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

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.

Let's have the list now please.

i enjoyed three body, i liked the oddness of it. i don't know if it was conceived as part 1 of a trilogy but i liked where it ended and i am not sure i want any more of a resolution.

shaggy hipster almost 70s Marvel tone

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

Zelazny was a big deal in SF/fantasy at one point, wasn't he? Can easily imagine his slangy style striking a chord with young comic book writers of the late 60s/early 70s. I know Neil Gaiman is a big Zelazny stan, and the Amber books definitely feel like the biggest influence on Sandman - some of the points of similarity are p striking.

Yeah, I always figured that zelazny and moorcock were real influences on the second wave of marvel writers.

Yes and leave us not forget the comics background of Alfie Bester.
Now reading God Emperor of Dune. After figuring out how to keep a lid on the helpful and torturous voices of ancestral memories and prescient options, times at least a couple of galaxies, for 3,500 years, the GE is understandably getting bored out of his skull. He doesn't really have a skull anymore, but it's becoming a throbbing phantom part, like some other parts, when He greets the unpretentious, gracefully sincere young Ambassador of the IXians. The IXians make all the implements He's becoming dependent on---including, lately, the de facto computers, officially still banned in the wake of the ancient Butlerian Jihad ("Thou Shalt Make No Machine In The Image of Man"). Now He realizes that the comely Ambassador is bred to be the most exquisite, diabolical IXian creation yet. Yet, so bored is He,that He welcomes the unexpectedly fresh bit of torture, adding something new to the cat and mouse game he always plays with opponents.
Still awaiting that list, ledge.

i enjoyed three body, i liked the oddness of it.

It was indeed odd. it started off like a hardboiled thriller, then became a history textbook, and finished off like flatland or the even weirder lesabendio. but i hated flatland and couldn't finish lesabendio.

for those keen on tracking my reading ambitions

is second imperial radish book worth reading. enjoyed the first but didn't love it

Question cosigned.

Thinking about the three body problem, I did enjoy the videogame sections. Although for a fictional game it seemed strangely lacking in any kind of actual gameplay, it did provide some memorable images - e.g. a mediaeval knight on horseback and on fire, galloping in from the horizon shouting "dehydrate! dehydrate!" as an enormous burning sun rises in the sky behind him.

Have just actually properly finished the book - author's and translator's notes... and a brief preview of the second instalment. I couldn't help but be slightly intrigued.

what do u guys think of ramez naam?

the second radish book is more like a mystery (albeit not a terribly mysterious one) set in said universe

it's okay, but weirdly low-stakes compared to the first and doesn't seem to move the larger plot forward much at all iirc

xp: Kade activates the Bruce Lee program and also fights the ERD soldiers. Wats, watching the entire scene on the roof, also breaks through the ceiling to join the fight. Wats is killed. The ERD detonate explosions in the skulls of the soldiers. Sam and Kade escape.

idk doesn't really sound like my cup of tea.

yeah that sounds kinda wack. i heard good things about it though, might check it out

http://www.avclub.com/article/bradley-cooper-adapting-dan-simmons-epic-hyperion--220725

show for syfy

Cooper will be executive producing the series, along with Graham King and his Hangover director Todd Phillips. Itamar Moses (Boardwalk Empire) will write the screenplay.

this seems moderate to high on the wtf scale

talk of Cooper directing a Hyperion movie has been around for a few years

I guess he just really likes it

wow!

We don't get syfy in australia, but the impression i get is that it's usually pretty low-rent stuff, right?

Anyone see that Penguin box set of 100 postcards of old SF cover art? Not sure if this was mentioned already.

no, i hadn't.

a few pictures here. only 4, but that's 3 more than on penguin's site
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1405920734/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl

ooh!

did PKD write the game-players of titan in 24 hours? just a guess. man, i gotta find some of that speed stuff.

when worlds don't collide---SF fans,LGB(and maybe proto-T?)activists in the 50s:http://www.laassubject.org/index.php/monomania/kepner

fascinating

btw:
In September 1923, Kepner was found wrapped in newspaper under an oleander bush in Galveston, Texas

Since I'd totally forgotten the good ol thread you reposted that on or to, I'll recip as note to self:
Science Fiction and Teh Gays

We don't get syfy in australia, but the impression i get is that it's usually pretty low-rent stuff, right?

Varies tremendously. At one end of the scale you have Battlestar Galactica, at the other Olympus.

They're also producing a series based on Corey's Expanse novels which lands later this year.

The final Apollo Quartet book, All That Outer Space Allows really delivered, successfully tying together the various, um, microworlds, he was investigating in a meaningful way. Thanks to James Morrison for alerting me to its existence.

Will have to check that, haven't come across the AQ books. Haven't read the xpost Expanse series either, but Daniel Abraham, who is 1/2 of James SA Corey, wrote a really good, unusual story I talked about upthread; it's in the Rogues anthology. There's a Corey story in another Dozois & Martin collection I mentioned, Old Mars.

Got pulled into an unexpectedly sustained final reading of God Emperor of Dune. As taught by Children of, I made like a sandworm and tunneled past the GE's manipulative philosophical bullshit, to the part(s) of the Golden Path made of plot twists (incl. turns of POV and character development). Good enough (for this Dune junkie) that way, but I'm worried that dingleberry pearls of wisdumb will be taken at face value in Heretics of Dune, by radical reactionaries vs. the post-GE establishment (though if that happens, I'm sure the author will demonstrate error of their ways, at some length).

By Jove---
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2015/06/soliloquy-for-pan_13.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

Quite by chance I took At Swim-Two-Birds (don't really know what it was doing on the all time spec fic poll. but there it was) and the free Lafferty omnibus mentioned upthread away for the weekend. Disconcertingly un-disconcerting switching between them - O'Brien prefers to hypnotise you with interminable blarney where Lafferty is happier to wrap things up with the corniest of punchlines, but otherwise they are more than comfortable bedfellows. This from Lafferty I thought particularly Flannish:

The basement room smelled of apples and ink. The editor was there as always, filling the room with his presence. He was a heavy man-image, full of left-handed wisdom and piquant expression. The editor always had time for a like-minded visitor, and George Florin came in as to a room in his own home and sat down in a deep chair in front of the "cracker barrel." "It's been a rough day," Florin said. "That makes it doubly good to see you."

"Except that you do not see me at all," the editor said. "But it is quite a presence that I project -- all the kindly cliches rolled into one. All the prime comments commented so perfectly once again. The man I took for a model was Don Marquis, though he was a columnist and not an editor in that earlier century. He kept, as you might not recall, a typewriting cockroach in his desk drawer. I keep a homunculus, a tiny manthing who comes out at night and dances over the machinery inserting his comments. He is one of our most popular characters, and I give him some good lines."

finished game-players of titan. i didn't like that book at all. so dumb. reading this now:

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/17670_10154003985842137_1963265635912919803_n.jpg?oh=8f3187c8e11301baf927219f5547b735&oe=55EFB74D

also, saw Tomorrowland with Cyrus yesterday and really enjoyed that. it looked so nice and had such great detail. also, that speech at the end by House M.D. hit pretty close to home. about how people just want to watch end of the world movies and zombie shows instead of trying to make the world better because they have given up and figure there is nothing they can do because we are doomed. he was speeching at ME! oh well.

Richard Middleton's "The Ghost Ship" was quite fun. A short little whimsical tale of a ghost ship landing on a farm and all the local ghosts go on the ship to get drunk.

Lovecraft's "Dunwich Horror" starts out very well but I found the second half very boring, going through the motions and far longer than it needed to be. I think the intent was to make it similar to a detailed report (as he often does) but there was just too many inessential details and repetitions. All the dialogue with the heavy accents didn't help either.
The desciprtions of Wilbur Whateley and the countryside were probably the best things in the story.

So that finishes Great Tales Of Terror & Supernatural (after way too long of not touching it). I think that much like Dark Descent, only one third of the stories are good enough to be in a big doorstopper book like this. The rest are decent, okay or just kinda interesting. One or two I thought were actually pretty bad.

in the middle of "the goblin emperor" and enjoying it a lot. riyl court intrigue

reread 'this is the way the world ends'; still good

Ooh that looks cool. Never heard of her (in her own name or her pen name). Thanks!

Xpost

https://www.blackgate.com/2014/03/25/i-invoke-the-voidal-oblivion-hand-by-adrian-cole/

This Voidal series by Adrian Cole sounds nutty and right up my street.

The cover art of Baen books are really perplexing. There's always been bad fantasy cover art but why do their books so often look like bad fantasy cover art from over 25 years ago?