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

Gloria Anzaldúa deployed the Nahua word/concept nepantla to describe the space and experience of in-between-ness. Author Daniel Jose Older has built on this work in his fiction to frame Brooklyn as a multicultural frontera capable not only of resisting the gentrifying monoculture of whiteness but also of defying its associated ontological boundaries, including such binaries as life/death, human/inhuman, and natural/unnatural. How far can The Weird run with this model, and can it do so without co-opting the roots of Anzaldúa’s thought in mestizaje, queerness, and feminism?

Is it fair that I think this sounds really daft?

RIP Gardner Dozois

Finished We and followed it up with a clockwork orange and Jack London's Iron Heel which is about the rise of capitalism throughout the early 20th century. It's funny because it talks about the turmoil between 1918 and the 1930s, wars with Germany and Japan, lots of things like that, reads like it's an alternate history, but it was written in 1908...

There was a lot of fiction predicting war with Germany in the early years of the 20th century - the country was emerging as a new military power and there was a lot of anxiety associated with that. Dunno if it's quite the same for Japan, but in <i>A Passage To India</i> Forster has his Indian characters make mention of India wanting to attain a place amongst the great nations like Japan had, so maybe?

japan also very militaristic at the time, was at war with china on and off for years. samurai culture, partly.

Good overview of speculative fiction re wars to come, beginning (here) in the 18th Century: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/future_war Haven't read much of this, except The Iron Heel and Wells' "The Land Ironclads," which tracked mobile slaughter though a coming Great War (published in 1903). Especially effective from the viewpoint of a middle-aged-seeming correspondent, unthrilled eyewitness to history in the making and unmaking---think this is the whole thing, as best I remember: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0604041h.html

Today’s featured Wikipedia article is about Fantasy Book, which was mostly notable for the initial publication of “Scanners Live In Vain.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Book?wprov=sfti1

Awes would of course like to have Scanners issue w Jack Gaughan cover (his first sale, and Cordwainer's too, under that name)---also, being a McNutt/Beaumont nut, this 'un:
Crawford still had in inventory stories he had acquired for Marvel Tales over a decade earlier, and "People of the Crater" by Andre Norton (under the pseudonym Andrew North), which appeared in the first issue, was one of these.[3] There was also a story by A. E. van Vogt, "The Cataaaa",[7] and Robert Bloch's "The Black Lotus",[8] which had first appeared in 1935 in Unusual Stories.[9] Crawford's budget limited the quality of the artwork he could acquire—he sometimes was unable to pay for art—but he managed to get Charles McNutt, later better known as Charles Beaumont, to contribute interior illustrations to the first issue.[3] Wendy Bousfield, a science fiction historian, describes his work as "strikingly original",[10] and considers the first issue to be the most artistically attractive of the whole run.[10]
SFEncyclopedia sez "People of the Crater" was Norton's first published SF story, and When it ceased publication it left incomplete a Murray Leinster serial, "Journey to Barkut"; this later appeared in full in Startling Stories (January 1952), and in book form as Gateway to Elsewhere (1954). [MJE/PN]
The name seems slightly familiar, though maybe because it was used again in the 80s:
2. US Semiprozine, letter-size, with 23 issues October 1981 to March 1987, edited by Dennis Mallonee and Nick Smith from Pasadena, California, bimonthly, then quarterly from #4. Unlike the first Fantasy Book, to which it was unconnected, this published almost no sf, concentrating on fantasy and horror. Its authors included R A Lafferty, Alan Dean Foster, Harry Turtledove (as Eric G Iverson) and Ian Watson. Circulation seldom rose above 3000. [MJE/PN/MA]

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy - Weird Tales Of A Bangalorean

A short collection of connected stories and poems that work as one larger piece; involving people who encounter the slums, ghosts, overlapping realities and there's a fair amount of music references (including a funny dig at Frank Zappa when he's not on his best form).

Taken individually I thought some of the stories needed something a bit more but they're always well written and interesting. The last story brings everything together really nicely.
I'm looking forward to Satyamurthy's newest collection, if I can get it in time.

There's quite a few typos and errors. This was a small press book but now it's on amazon as print on demand.

Also read Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo" and I actually much prefer it to "The Willows". The dialogue regarding feet of fire and fiery heights seemed a problem at first but it became gradually spookier when the oddness of the speech is further pressed on.

Oh my feet of fire! These fiery heights!

a bit too "oh my ears and whiskers" for my liking.

If only Blackwood had recorded audio for all his best works. He had a great voice for it.

First link shows Satyamurthy in his doom metal band and with his wife in the animal shelter they run. Second link goes deeper into metal, veganism and running an animal shelter.
https://31hathoctober.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/oct21-2016/
https://strivingwithsystems.com/2014/12/25/interview-with-jayaprakash-satyamurthy/

He seems like a thoroughly good person.

Had never heard of him, but all that makes me very happy.

He liked your image of the Lovecraft pastiche writer on twitter.

Lol ok, weird

Aickman's "The Trains" is really good, the fourth and best story I've read by him, it's very vivid. Never been sure if I wanted to go for his collections, I've mostly been content to find him in anthologies.

Elizabeth Gaskell's "Old Nurse's Story" is really good. Very cute and with clichés done quite satisfyingly.

Tanith Lee
-"Cain" twincest, with a ghost twin.
- "Where Does The Town Go At Night?" seemed to be getting quite treacly then goes into very bluntly portrayed shitty people.
- "Lady Of The Shallot House" hardly anything happens but it still feels quite full to me.

Those Lee stories sound good, where did you read them?

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (series editor John Joseph Adams, guest ed. Joe Hill) seems more uneven than the volume guest edited by Karen Joy Fowler, and I already knew two of the
best, Karen Russell's "The Bad Graft"--which shows up early and proves a very tough act to follow, also to open for---and Kelly Link's "I Can See Right Through You" (from her most recent collection, Get In Trouble, which I carried on about upthread.
Also, Link's story added to the initial misgivings I had about several others here: they make the best, or at least end up justifying, the use of tired tropes, but---can't we just go on to something else? Nevertheless, some of them share a conscious theme of tropes getting older, like Link's iconic demon lover and his acolyte--who have proved to be cinematic one-hit wonders, living on and on in pop culture afterlife, especially tabloids, reality shows, b-movies. A little too much familiar snark and other nudge-nudge here, but it builds, it gets scary, and the demon lover's bleak, noxious POV, bleary and clear-eyed between compulsive brown-outs, proved to be a bit contagious here.
Cute humans get older and set aside for a while, in Alaya Dawn Johnson's "A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i" (incl. real vampires, still sufficiently cinematic of course) and Kelly Sandoval's "The Ones The Took Before" (aliens with a taste for girly singer-songwriters of Portland).
Kids are exploited by other humans, ones with cybervampiric (bandwidth-ravenous) needs, in "We Are The Cloud, by Sam J. Miller, whose artistry shows a bit more than his experience as a sharp-eyed community organizer disturbingly tells---misgivings returned at the very end, even before I read his notes: he thinks of this as a "supervillain origin story"---but what the hell, Bester's comic book influences served him well at his peak, and okay you got me Sam J. Especially since the ending is mainly presented as but one of several attractive options in a burgeoning mind, even though it's the one seized on in there for the moment (I'd rather think of it as a delusion, and I can if I don't think too much about hos Sam J. thinks about it).
Endings are more of a problem in several other stories, just the tacked-on happy endings, often completely non-seq, except sometimes it's understandable that the author and many readers, incl. me, want the protagonists to have happy endings--especially in trans author A. Merc Rustad's "How To Become A Robot in 12 Easy Steps"--no, the organic unit tagged as a girl named Tesla doesn't get to become out as a robot, but---still, that one makes for a fairly satisfying finale, via the precise, funny, sad, eerie, increasingly desperate voice of the narrator.
Also there are a few that come off more as promising pitches: here's a couple scenes, then yadda-yadda plot summary, then another scene---but maybe Netflix will make something of those.
Oh and speaking of descendants of Bester---she could be maybe a grandniece,with an indirectly related gift for imagery as fuel for drive---here's Russell's "The Bad Graft" (she's got several others on here too):
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/09/the-bad-graft

Oh yeah, and my big discovery here was Adam-Troy Castro (apparently a popular YA author), whose "The Thing About Shapes To Come" is about a generation, an epidemic to some, of shape-children, big warm cubes getting bigger, for instance, and those golf-ball types, in a variety of colors, who suddenly start bouncing around all over the place, all over the world---the cubes get called "squares, " then "s-words"--but there are some loyal, loving parents in here too. Very much like a Rudy Rucker story with more emotions, and I'll take it over s-word selections in this vol.

Those Tanith stories were from Tempting The Gods. It's the only collection I've read by her so far but Tanith By Choice is probably a better entry point. Her Arkham House collection Dreams Of Shadows And Light was quite celebrated but hard to find at a reasonable price (unless Gollancz have an ebook version). Tempting The Gods is subtitled Selected Stories but I think that's misleading, they were probably just stories that hadn't been collected yet (with a few exceptions).

The collection I have by her (pdf) is Nightshades

i just bought a gollancz ebook of dreams of dark and light for £2.99. also bought and started electric forest by her, so far reminds me of algis budrys - sf with a psychological focus.

Can’t remember if I ever posted this here: Covering Viroconium

Aargh. I caught some sort of misspelling bug in my fat fingers recently, of course it’s called “Covering Viriconium.”

Now I need to reread my viriconium omnibus

Very fine Bruce Pennington cover!

oho--this weekend's WSJ incl. Sam Sacks' favorable mention of Catastrophe and Other Storiesby Dino Buzzati, who made an incisive impression very, very early on in my science fiction-scarfing skull---here's a preview of the reprint: https://books.google.com/books/about/Catastrophe.html?id=w5MpDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false

Intriguing entry: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/buzzati_dino

"I go to bed angry and I get up angrier every morning," he boasted RIP Hell Up In Harlan:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/29/controversial-author-harlan-ellison-remade-sci-fi-while-battling-movie-studios-publishers-and-frank-sinatra/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d2c2446f2740

Oh nice---dinged copies of Subterranean fancy editions for $20.00 ea., pretty sweet conceptually/not a chance in hell I'll buy, but feels good to be tempted:
https://subterraneanpress.com/djstories-the-best-of-david-j-schow-dinged

https://subterraneanpress.com/mandel-station-eleven

https://subterraneanpress.com/mckean-the-weight-of-words

Not specific to this thread but isn't Lulu a print on demand service? So I don't get why some orders are taking much longer than others. I thought they'd all be printed at the same time.

Not a regular scifi reader (see upthread) but I just finished Leviathan Wakes and dug it somewhat. Is there anything similar, but better written - or is the answer, Book 2 of The Expanse?

I feel like Leviathan might have prepped me for trying a little harder with M John Harrison's Light, which I found kind of chilly and incomprehensible and quit after about 50 pages.

Love me some LIGHT

Hoho at this Ian Sales review, unfortunately the link for the full review is dead.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/360254689

What is "New Space Opera"? If it means Alistair Reynolds, then, er, no thanks

I don't know, but I'd imagine it's earlier than Reynolds.

Isn’t there a Cramer/Hartwell anthology called The Space Opera Renaissance? I believe this topic is discussed in its introductory material.

reading dreams of dark & light by tanith lee, but i might give it up. her prose is fine, she creates detailed and colourful worlds, her characters are not unconvincing but i cannot feel any compassion for them and I'm not sure she could either. the one story where she manages to engineer a gay relationship between (physically) a man and a woman and (mentally) two straight men was noteworthy tho.

Was thinking the mid-70s Aldiss anthologies were a sign/stimulus of the revival, but this article points out more continuity than I'd remembered (as books, that is; it mostly vanished from most of the mags in 50s, at least for a while): http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/space_opera

Has anyone read this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maureen_Birnbaum,_Barbarian_Swordsperson
The excerpt here is hilarious

You might need to open the post by Alan C. Barclay to see.

Having seen various books in this series, I was never tempted to pick them up.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/12/Chicks_in_Chainmail.jpg

Some find Tanith a bit cold but I never did, yet at least.

Went to a bunch of second hand book stores and scored a bunch for super cheap (usually a pound each). Bunch of 70s horror anthologies, the first Van Vogt Null-A book, some Andre Norton, Sturgeon and 3 Joanna Russ books.

Recent reading:

Audrey Schulman - Theory of Bastards: really, really good near-future novel about bonobos and research and endometriosis and climate change, great stuff

Péter Zsoldos - The Mission: 1970s Hungarian novel about stranded researchers on an alien planet with a very cunning long-term survival plan; interesting but flawed, like a second-tier Lem crossed with a Bob Shaw novel

Elizabeth Bear - In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns: nearish-future, Indian cop investigates the murder of a man whose corpse has been impossibly inverted, at the same time as the first indisputable ET signal is received; thoroughly enjoyable, and I want to read more of her

AND

Roque Larraquy - Comemadre: interesting but ultimately too irritating and unfocused Argentinean SF about death and afterlife and bodies

got the elizabeth bear this morning, wasn't expecting to finish it the same day! It's more like a sketch of a novel. it started off straight out of the raymond chandler school of sf and i didn't really warm to it beyond that i'm afraid.

lol. Have you read the relevant Malzberg story, ledge?

It’s called “Playback.” And only know realized why.

D’Oh!
I mean I probably noticed before but I forgot.

ysi?

Just sent it via the Crap Nebula.