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

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Lol

also been reading Karin Tidbeck's "Jagannath" bit by bit, she's great.

I read the beginning of that back when I could still read a little and it was pretty good

James Redd- That's cool, thanks.

Οὖτις - Would like to hear your thoughts when you're finished.

so far my favorites are the one with the kid grown in a can and the guy who fell in love with a spaceship (which subsequently considers him a presumptuous rapist)

Two books by Farah Rose Smith

The Visitor (3 out of 5 stars)

This is two short stories, one of them the title story and one is a preview from the upcoming (?) Anonyma.

The first story starts well with the depiction of the Afterworld but I found the rest not quite interesting enough. Something about the way the rock and roll/goth/decadent milieu was depicted seemed just a bit too familiar, maybe cliched.

Second story was far more interesting, simply an interview with an architect, good enough to save this book from two stars, despite again feeling that perhaps the depiction of the architect and the aesthetic movements he belongs to were too familiar, maybe cliched.

Weird Fiction sometimes has a problem with its lovingly depicted common character types (recluses, scholars, antiquarians, aesthetes, dandies, decadents, nihilists, goths, Crowley-esque bastards) and the associates art movements, feeling a bit too obvious or some other problem I cant quite put my finger on. Not that I want these things to be abandoned, they just need to be approached with extra care.

But it is absorbing and it contains references to Smith's later books The Almanac Of Dust (which is very good) and Eviscerator (which I've just started).

Do those Christian crosses between the words "Modern" and "Gothic" have any religious significance? I don't mind either way, I'm just curious. Maybe we'll find out if Anonyma comes out.

The Almanac Of Dust (4 out of 5 stars)

My main reservation about this is the "everything is nothing" doomy sermons. I heard someone complaining a while ago about too many stories featuring voids and nothingness, seeming kind of a empty threat. Could we take these sermons as a partial reflection of the arrogance of Von Rehm (who I guessed was a provocateur who was nonetheless onto something) and Bhodi (who is disgusted by Von Rehm but reluctantly absorbs his ideas)?

But don't let that put you off, for a book so much about nothingness and with a surprisingly small word count taking up its pages (many of the pages have only one or two sentences), this has so much in it. There's a lot of passages to puzzle over (wonder what is supposed to mean something and what is supposed to be the mad gibberish of men going insane), pause over and admire. I liked the observation about illness and medicine leaving different fragments of a person intact.

I like that Smith isn't afraid to bring the purple and use unnaturally theatrical speech (especially Bhodi's rant to the city as he stands outside in the wind). Some very pleasing imagery too.

James Thomson's City Of Dreadful Night (which I've been meaning to read) is quoted at the start and I don't know how much influence it is on this story but what it resembles more than anything else I've read is Hodgson's The Night Land, with similar kinds of monsters. The journey that ends the story was very good.

This may be regarded as my personal preference but I would have liked more description of the places. I think an earlier and more detailed description of the home and surrounding country would have enhanced it. And though we are told what the Silver City looks like generally, I still found it a little too vague when we actually get there.

But I hope you buy this from Lulu in print or get the kindle version. I hope it doesn't fly under the radar. I hope this is reprinted many times by increasingly large publishers and I hope Farah Rose Smith goes very far.

Lol-tastic true tale here, concerning the downside of winning the Church of $c13nt0l0gy-related short fiction contest: https://www.authoralden.com/2018/08/goingclearwater.html?spref=fb

Kind of glad the one time I entered it resulted in a straight rejection.

I read a comic adaptation of some Fafhrd & Grey Mouser stories and remember enjoying that a lot. Perhaps because it was my first taste of urban fantasy. Or maybe I was just distracted by the usual Mignola loveliness.

I’m definitely keeping my fafhrd/mouser paperbacks with the nice mignola covers and spot illos

Two new to me strugatsky brothers books in fopp this afternoon, 2 for £5 (as well as hard to be a God dvd cheap). Um, doomed city, and another...

Monday Begins on Saturday? I bought the same twofer myself the other day! Fopp have quite a lot of SF Masterworks in stock at the moment, at least in Glasgow - lots of PKD in particular.

I finished all the Marses, Red, Green, and Blue. For their faults they are an astonishing achievement, absolutely top tier SF. Hard SF so not everyone's cup of tea; however, rather than just being speculative physics the main scientific focus is geography and geology, with large helpings of meteorology, hydrology, ecology, biology, sociology, psychology, economics, politics... the breadth is really impressive. But hey it's not all dry facts and book learnin'! There's plenty of good, varied characterisation and even moments of poetry, enough to get you past the pages and pages of martian landscape description (which is less of a problem in books 2 and 3).

Now reading The Female Man, which is righteously angry.

Hugo Award results:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/20/hugo-awards-women-nk-jemisin-wins-best-novel

Veteran writer Lois McMaster Bujold, herself a four-time best novel winner, won the best series award for her World of the Five Gods sequence. Really enjoyed Memory---pace and levels, incl allusions made-comprehensible-without-getting-bogged-down to total series noob me---will have to check Five Gods stories too.

I carried on upthread about Memory, natch.

All the Vorkosigan books are pretty good and worth a read.

Noticed earlier that Glen Cook is releasing his first Black Company book in 30 years next month!

this just got posted, my bro sent me the link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nclIvAYdRdo

kinda boring but lol @ Beatles talk

posting here in case anyone has any recs for Jordan:

It's too bad, because I've really been in the mood for some literary sci-fi/genre-bending.

So, any suggestions for new entries? I feel like it's increasingly hard to find new fiction where the writing is sentence-level great and also has, shall we say, thrillpower.

I realize there may not be much market incentive these days for young authors to spend time creating work like this and satisfy my specific entertainment desires, but I'd love something that hits that old Lethem/David Mitchell sweet spot.

― change display name (Jordan), Wednesday, August 29, 2018 1:49 PM

I suggested Karen Tidbeck, although she doesn't quite do the same thing as Lethem and Mitchell do. Closer to Kafka or something, I suppose?

Karen Russell maybe? She’s a grower.

I will always rep for my man Charles Yu, who has something of Lethem's sad-sack protagonist schtick

I started 'How to Live Safely...' and had a hard time getting into it. :/ The tone reminded of The Martian, which is not a good thing.

I'm excited to read Tidbeck though.

The Martian? I haven't read it but isn't that more hard-science...?

well it's definitely not literary

tbf I don't think Yu's a great prose stylist or anything, but I feel he does mix realism and its potential for emotional impact well with weird sf ideas.

Kevin Barry's City of Bohane might qualify. It's set in a semi-fictional Irish city in 2053 and has some fantastical elements (although there's essentially zero sci in its fi)

He's definitely an original stylist though

parts of Lanark def reminded me of Mitchell's Black Swan Green

that book is super-weird and unique tho

I second the rec of Karen Russell, also suggest Kelly Link, both of whom I've carried on about upthread---ditto those two volumes of Houghton Mifflin/Mariner's The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, series edited by John Joseph Adams. I prefer the 2016 collection, guest edited by Karen Joy Fowler (check her novels too, starting with We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, tracking the aftermath of raising a furry primate with/in a human family---there actually were and maybe are daddy scientists doing this, so it's a different kind of science fiction, also a Pen/Faulkner winner). But 2015, guest ed. by Joe Hill, also has some remarkable stories overall--most by authors new to me---it's just that having Russell and Link in the same collection provides a couple of acts that are hard to follow.
Haven't yet gotten to guest ed. Charles Yu's 2017 selection (haven't read any of his own stories either). 2018, guested by NK Jemisin, comes out Oct. 2.
Oh yeah, and Colson Whitehead's zombie-clean-up slab, Zone One, sported a jacket promising literary satisfactions and tasty pulp, delivered both.

Saw a potentially interesting recent book about Ballard at the library today but didn’t check it out

Ooh yeah Kelly Link, she’s great

I'd love something that hits that old Lethem/David Mitchell sweet spot.

I feel wary about 'recommending' a book I haven't read myself, but this recentish novel by Michel Faber (who also wrote Under the Skin) got pretty good reviews, including a rave from M John Harrison, who knows a thing or two;

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/23/the-book-of-strange-new-things-michel-faber-review

omg the book of strange new things is the worst. ludicrous characters, ludicrous situation. m john harrison said "it has such a lot of religious, linguistic, philosophical and political freight to deliver" but i unpacked those boxes and they were all empty. haven't read any lethem *gasps* (though ilx is doing its best to persuade me), but it has absolutely none of the invention or zest of cloud atlas.

Thanks all! I haven't read an anthology in years so I will check out the Best Americans.

I love Under the Skin but reading about the backstory behind Book of Strange New Things, idk, seemed heavy in a way that made me say "mmmm, maybe not now". Although the space priest setup brings to mind those weird Ender's Game sequels that I read as a kid.

I do remember enjoying Zone One, I think it was the first e-book I read. Weirdly Colson Whitehead has been coming up a lot lately and I had completely forgotton about the existence of that book until now.

Reading The Apex Book Of World SF. Very impressed by the first story by S.P. Somtow, though it's more horror than sci-fi - a series of killings, viewed from the perspective of an American kid who fled China w/ his mother when the communists took over and ended up in Thailand. Lots of historical weight (Nanking Massacre and so on), and prejudices - Thai vs Chinese, Chinese vs Japanese. I'm a few more stories in but nothing has really impressed me in the same way.

Somtow probably best known for Vampire Junction in the 80s.

People really angry with SilverBob's ill advised comments

On a private mailing list, Robert Silverberg called N.K. Jemisin's #HugoAwards win for Best Novel "identity politics" while admitting he hasn't even read her books. (Comment confirmed by John Scalzi.) pic.twitter.com/3XVh2EpGRD

— Rogers Cadenhead (@rcade) August 22, 2018

Silverbob's politics are weird

My daughter went to DragonCon this weekend and got me Larry Niven's autograph -- I got perverse pleasure in getting it buried on page 186 of a ratty copy of the 1971 collection Quark/4. "The Fourth Profession" is my favorite of his stories and that was where I first read it. My daughter reports that Niven isn't tracking very well at all, not too compos mentis.

I've been working my way through the early Nebula Award Stories collections, each one edited by a different big name SF writer. Volume 4, edited by Poul Anderson, only confirms my dislike for this author. This is from his introduction (published in 1969) - his subject is the contemporary inter-relationship between modern literary fiction and science fiction:

"Most science fiction has also preserved its own traditional virtues. It still tells stories, wherein things happen. It remains more interested in the glamour and mystery of existence, the survival and triumph and tragedy of heroes and thinkers, than in the neuroses of some snivelling fagot (sic)."

So give me Delany, for all his gaucheries, over this fucking guy always.

Volume 4 is all told a bit of a dud, anyway - over 100 pages of Anne Mcaffrey's interminable dragon fantasia was the SF story I've most struggled to finish since - Poul Anderson's 'No Truce With Kings'...

never bothered to read a word of Anderson, he sounds terrible

also signed his name to that pro-Vietnam War thing iirc

Not fiction, but I just bought:

Frederik Pohl: THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS - a memoir.

Seems a really rich piece of personal cultural history about SF from c.1920s on - the formation of clubs, societies, Golden Age.

Ooh I’ll read that

I got a copy of that when it first came out from the SF Book Club when I was in high school. Got his autograph too at a convention.

Wow!

Pohl also blogged for the last ~5 years of his life, with many juicy biographical reminiscences. Probably a great supplement to that book, which I'd like to read.

Gosh!

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/avjdpa/frederick-pohl-424-v15n12

I don't understand why that article is so virulently anti-Ray Bradbury. Goodness knows there is room for both of them and more.

Yeah, that blog is full of good stuff. Seems like he was a real mensch, based on that book, that blog, seeing him speak at the convention and the 30 seconds I talked to him.
xp

btw it's the interviewer, not Pohl, who is hostile to Bradbury.

I found that link via the blog.

Yeah, that’s a bizarre angle, like Bob Dylan talking up Buck Owens and trashing Merle Haggard.

would read Pohl memoir. he always seemed like a standup guy with p good taste to me

I don't understand why that article is so virulently anti-Ray Bradbury.

because Vice hires shitty writers