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

i don't even know what my taste is anymore. i just make it up as i go along.

have bought the emily st john mandel in paperback, now i must actually read it

thomp have you checked scott's thread for Area 51? Still haven't read it, but thread makes it look appealing, and author just won Nebula. I did read first chapter of Paolo B's The Water Knife, about water wars of the near future. Cool antihero leads a black ops raid, vs. plucky underdog with pocket protector. Did;t have any trouble setting it aside after that, but this opening seemed like okay pilot episode of near-future.
Speaking of TV, checked Wayward Pines on scott's rec, and he's right. it's not Twin Peaks or, so far, *too* much anything else I've seen before. Kinda slow and murmur-y at times, so I'll spoil it a little for impatient thread regulars: what if The Prisoner was given several kinds of unexpected responsibilities, even powers (and/or "powers"). and what if the Village was not just for renegade or (any other kind of) govt. tools---maybe?
Some of the citizens seem one-dimensional so far, but with little bits of anxiety, Stepford Family Values with promising sparks. Hope Davis does her blonde Morticia (as headmistress) thing, but also the little bits; Melissa Leo is underemployed Big Nurse, bumping against the glass ceiling; there'a secretary who looks and acts like she was snatched from Mad Men, so seems like a wild card, to whatever degree.
Based on a series of novels, hmm. Hope it doesn't go on too long. I'm way past Under The Dome.
Also like early eps of Humans and Mr. Robot.

"slow and murmury" stuff keeps happening, plots keep twisting, but going more for the vibe than DO YOU SEE--commendable, but little triggers for my prob with trance, drones, etc (tendency to zzzz or free associate)

dow i was v confused looking for an 'area 51' thread and then realised it was area x and i was disappointed

like i was looking at a non fiction 'area 51' book on amazon that came out this month and i was like, maybe this is it? maybe this is actually a fiction thing so committed to pretending to be a volume of trashy journalism that even its amazon description doesn't break kayfabe?

i have put two books in my amazon basket, probably never to order them

Yikes! So sorry! Also, I keep thinking of Wayward Pines as Whispering Pines, but relieved to see that I didn't post it as the latter, although that might be a better title, especially if they used the song (but too Twin Peaks/Coen-y maybe)

Flowers for Algernon for the first time.

a classic

Horace Gold arguing for a happy ending is very smdh

started this. it is beach reading season after all...

https://scontent-lga1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtp1/v/t1.0-9/11701078_10154070476932137_6157904405248351834_n.jpg?oh=cfc5662440c28dc6858be0038e21fe1b&oe=56135376

I've never read any longform Spinrad, altho Bug Jack Barron has been on my list forever...

Same here. I did like his Asimov's Mag book reviews---intricate straight talk about SF! Much appreciated pre-Web, not that it wouldn't be now. But then he went off on a tangent about Le Guin---okay at first, maybe, but just kept going and never did quite come back, seemed like. Hope I'm wrong, but I just started skipping his columns, and eventually my subscription lasped. But he did collect some of this material, and I'd like to check it again (got the book somewhere, mags too, prob).

2014 Shirley Jackson Awards Winners

— posted Sunday 12 July 2015 @ 9:15 am PDT

The 2014 Shirley Jackson Awards winners were announced on July 12, 2015 at Readercon 22 in Burlington MA. The awards are presented for outstanding achievement in horror, psychological suspense, and dark fantasy fiction.

NOVEL

Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals)

Broken Monsters, Lauren Beukes (Mulholland)
The Lesser Dead, Christopher Buehlman (Berkley)
The Unquiet House, Alison Littlewood (Jo Fletcher)
Bird Box, Josh Malerman (Ecco)
Confessions, Kanae Minato (Mulholland)

NOVELLA

We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory (Tachyon)

Ceremony of Flies, Kate Jonez (DarkFuse)
“The Mothers of Voorhisville”, Mary Rickert (Tor.com 4/30/14)
The Good Shabti, Robert Sharp (Jurassic London)
The Beauty, Aliya Whiteley (Unsung Stories)

NOVELETTE

“The End of the End of Everything”, Dale Bailey (Tor.com 4/23/14)

Office at Night, Kate Bernheimer & Laird Hunt (Coffee House)
“The Quiet Room”, V.H. Leslie (Shadows & Tall Trees 2014)
“The Husband Stitch”, Carmen Maria Machado (Granta #129)
“Newspaper Heart”, Stephen Volk (The Spectral Book of Horror Stories)
“The Devil in America”, Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com 4/2/14)

SHORT FICTION

“The Dogs Home”, Alison Littlewood (The Spectral Book of Horror Stories)

“Wendigo Nights”, Siobhan Carroll (Fearful Symmetries)
“Candy Girl”, Chikodili Emelumadu (Apex 11/14)
“Shay Corsham Worsted”, Garth Nix (Fearful Symmetries)
“The Fisher Queen”, Alyssa Wong (F&SF 5-6/14)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

Gifts for the One Who Comes After, Helen Marshall (ChiZine)

Unseaming, Mike Allen (Antimatter)
After the People Lights Have Gone Off, Stephen Graham Jones (Dark House)
They Do The Same Things Different There, Robert Shearman (ChiZine)
Burnt Black Suns, Simon Strantzas (Hippocampus)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

Fearful Symmetries, Ellen Datlow, ed. (ChiZine)

Letters to Lovecraft, Jesse Bullington, ed. (Stone Skin)
Shadows & Tall Trees 2014, Michael Kelly, ed. (Undertow/ChiZine)
The Children of Old Leech, Ross E. Lockhart & Justin Steele, ed. (Word Horde)
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, Mark Morris, ed. (Spectral)

- See more at:http://www.locusmag.com/News/2015/07/2014-shirley-jackson-awards-winners/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter#sthash.BYiK55OT.dpuf"> http://www.locusmag.com/News/2015/07/2014-shirley-jackson-awards-winners/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter#sthash.BYiK55OT.dpuf links etc

Tom Piccirilli passed away. Here's Nick Mamatas talking about him.
http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1927635.html

loving Malzberg's "Out From Ganymede" collection so far. Having primarily read his novels before (which can get tiresome, repetitive, and depressing in their monomania) and it definitely plays to his strengths to have things broken up into short chunks, and he acknowledges as much in the introduction. The format allows him to set up the premise, explore the story's central idea, and make the most of his sharp prose before wearing out his welcome.

Interested to know what is in that collection.

Contents:

Out from Ganymede
November 22, 1963
Still-Life
The Conquest of Mars
Some Notes Toward a Useable Past
Linkage
The Union Forever
Yearbook
Inter Alia
Allowances
The Helmet
Breaking In
Pater Familias (with Kris Neville)
Causation
The Art of Fiction
A Short Religious Novel
Report of the Defense
Notes for a Novel About the First Ship Ever to Venus
Beyond Sleep
The Interceptor
Agony Column
The Sense of the Fire

a lot of these are *very* short - like 10 pages. I hadn't read any of them before. I have a different collection ("The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg", a laughably generic and inappropriate title - world-building is not his thing) which I think covers a later period and was not quite as engaging.

can we lol at this cover:
https://i1.wp.com/www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/e/ed/THMNZBRG481975.jpg

Lol

i got the coyote trilogy by allen steele. he lives near me and comes in my store sometimes with his dog so i figure i should try and support local SF. also got his book A King Of Infinite Space.

got two ace doubles today too. delany jewels of aptor/james white second ending and philip jose farmer twofer of cache from outer space/the celestial blueprint.

AND i splurged and got ancillary sword/ancillary justice by ann leckie. just trying to stay a little bit current. they look like books i would enjoy.

also, cyrus was very excited to get the new book by the ready player one guy. he just finished ready player one and he says its his favorite book.

just looked at the RP1 wiki and ... I can't get with that, I don't think. and of course now Spielberg is making a movie of it.

Still-Life

One of my favorite stories, by anyone, ever.

I dunno if it's better than the v similar and much longer "Beyond Apollo" but it's certainly more concise

Seems like most of his novels have a corresponding short story version.

from the fix-up school of noveling

B-b-but does he stitch together multiple stories or just expand them one at a time?

ha that's hard to say given how much he re-used certain themes and situations (JFK assassination, inscrutable but near-omniscient aliens interfering with schmoes, crazed astronauts, etc.). He had a bunch of stories about disturbed astronauts and the futility of the space program, for example, which varied in certain ways but it would probably not have been hard for him to just string a bunch of them together and change some minor details here and there to keep them consistent.

I love fixup novels

We should do a greatest fixup novel poll

not exactly on topic but cool: https://twitter.com/videodrew/status/622205026316984320

I love fixup novels

We should do a greatest fixup novel poll

Dying earth bro

That too, but haven't finished reading the first time

Looks like that is the case with a lot of the great fix ups, actually

"The 2014 Shirley Jackson Awards winners were announced on July 12, 2015 at Readercon 22 in Burlington MA."

damn, i didn't even know about this thing. it's up the road a piece from me. i've done record shows in burlington. i could hang out with chip delany.

burlington is kinda like an interdimensional void in some ways. if you aren't from there you probably don't know its there and there is nothing there and nothing near there.

Seems like WeirdFictionReview is dying down quite a bit. I hope it's going to stick around because in previous years it was amazing.

At the omphalos of steampunk right now- the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

http://www.clickhole.com/quiz/how-many-these-classic-sci-fi-novels-have-you-read-2734

No Solar Shoe Salesman, no credibility

poll

Her Smoke Rose up Forever: a heady cocktail of love and misery, sex and death. Stellar stuff, pretty much, a couple of misfires aside; not necessarily recommended for those trying to avoid encouraging their natural tendencies towards misanthropy, misandry and a keen sense of futility.

Kim Stanley Robinson's new one, Aurora, which was very entertaining: slightly odd authorial voice explained by the book being written by an AI learning to to be conscious and to write -- I really liked it, but if you don't like KSR this one won't change your mind

Louisa Hall: Speak -- a David-Mitchell-nested-narratives story about the creation of AI, which had lots of good bits, but didn't entirely work for me; the 5 layers of story are too carefully, literarily intertwined and cross-referential, and some stuff atributed to Alan Turing is a bit on the nose (such as when talking about social mores, he talks about how awful it is to "break codes", or the way one shortish made-up letter will just happen to reference machine intelligence, Snow White, his homosexuality, code-breaking, and more)

Reading the grauniad sf round up and we have 'a masterpiece', a 'tour de force', 'a gripping read', a book with a 'brilliant creation' of a character and a 'brilliant twist', 'a stunning double finale', and one superlative free review. Maybe things are that great in current sf but i somehow doubt that if I were to enthusiastically pick all these up I wouldn't be disappointed two or three or four times over. Tempted to give at least one a go though, maybe the tour de force.

(In order: Chrid Beckett, Mother of Eden; Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; Stephen Palmer, Beautiful Intelligence; Ian Sales, All That Outer Space Allows; SL Grey, Under Ground; and Alex Lamb, Roboteer. I'd discount the first, third and last for genre considerations, and the last for not being superlative.)

Been reading a lot of the awards/puppy controversy on Black Gate blog. Initially I wanted to avoid it because I find most outrages really boring and annoying but I've really enjoyed reading about this one, though I still don't completely understand the whole situation. Very refreshing to see different sides of the argument discussing things civilly in the comments thread.
But really taken aback by some of the views of the most conservative "puppy" writers, like "is this a joke, are you really saying these things that would have sounded nuts to many people several decades ago and definitely sound nuts to most conservatives today?", I had no idea there were still fairly popular writers quite like that.

James, a friend of mine recommended the KSR just last night. I have read a few short stories that I liked but haven't made it through any of his big novels yet, daunted by the length, perhaps will try this one.

ledge, that grauniad roundup is little too conspicuously upbeat, a classic 'win-win' situation. Hope springs eternal though. As you may know that Ian Sales book is the fourth in a series which is probably best read in order.

Thanks for that blog reference, Robert, although I too have steered clear of these controversies thus far,

You neglected to pull this cherce nugget from the graunaid, ledge;

It’s JG Ballard meets Agatha Christie, with a soupcon of Patricia Highsmith thrown in.

Well that Guardian reviewer is an SF writer so might not be that reliable. It's not unheard of for them to be totally honest but more often they are very complimentary.