlighting some of the favourite books.

Here, sorry
http://io9.com/tanith-lee-was-an-indispensible-fantasy-author-1707086691
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/26/fantasy-and-horror-writer-tanith-lee-dies-aged-67

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2015/02/exclusive-behold-the-table-of-contents-for-sisters-of-the-revolution-edited-by-ann-and-jeff-vandermeer/

Didn't realise this was out in two months.

Looking at the Vandermeers output there is also a pirate anthology.

tip: if you google hard enough, you can find an unauthorized, 3500-page-long, immaculately copy-edited etext of R.A. Lafferty's short stories. it claims to be a complete collection, and it includes about 50 uncollected stories as well as tables of contents corresponding to previously published anthologies (Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, etc.). given the general unavailability of Lafferty's work, I feel only a tiny bit guilty for downloading it.

heck, even wikipedia links to it, so why not:

https://sites.google.com/site/thebooksofsand/the-man-who-talled-tales---r-a-lafferty

Holy cats!

I actually got my first ereader years back because of lafferty -- because I couldn't find an affordable copy of nine hundred grandmothers anywhere but came across a pdf online.

B-b-but then you will deprive yourself of the fun of chasing down old library copies of such anthologies as In The Wake of Man, Four Futures and Universe 7, and aggravating your dust allergies therewith!

Forgot A Day In The Life, ed. by Gardner Dozois.

annoying ", and" up there should have used different word.

wow that Lafferty thing is nuts. what is the deal with his estate anyway? my coworker made some comment that he had idly looked into how much it would cost to purchase the entire estate.

finished "Lord of Light" - pretty good, what else should I check out by Zelazny? (only other thing I've read is Deus Irae). LoL kind of a rambling, disjointed series of battles and exchanges of brief dialogue with some mellifluous prose thrown in here or there to give it the proper religious/spiritual trappings. I can see why Gaiman (whose quotes are all over the edition I read) loves it, it has the same kind of adolescent-playing-with-cosmic-dolls approach that he so often likes to indulge in. "those wacky gods, they're just like US!" Didn't feel particularly profound or groundbreaking, just a solid yarn. But would read more if there's other/better stuff out there.

By chance I am also dipping my toe into zelazny right now-- the three novella fixup novel My Name Is Legion. Dug the first story, just started the second. Enjoying the sort of shaggy hipster almost 70s Marvel tone.

I don't have an ereader, what should I use to open this Lafferty in epub format? Windows did a search, came up with Free Editor and a couple of others.

Calibre, or there should be a free desktop version of the Nook app

shaggy hipster almost 70s Marvel tone

haha yeah Lord of Light reads like it could've been written by Englehart or Gerber

what is the deal with his estate anyway? my coworker made some comment that he had idly looked into how much it would cost to purchase the entire estate.

apparently the Locus Foundation bought his estate in 2011 for $70,000 and a profit-sharing agreement. a Lafferty fansite says this:

Today (2013), all of these books are unexplicably out of print, all over the world. Neil Gaiman and Locus Press, who recently have bought the rights to Lafferty's estate, have planned the launching of a bunch of new editions in 2014, the year of the centenial of the birth of 'the cranky old man from Tulsa'.

but obviously the anniversary came and went without any publications

I wonder what's going on with Robert Sheckley's estate, because it seems like a lot of his pre-1964 works have lapsed into the public domain (judging by their availability on project gutenberg et al.). though I guess it's possible that was a terrible Lovecraftian businessman and he simply didn't bother to renew the copyrights during his lifetime.

*that he was

Centipede published two collections in 2013 and January this year but as with most of their books, they were crazy expensive.

Of Lafferty that is.

Re: Zelazny. I usually just get the most complete omnibus of anything. Chronicles Of Amber has the first 5 books but Great Book Of Amber has 10 books. But many reviewers say the latter five are very poor and kind of a different story from the first five.

I previously quite enjoyed Walter De La Mare's "Seaton's Aunt", it had an interesting strangeness but found "Out Of The Deep" to be a real pain in the ass. It was only written (or published at least) a year later but it's a totally different style. That sort of Henry James thing where the teensiest things are obsessed over. I'm going to be wary of this guy now.

Fizzles touted him in another thread once. I have his novel Henry Brocken on my reader and am still looking forward to checking it out

He's supposed to be a very good poet.

sumatra reader is v. lightweight and will open epub/mobi (for windows)

calibre is pretty awesome but it's way overkill if you're just looking at one ebook

There is a Zelazny collection called The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth which seems to have a good selection of some of his most famous stories, including the title one and "A Rose For Ecclesiastes." Available as an ebook pretty cheap.

In theory would read the first of those Amber books to see what they are all about, but don't want to contend with doorstop omnibus of diminishing returns and limited portability.

Thanks guys, sumatra's doing fine, and these pages look nice, not some crude scan; I'll try Calibre too, now that I'm finally inclined to try downloads from the local library.

Hey, just was starting a book by Gene Wolfe, who I have resisted for years, and noticed a reference to that Zelazny story. Prior to that I read something else by GW, "Seven American Nights," which I find interesting but slightly incomprehensible until I turned to the intranetz for explication.

I'm rereading Farmer's Riverworld series, about 35 years after the first time. I still love the central concept, but god, PJF could be a dull prose stylist. Some of this stuff reads like an episode of Dragnet, people expositioning at each other for dozens of pages at a time.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-story-as-database

what up nerds, is this any good

I dunno but the quote fails the random read test: ten ways of splaining how "she was herself, but different"---oh wowwwww man. And the description seems as deja vu as her lives, and I spend enough time dealing with computers, don't want no book with cyber-garble and error messages.

Nebula Awards presentations livestream---some people are still having trouble with it, but I'm getting it on Chrome (I just now checked back in, after delay):
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nebulaawards

third imperial radish book, Ancillary Mercy, keeps popping up in my recommendations. she doesn't hang about. not out until october though.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0356502422

i'm about 130 pages into the third of Reynolds' Poseidon's Children series but i'm not sure i'm enjoying it, mostly because i can't really remember what happened in part 2. (it also bugs me that the first 3 covers are all in different styles)

he (Reynolds) also has another book out, Slow Bullets, but it seemed expensive for the length so i haven't bought it (yet)

first Poseidon's Children was really boring. I guess it doesn't pick up

it's more that there was a 18 month gap and about 60 other books between the 2nd and 3rd.

the second had more spaceships in it than the first.

Finished Cixin Lui's The Three Body Problem. Starts off as a decently compelling whodunnit (and whodunwhat) but gets bogged down with infodumps in the second half and ends with a ridiculous and ridiculously rushed conclusion. Can't say I'll be looking forward to the sequels.

Now I need to get on with the list of ten I promised to read this year. Only managed three so far.