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

"The Island" by Peter Watts (Year's Best SF 15, Hartwell & Cramer, eds.)---The narrator, a female-identifying entity, awakens once again on outward bound ship/portal, where things long since post-human pass through. A cosmic cloaca, and Damon Knight would dig this take on how a Galactic Empire would really work, esp. with centuries of suspended animation so often an unexamined given in today's s.f. She's ready to get back into her eternal feud with the Chimp, derisive name for the ship's hard drive (they need each other, she hates him/it, even more for being so detached). This time, she soon encounters her son, a perhaps mentally challenged human grown from the Chimp's secret stash of narrator's and her long-dead lover's materials. It all gets pretty harrowing, somewhat tragic, also could be titled "Angry Candy" or "Psychocandy." Gotta check some more Watts--apparently he's set all his stories adrift on the Web.

― dow, Sunday, July 29, 2012 7:32 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cosmic cloaca??

― the late great, Sunday, July 29, 2012 11:16 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

All Peter Watts work is free on his website: http://www.rifters.com

― computers are the new "cool tool" (James Morrison), Monday, July 30, 2012 7:44 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Someone hated Watts--Lamp, maybe?

― check the name, no caps, boom, i'm (Laurel), Monday, July 30, 2012 7:51 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Rift trilogy is pretty brutal. I think I may have bogged down and not finished the third book.

― check the name, no caps, boom, i'm (Laurel), Monday, July 30, 2012 7:51 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Peter Watts! Yesssssssss. I loved the stand-alone book--the trilogy ones got kind of brutal read in a row but maybe you'll approach them difftly/better.

― grossly incorrect register (in orbit), Tuesday, December 11, 2012 12:20 PM (five years ago)

got a proof of the new Peter Watts, 'Echopraxia', and am loving it so far. If you enjoyed 'Blindsight', it's set in the same world. If the presence of scientifically rationalised neanderthal vampires in that bothered you, this one also has body/brain-hacked soldier 'zombies'.

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Thursday, June 5, 2014 7:08 PM (four years ago)

At one point, he posted all his shorter (?) fiction online for free---maybe some novels too?---but later said somebody was peddling it as counterfeit ebooks.

Ah awesome thx

Start with BLINDSIGHT or his new one, THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION

Only a third of the stories had something unreal in them by I very much enjoyed Drowning In Beauty. It has a load of current authors I've been meaning to check out for years (about half of them are people I know from forums and goodreads) and it's a relief to say they're all very strong. A few of them are very funny and the last story is super fucked up.

The one that appealed to me most in a fantasy way was Damian Murphy's story about the woman who collects incredibly obscure videogames for systems like ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. It has a similar appeal to the quiet puzzle moments in early survival horror games.

My goodreads review of it. Beware of slight repetition of above post.
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This has a load of new-ish authors I've been meaning to check out for years, so I just dropped other genre history obligations and read this. It's a very strong anthology and an encouraging first taste of many of these writers.

I don't know how to take the manifestos exactly. How much of it is serious, how much provocations for their own sake or just jokes? There's probably some references in there I didn't get. I don't have the patience or mental steadiness to verify if these stories have much to do with the manifestos but either way I try not to judge anthologies by their supposed purpose.

I was surprised by how many of the stories were funny. Yarrow Paisley's story had something making me smile nearly every page and the absurdist style caught me pleasantly off-guard. The amazingly detailed piece by Justin Isis particularly impressed me and the parts about the hand rubs and the quiet grudge match between the hostess and one of her boyfriends were so brilliant.
I'm not easily shocked but a couple of things in James Champagne's story had me thinking "oh jeezus..." with a sinking realization at just how far it was going but it's also very funny; perhaps the funniest thing in the book is the idea that the character somehow has the pants of a boy from one of the Diary Of A Wimpy Kid films and wondering how on earth he got them.

Closer to my regular habits were Damian Murphy and Avalon Brantley's contributions.
I'm not sure if Murphy was intending a parody but whatever the case it effectively evokes moody point and click adventure games and the quieter moments of early survival horror games, it's interesting the way it emphasizes the limitations of the gaming hardware but frequently describes things far beyond those limitations and makes you wonder at how much the player's imagination is filling in the gaps. It's a very nice little world in there.
The writing of Brantley's piece is very beautiful. I really don't know how accurate her language is to the period she's portraying but I wish more historical fantasy writing was this convincing (to non-scholars like me).

that looks really good

It is. I've got another anthology edited by Justin Isis, but Daniel Corrick's other anthologies are probably impossible to get now.

I wish there was some way I could buy a print of one of Bob Pepper's sf book covers. Or any Bob Pepper art, really.

Otm an sf art of bob pepper book would rule so hard.

Did I tell the story of talking to a guy I know from comics (former dc editor) who ended up working for the company that does settlers of catan in the us? He told me he had a pitch there for a new board game with bob pepper art, pepper was on board, but he couldn’t get it approved.

Yeah, he mentions Milton Bradley etc. in this brief but fairly wide-ranging interview:
http://well-of-souls.com/tower/dt_pepper.htm

More in-depth---remembered Love's Forever Changes, but didn't realize he'd done so many LP covers (bunch of books here too):
https://www.coverourtracks.com/single-post/2016/09/26/Bob-Pepper---The-Cover-Our-Tracks-Interview

ooh man thanks for that interview!

Ha he did the awesome Scanner Darkly cover, I didn't realize that.

I bet the cool Avram Davidson People Under the Earth paperback i've got is him too. I'll check.

colour me intrigued

https://www.tramppress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/A-Brilliant-Void-Cover.png

That's timely, what with WorldCon being in Dublin next year and all.

Science Fiction the 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 by Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo

This is the sequel to David Pringle's brilliant Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. Don't know why I delayed so much in getting this because I loved all the other similar genre guides. Main differences with Pringle's earlier guide is that it adds an extra book more, Pringle always used 2 pages per entry and this uses 2-3 pages (Gene Wolfe was the only one to get 4 pages if I remember correctly). No author gets more than one book (or book series), while Pringle was quite happy to choose multiple books by the same author. It could be said that Broderick and Di Filippo cheat by cramming in lots of other recommendations as tangents (Attanasio's Radix is given a strong recommendation in the entry for Zindell's Neverness, they lament that he was overlooked for the previous book) and career run-throughs for lesser known authors (Liz Jensen gets a bundle of her books profiled). Some reviewers disliked all this extra cramming but I really appreciated it.

Like other reviewers I sometimes suspected some books were included for being important and representative (perhaps to discuss developments in the genre) rather than the best, a surprising number of bestsellers are chosen and I wondered if this was a crowdpleasing move. Some later successes by the SF elders are chosen (including Poul Anderson, Vance, Vonnegut, Ballard, Moorcock, Le Guin, Aldiss) and many other reviewers felt these entries were just out of respect to the legends of the genre. Possibly some writers were chosen out of respect for their short fiction?
Since I haven't read a single one of these books and cant read the minds of Broderick & Di Filippo, I cant say how honest the choices were.

I normally welcome dense writing but when I read reviews, I rarely have the patience for it and sometimes feel like a traitor for this. But a lot of the descriptions are really confusing. They insist that science fiction rarely has much actual science in it but I was frequently lost with the mentions of singularity, quantum sciences and other such things. In a guide like this, which will probably attract newbies as much as huge SF fans, I felt they should have been more accessible like Pringle was. But I enjoyed the writing more than most people seemed to, I thought there was a glee to it.
My biggest complaint is that the type size is too small, making the book much more difficult. Even if you're not fond of ebooks you might want to consider the ebook version to save your eyes.

There was quite a lot of epic Hard SF and that's a hard sell for me despite my admiration for the scale of such stories, but Broderick and Filippo did quite a good job getting me to consider getting some of them. Half way through I was wondering how many women wrote this sort of thing and the entry on Linda Nagata answers that.

I never thought I'd be interested in Michael Chabon or Orson Scott Card's Ender series but they also sold me on those. I recently passed by Cherryh's Cyteen in a charity shop and assumed it must be one of her lesser works but according to this guide it's one of her best!

The book entries I was most excited by were...

James Morrow - This Is The Way The World Ends
Pamela Sargent - Shore Of Women
Joan Slonczewski - A Door Into Ocean
Paul Park - Sugar Festival
David Zindell - Neverness
Gwyneth Jones - Aleutian trilogy
Richard Calder - Dead Girls trilogy
Walter Jon Williams - Aristoi
Michael Moorcock - Second Ether trilogy
Christopher Priest - The Separation
John C Wright - The Golden Age (Strange to see him featured here considering what he done to his reputation since. 2012 was such a different time in the genre!)
Ian McDonald - River Of Gods
Ian R MacLeod - House Of Storms
David Marusek - Counting Heads
Geoff Ryman - Air
Liz Jensen - My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (along with a bunch of her other works discussed)
Carol Emshwiller - Secret City (the crazy sounding The Mount even moreso)
Ekaterina Sedia - Alchemy Of Stone
Hannu Rajaniemi - Quantum Thief series (seemed to do interesting things with the references)

Please don't be put off by some of the drawbacks of this guide. I cant verify how good the choices are but I haven't found many better ways to aquaint myself with what has been going on in science fiction during the period covered. Speculative fiction (and maybe other genres) are perhaps getting too big for anyone to cover comprehensively and perhaps people wont be able to do this kind of thing convincingly anymore. But I pray there will be more guides like this. Fantasy really needs more top 100 guides like this because the last really good ones were in the 80s.

Can heartily recommend A Door into Ocean.
Are those emshwiller choices novels or short stories?

Would definitely recommend Liz Jensen

Jon- all the main entries are novels, although it occasionally mentioned short stories worth checking out. That's the main drawback of the top 100 books by Pringle, Cawthorn and this one, they only do novels or story collections that are completely unified (Bradbury's Martian Chronicles). The top 100 horror books by Jones/Newman feature lots of collections but horror is far more short story orientated.

Might be difficult to write about lots of short stories and it's hard to come by a truly stonking good collection or anthology.

https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41MGCK4rwyL._SL500_SX325_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I have this by Pringle, which I find very useful (I think there's a second edition I don't have). Hundreds of capsule reviews of every significant SF novel up to that point; also major short story collections and anthologies, tho no short story reviews as such. Alongside his own fairly pithy comments and a standard star rating system, Pringle also finds space from quotes by other reviewers like Ballard, Clute, all the usual suspects.

I might get that, I absolutely loved his 100 SF Novels and 100 Modern Fantasy Novels guides. I got a new-ish (90s or early 00s) fantasy guide by him and was just profiles of authors and it didn't seem to have anything like reviews. But there's lots of books by him with similar titles, not sure which ones are updates.

That Pringle book Ward mentioned is Internet Archive-borrowable here: https://archive.org/details/ultimateguidetos00prin

Had a look through Ultimate Encyclopedia Of Fantasy this morning. As a critical guide it isn't very helpful, Pringle is joined by Brian Stableford, David Langford and someone else I cant remember, but you never know who is writing what and evaluating what might be worthwhile is difficult because it isn't very review focused although it does occasionally offer judgements.

But it's got way too much film and tv stuff and useless profiles of the most famous fantasy lands. Films cover everything you'd expect to things like Big (Tom Hanks), Peggy Sue Got Married, Groundhog Day, Michael (Travolta), The Mask (Jim Carrey) and Splash. How many readers are going to find these selections helpful?
There's also favorable reviews of Pirates Of The Caribbean and Shrek (I doubt Stableford written those). Who knows how many duds and not relevant enough things you could end up searching for? But it's also got curiosities like Artemis 81, which really does look worthwhile.

Lafferty's Reefs Of Earth recently came out on paperback.

That’s good news - my favorite longer lafferty work

Never read a longer Lafferty; describe, please!

Encyclopedia of Fantasty, fraternal online twin of Science Fiction Encyclopedia, is pretty handy:
http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php
Although it's done, Sun:
This digital version of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) edited by John Clute and John Grant, was prepared by David Langford in 1999 and placed online in October 2012. Please note the disclaimer at the foot of (almost) every entry.

It's the new 'Dynasts'!

There's a new edition of Erckmann & Chatrian in the shops from HarperCollins. First in quite some time.

I don't know if the two Oxfams in Glasgow have been better recently or I just know about more writers because I've been finding interesting stuff lately. Including the above mentioned River Of Gods by Ian McDonald. I think I'm going to make a habit of visiting both stores, I hadn't really bothered in years.

Making my way through a Dunsany collection now and there's some really nice stuff in there.

The charity shops near me have been absolutely great for books recently. A friend posited it was perhaps due to the influence of the Kindles and people decluttering their lives, shrug.

Gollancz just put out a Lafferty omnibus
https://www.gollancz.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/hbg-title-9781473213418.jpg
And have a collection of his short stories due next year

Ooh

With introduction by Neil Gaiman.

Boo

Story collection will fill a huge huge gap

B-b-but will it fill the Narrow Valley?

March 2019 for the stories, also with Gaiman intro:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41v16UW6LVL.jpg

A friend posited it was perhaps due to the influence of the Kindles and people decluttering their lives, shrug.

― You (bleeping) need me. You can't Finn without me (fionnland), Friday, October 26, 2018 10:35 PM

Interesting. I hope I haven't missed a ton of good stuff over the past few years. Even as I anticipate the possibility of getting some great finds, I'm a little sad that people are parting with them.

One of my finds this week was the third book in Rohan's Spiral series. I wondered what he was doing now and found he died two months ago. Didn't know he was part of an Edinburgh scene.

https://michaelscottrohan.org.uk/remembering-msr/

Wonder if Waterstones are stocking Three Great Novels because I had a thorough look in there this week and didn't see it (I didn't know it existed but I'm sure I would have spotted it as I was scanning shelves).

aw i love Lafferty, no need to Gaiman him up :(

was unaware of novels tho, really should pay more attention to things other than what falls in my lap :D

tbf to Gaiman, he's championed Lafferty for years, and I'm sure he's been a big help in getting these books back into print. Intros are easy enough to skip.

Do we know a tracklisting for the short story collection yet?

Annoyingly I have two of the three novels in that Three Great Novels set (which, btw RAG, I saw in the Waterstones at Braehead just the other day); £14.99 is a lot to pay for Space Chantey, especially as I haven't got round to reading Past Master or the totally out-there sounding Fourth Mansions yet. I suppose I have a suspicion that Lafferty, like a great many of the more unique SF writers, might be best in the shorter forms - but we shall see.

On the one hand some of the stories even outrun their ideas, but on the other hand his best prose, especially dialogue, has this shaggy dog charm that I can happily imagine meandering along at novel length.

Kim Stanley Robinson has a new one out: RED MOON.

Damn already?!

He’s also got BLUE MOON coming out in Jan 2019

This is probably not about to come back into print but for novel length lafferty, his historical Native American piece Okla Hannali was a great marriage of tone and subject

I liked annals of klepsis better than past master or fourth mansions. Have space chantey but never got around to it. As mentioned, Reefs of Earth was my favorite ral novel but it’s been decades since I read these.

There was also a great long-novella length Sindbad story published during his indie label years - I hope i still have that in a box somewhere.

There was a time around 1990 when you could get all these zine format lafferty obscurities from Chris Drumm books

Talkin' bout Laffertys, i just read Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes. A murder mystery on a spaceship full of clones. Perhaps some people are sick of "rules of cloning" stories, but I thought it was a lot of fun.

B-b-but wazzabout R.A. Lafferty's Six Fingers of Time?