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

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.

never heard of him before tbh. found a couple of career retrospective reviews which praise his talent and wonder at his lack of recognition, while making him sound easy to admire but hard to like.

I recommend Gather in the Hall of the Planets and others from the same period which I haven’t gotten around to reading properly but others here have.

He, like Silverberg, had a Fitzgerald-like Crack-Up and couldn’t write for a while. Silverberg rolled up his sleeves and went back to delivering fan service like Lord Valentine’s Castle, whilst Malzberg remained in bitterness.

theory of bastards sounds great, thanks for the rec

i bought that one too. at the moment i'll shell out for anything by a female author that sounds moderately appealing.

Yeah, I am thinking about taking the bait on that as well.

what up nerds, somehow I missed the most recent posts in this thread!

Malzberg is great, if repetitive and claustrophobic. But when he is good, he is *very* good, and as a constructor of marvelous sentences/prose stylist I think he's second only to Ballard in the genre.

Finally got around to Norman Spinrad's "Bug Jack Barron", which is weird given what a big deal/turning point it seems to have been in the New Wave. Only read short pieces of his before. Joanna Russ's critique (I would love to read her full review if it's online somewhere?) cited in the wiki entry seems at the very least accurate, if overly (and yet pretty understandably) hostile. The sexism in it is both very up-front as well as perfectly representative of the era and its politics, and the writing is not quite as sharp as Spinrad seems to think it is. His particular iteration of post-beatnik-stream-of-consciousness is way more repetitive and less inventive and memorable than, say, Aldiss' in "Barefoot in the Head". I am about 2/3rds of the way through it and wouldn't call it great, although there are some interesting ideas and imagery in it. It's explicit prediction of the cynicism and burnout of 60s activist politics is definitely prescient, if not particularly nuanced.

Curious about his Hitler-as-genre-author book.

Yeah, i bought The Iron Dream but am sort of pre-exhausted at the idea of actually reading it, given current state of the world.

Liked it when I read it in high school, don’t know how it holds up.

I agree with Shakey’s favorite, Mike Moorcock, that Spinrad’s best is The Void Captain’s Tale.

From his panoramic tour of Spinrad's work ( incl. favorable mention of The Void Captain's Tale),
here's shrewd John Clute on BJB in context:
...it was with his next book, Bug Jack Barron (December 1967-October 1968 New Worlds; exp 1969), that he made his greatest impact on the sheltered world of sf, whose risible parochialism, when confronted by this not particularly shocking novel, was demonstrated by Sam J Lundwall in his Science Fiction: What It's All About (1969; trans exp 1971), where Bug Jack Barron is dismissed as "practically a collection of obscenities". The violent texture and profanity of the magazine version of the text more ominously rattled the excitable dovecotes of the UK "moral establishment" as well, leading directly to the banning of New Worlds by W H Smith, a newsagent chain then so dominant in the market that its action was tantamount to censorship. The novel itself, whose language does not fully conceal a certain sentimentality, describes a Near-Future US through Television figure Jack Barron and his involvement in a politically corrupt system: the resulting picture of America as a hyped, Sex-obsessed, apocalyptic Theatre of the Absurd made the text seem less sf than Fabulation, where this sort of vision is common. The sledgehammer style matched, at points, the content; and the treatment of women (see Feminism) lost the book some of the positive interest its flaring cynicism about male-dominated power structures might have merited.

Oops that's from http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/spinrad_norman

I found Spinrad's book reviews in Asimov's to be refreshingly blunt and his observations focused my vague impressions and messy frustrations getting back into SF in the early 80s, trying to catch up, finding most reviewers to be too xpost parochial--but then he denounced Le Guin's Always Coming Home as soggy leftover 60s sentiment etc.--might've been right for all I know, but he stayed on his soapbox awhile and I stopped reading him. He's got a couple of nonfiction collections, which I haven't read, ditto any of his fiction. Nevertheless, he lead me to some good stuff by other writers, and good thoughts about what I was looking for, in several directions.

Here is some more about Spinrad, written by a guy I only know from his book of Silverberg interviews: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/iron-chromium-five-novels-norman-spinrad/

There are several things about The Void Captain’s Tale that make me think Spinrad is channeling Cordwainer Smith, so perhaps Shakey should steer clear.

Heh I’ll give it a shot

I reread Jonathan Lethem's GIRL IN LANDSCAPE (1998). If anything I admired it this time. The drifting quality of the narrative, while still excessive, has some point in relation to the centrality of landscape. And the ending is more climactic and structured than I'd recalled.

The central character is curiously dislikeable though, more so by the last page than ever.

(posted that here as it's JL's most fully SF novel)

also really digging Kate Wilhelm lately (Juniper Time, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, the Killer Thing)

Her and Damon Knight are maybe my favorite sci-fi couple. Actually I just find the whole idea of sci-fi author couples charming - Ernie and Carol Emshwiller, Vernor and Joan Vinge, etc.

Merril and Pohl ?

Kuttner and Moore

if I thought it would get any votes I would make a poll

This year I’ve read nothing but psychoanalysis (due to studying). I’ve finally almost got something that looks like free time and for some reason I want to read wintery Russian classics (or even summery ones if they exist). Are there any overlooked ones? Or, I’ve never read any Tolstoy...is that worth remedying?

Summery Russian classic = Turgenev's First Love

also it's really short

Kuttner and Moore

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

Well this was absurdly good. Superbly written - one section with a character smashing the end of her thumb had me twisting away from the page in an effort to avoid the pain - well drawn characters, loads of non-fictional appeal for those into evolutionary/comparative/primate psychology. As far as the SF side of it goes, it was an effective cautionary tale but the ending was maybe a little overplayed for me; you could imagine it as a standard present day non-genre novel, dispensing with the SF elements and taking a less dramatic turn.

Summery Russian classic = Turgenev's First Love

also it's really short

Thank you! I found Fathers and Sons a bit of a struggle to get through, but if it’s short and summery then it might be just right. I’ll keep an eye out.

I just realised that this isn't the general reading thread, and I don't think Turgenev is hugely into speculative fiction.

No problem. I view your post as coming in through the slipstream.

also forgot which thread I was on lol

Some good-to=great Russian SF discussed here and there upthread.

also good-to-great.

bit on feminist sci-fi on Front Row last night:

"Women Invent the Future is a new anthology of science fiction short stories by and about women. One of the authors, Molly Flatt, discusses re-imagining the future from a feminist perspective with Christina Dalcher, whose new novel Vox is set in a dystopian world where women's voices are strictly limited."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bbn6z0

(it's the first section but there's more on the end of the podcast version if you download that)

(it wasn't great, when i got around to listening. book looks interesting though)

Don't know if anyone here has mentioned the new BL SF collections. Golden Age stories, nicely packaged:

https://www.bl.uk/shop/lost-mars-the-golden-age-of-the-red-planet/p-1938

So Bug Jack Barron is really bad, annoyed that I read it now

every plot point telegraphed and predictable, mind-numbingly repetitive prose, paper-thin characterizations (with plenty of sexist garbage strewn about), bad dialogue - clearly the only thing going for it *was* its transgressiveness, which doesn't really leave much to recommend it. Moorcock has often said (overly modestly, I think) he's a bad writer with good ideas, by contrast Spinrad seems more like a bad writer with mostly bad ideas.

read the chronoliths, by the aforementioned robert charles wilson

i'm not sure the ending/solution really makes sense, but that's fine. i liked it a lot.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?19779

I read "Clara Militch" and wished he'd shut the fuck up about Platatuda Ivanova. Couldn't he just call her Platty?

As well as that Lost Mars anthology, Mike Ashley has Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventures out this year and also one about scary sea stories if I remember correctly.

The British Library collections look lovely, but not much golden age stuff is actually good.