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

lol

jeff vandermeer's weird anthology

― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, November 7, 2018 6:24 PM

Don't forget about Ann

yes! sorry

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy - A Volume Of Sleep

Satyamurthy has said his stories are essays, maybe sometimes but so far I see a number of these stories as him talking to us about anything that interests him while weaving in some plot and a speculative fiction concept. Discarded objects and outdated technology, a strange afterlife in which a woman let's go of some of her human sensibilities, some explanations of Satyamurthy's musical preferences and quite depressing depictions of musical failure (whether that's the lone guitarist being ineffective or the protagonist's band playing well yet being mostly ignored).

Like the previous collection it ends with a longer piece, this one about what might be twins, doppelgangers, multiple personalities or maybe something else. Contains many amusingly crazy theories about celebrities. Probably the best story but the tale of the afterlife is a contender for its outlandish distance.

Need to track down some of his anthology stories some day. Curious about what his contribution to Axes Of Evil will be like.

https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/brian-w-aldiss/

Read this blurb
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/l/l-jagi-lamplighter/maga-2020-and-beyond.htm

Hey this David Bunch guy is p good

Moderan?

Yeah, got it from the library, just getting through the intro

Not sure why he was so hated initially, would think the humor would’ve gone farther in putting over such a bleak vision.

Remember I said these weird/ghostly/strange/surreal fiction presses were the most expensive of all the small presses? Some people I know have been speaking very highly of these but I cant ever imagine myself spending this kind of money.

https://www.ziesings.com/advSearchResults.php?action=search&orderBy=relevance&category_id=0&keywordsField=mount+abraxas

fuuuuuck

Most Jack Vance fans know about the Integral Editions that was a 44 book set for rich people containing Vance's preferred versions. What has completely flew under the radar and only just came to my attention is that most or all(?) of these books are in paperback from Spatterlight over the last 2 years.

I've had the Monsters In Orbit/World Between double on my wishlist for a while because somebody said it was their favorite book ever but I've just discovered that Monsters In Orbit is a fixup of stories included in Golden Girl and that most of the remaining stories are in Moon Moth.

I seem to recall that several years after the initial VIE, there was something like a ‘reader’s edition’ that was a kind of second chance? So the paperbacks would be kind of the third go. I’d love to see what they look like.

Around the original VIE launch was one of the last times in my life when I had disposable income :( and I was very very close to pulling the trigger. Major regret of my reading career.

I would have a heart attack worrying about the postage journey of 44 books.

Nice charity shop finds: Mary Gentle's Ash and Suzy McKee Charnas' Holdfast omnibus (first two books).

NYRB's edition of David Bunch's Moderan adds eleven stories, maybe the complete cycle, something like 60 (Amazon's got the trade pb for $12.00 or so) He's sometimes described as a "cyberpunk pioneer," but I don't recall cyberpunks dealing in oceans covered by sheets of plastic as a given, or at all. In the name of Progress of course, and yeah there was plenty utopian-dystopian satire in the 50s and 60s (Bunch placed two stories in the first Dangerous Visions[published 1967, right?]), and he's kind of Lafferty-like, but more cranked up with the deadpan tragicomic irony, for lack of a better term. Jeff VanderMeer says that Bunch is more in-your-face than PKD, Tiptree, anybody, and that may be--I've only read a few stories, like the one in The Big Book of Science Fiction. Here's JV's intro to the NYRB collection:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/12/david-bunchs-prophetic-dystopia

I read the whole thing about a month ago. It's good (and funny!), albeit very repetitive. Essentially a paste-up, so the stories don't always cohere into a complete narrative arc that makes any sense. Some of the stuff is so apocalyptically bleak, particularly the stories that don't have to do with Stronghold 10 and instead focus on this fractured family (a plebian father and his progeny). Generally I found the Stronghold 10 stories fairly comical, closer to maybe Lem than PKD or Tiptree, whose writing styles are very different from the approach Bunch took. The intro (not VanderMeer's preface, but an intro piece that Bunch specifically wrote to preface the collection) is probably my favorite, a variation on the classic "I have unearthed this obscure manuscript from the past" framing device that is also really funny and sharp.

I think yr correct that this bears little to no resemblance to cyberpunk imo, either in writing style or in themes/ideas - the world described is more like a nightmarish bright and shiny feudal futurism rather than the hard-boiled grim-n-gritty noir updates of Gibson, Sterling et al

Well this sounds like something I need to get

it's p good, maybe over-praised due to its obscurity. I did feel like after the 15th story or so that I had pretty much gotten everything you could get from the book

Yeah, I prob couldn't make it even to 15, judging by the few I've read. But I'd like to read some more. This glimpse of things to come incl. some very unappealing descriptions, but those more familiar w the authors may get excited, in fact one such fan passed this along to me, so I'll maintain the chain:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/30/18127072/sci-fi-fantasy-anders-leckie-liu-hurley-coreybook-gibson-chiang-recommendations-2019

Am kind of interested in this 'un:
BROKEN STARS: CONTEMPORARY CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION IN TRANSLATION EDITED BY KEN LIU
Chinese science fiction has long been out of reach for most English-speaking fans, but that’s begun to change in recent years. Books like Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem helped and efforts from publications like Clarkesworld Magazine have opened the door to new translations, and the latest anthology comes from Ken Liu, who brings together 16 stories from authors like Xia Jia, Han Song, Baoshu, Hao Jingfang, Chen Quifan, and others, as well as a trio of essays about the state of China’s science fiction. (February 19th) Also a couple of other books in here by Chinese authors, and a new Ian Macdonald, and some others I'm cautiously anticipating.

the Marlon James is getting some fairly ecstatic advance notices

Which?

I read Brief History of Seven Killings and it was p good as far as those things go I suppose. is he dabbling in sf now?

"the African Game of Thrones" is the PR pitch

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/561305/black-leopard-red-wolf-by-marlon-james/9780

Plot blurbs are almost always worthless.

Hope so, cuz that sounds awful

Christopher Ropes, writer in a pretty nasty health situation.
https://www.gofundme.com/get-christophers-teeth-fixed

Just short profiles of the people who have won the Rediscovery award. I thought some of them were too famous, but as people in the comments say, a lot of fans still don't know them (many pointing out that currently active writers who are quite successful but really fallen off the radar for most people). But are those people even interested in this award?

https://www.tor.com/2018/09/04/who-are-the-forgotten-greats-of-science-fiction/

Guy who wrote the article also quite dedicated to reviewing forgotten women
https://www.tor.com/2018/12/27/100-sf-f-books-you-should-consider-reading-in-the-new-year/

great list, should keep me going for the year. it might even prompt me to stray further into fantasy than i usually do.

Interesting how the current panel is sort of bizarro version of the first one.

Perhaps the finest military fantasy about a Germanic centaur in a quasi-WWI setting ever.

That line sold me.

Because you have already read a lot of fantasies along similar lines and now can only find the finest, I assume.

so many terrible covers on that second list

Indeed

Thank you for sharing those lists, RAG. It sounds like this writer has also compiled a SF novel 'list of lists', which I would be interested to see - I couldn't see any likely links to it, on the page you linked to.

In the 'Forgotten Greats' list, JDN states that Wymon Guin, "is one of two authors who have won the Rediscovery whose work I have not managed to track down." My records indicate that I have stories by Guin - 'Volpla' in The Third Galaxy Reader edited by H L Gold (US paperback) and 'Beyond Bedlam' in Spectrum 2 edited by Amis and Conquest (UK paperback). I will read and report back!

He's made a ton of lists on the Tor site and on his own site so it might take a while to find. On one of his women writer focused lists I saw something that seems like it might epitomize a certain type of fantasy from the recent-ish past: the Horsegirl series by Constance Ash, I'd like to try it.

Would be cool if this guy wrote a big book guide but he tends to focus on tropes and types of stories and I don't know if he'd be up to writing about books that should be preserved for the ages.
But he's very welcome on sites like Tor and File770 that focus way too much on tv and film crap. I appreciate Black Gate for keeping that shit to a minimum.

For all the allure of pre-pulp and foreign language obscurities, the prospect of buried treasure in DAW books and similar publishers from the 70s-80s-90s is incredibly exciting to me.

I can never have enough guides. Another type of guide I'd like to see is for writers who are extremely prolific and very variable in quality like Philip Jose Farmer, Andre Norton, Roger Zelazny and CJ Cherryh. Not hard to find the fan favorites but navigating beyond that is much more foggy.

In total agreement with you about Farmer and Zelazny, don't know the others too well.

Poul Anderson and even someone as popular as Silverberg might benefit from some sort of reading order curated by critics.

Yeah, those two as well.

Also, another thing that fascinates me is writers who are generally regarded as trash yet people say they do have good work buried among their output: Piers Anthony and Brian Lumley.

I'm curious about Anthony's Firefly because people say its unbelievably fucked up and offensive.

Man even *I* couldn’t bring myself to slog through everything of Silverbob’s.

Xp

But yet you show no such scruples with Michael Moorcock.

Did Moorcock write many duds? The reason I didn't include Vance and Tanith Lee is that people generally say they didn't have any real duds, although some of the Vance books really offend some people for other reasons.

I thought Andre Norton was all duds. Was I wrong?

There is definitely Moorcock stuff I cant slog through! Corum, Hawkmoon, those Mars books...

I thought the same thing as James M.