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

From the back cover: “This stunning novel marks the arrival of a major SF talent. Mercedes Nights is a wildly inventive novel imbued with the unreality and manic energy of Philip K. Dick, but wholly original in concept and in the scope of its author’s imagination.

A black market cloning operation plots to sell duplicates of Mercedes Night, the hottest vidstar around, to clients with enough money to indulge in such pleasures. But the clones have minds of their own—and soon the real Mercedes must come to grips with the existence of several exact duplicates of herself. The characters whose lives are touched by the Mercedes Nights include the twisted and paranoid Arthur Horstmeyer, who waits for the day he can evolve past humanity; Lancelot, the handheld intelligent computer; and the mysterious Magnus, owned of Sub-Space Corporation and unseen manipulator of people and events. And drawing them all together is Mercedes Night—one of the most captivating, sharp-edged, unforgettable characters in all of science fiction.

Unique, ironic, and absorbing, Mercedes Nights is a novel that will be talked about for years to come.”

I looked it up in Pringle's Ultimate Guide to SF:

"A star comedian is kidnapped, cloned and sold as a sort of living sex doll. This turns out to be the front-shop operation for some political machinations. There is a parallel strand about travel to the stars by what seem to be mystical means. An energetic first novel." (1 star)

And his second novel, My Father Immortal (1989):
"Three newborn babies are cast into space and, as they grow towards puberty, machines teach them of their strange past... A complex tale of suspended animation and post-nuclear horrors: crude in place, but powerful." (2 stars)

Οὖτις - I think ERBurroughs was only a youthful enthusiasm for Moorcock. But like other writers, perhaps saw more potential in his style to be developed.

Jon says "RJG"

I'm reading this as Robert John Godfrey.

Daniel says "This might be reductive, but maybe that sort of dismissiveness is a bad trait in a critic but a good one in an author? In that you kinda have to have a lot of faith in the idea that what you're doing is to some degree the "right" way."

I've always wondered about this. Nick Cave said something along these lines. Personally, I've never liked it. I believe that eventually big blind spots strangles artists when they get older.

Just far too many dismissive provocateur statements going around these days.

Another artist, Helmut Wenske used a lot of art for both albums and books. He was most associated with the band Nektar and did quite a few PK Dick, Lem and Strugatsky covers.

https://iansales.com/2013/06/11/your-epic-fantasy-list-smells-of-elderberries/

Ian Sales again. The epic fantasy lists he links to are entertaining enough but they're more concerned with speculating widespread influence than quality (still enjoyable though). His selections all seem to be his favorites.
Ricardo Pinto's interesting sounding trilogy is currently being revised into a longer series, he says "I have broken the Stone Dance into seven rather than three parts. There are practical reasons for this, but the artistic reasons are the clincher."
More info here..
https://www.ricardopinto.com/2018/08/15/stone-dance-second-edition/

I totally agree with Sales that the film/tv awards should be done away with in literary awards. Some of the recent nominations and winners are a bit embarrassing.
Rich Horton was understandably upset that Alec Nevala-Lee's landmark non-fiction Astounding was beaten at the Hugos by an online archive of fanfiction. See the comments here...
https://www.blackgate.com/2019/08/24/john-w-campbell-was-a-racist-and-a-loon-a-response-to-jeannette-ngs-campbell-award-acceptance-speech/
I had a look around this archive and was amazed how much music fanfiction there was (both of band members and the worlds contained in their music), but as with all the crossovers of prose fiction, comics, screen and videogame characters, I think a lot of this is done for laughs or outdoing each other at unlikely crossovers (Hodgson's Night Land mixed with some tv show I hadn't heard of). The Burzum/Mayhem sex stories might be serious but I didn't have the patience to verify.

I am finally reading a fantasy novel.

THE TROLLTOOTH WARS, the first Fighting Fantasy novel, by Steve Jackson:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1129762.The_Trolltooth_Wars

Because of nostalgia?

I tried to read "In the Ocean of the Night" by Gregory Benford but the attractive successful astronaut and his polyamorous relationship with two attractive successful women took up over half the book and was insufferable, even when one of them was stricken with a life threatening incurable illness.

From a goodreads review: white british dude whose only personality trait is getting irrationally angry at complete strangers about religion goes from being in a polyamorous relationship with two women to getting a petite Japanese manic pixie dream girl to fall in love with him via impressing her with weed? and being incredibly patronizing towards her.

Now I'm sad I didn't get as far as the japanese manic pixie dream girl.

Because I found it in a 2nd hand bookshop for £1 ... and yes, I go way way back with actual FFGs. A FF novel is of course a different entity, but it has fun with using some of the same places and names from books like THE CITADEL OF CHAOS.

I have a sense that Jackson was occasionally trying to do some quirky things, eg: with a character called a Chervah who is like an elf / pixie character who is vegetarian and teetotal, always trying to get the hero to eat health foods. The book sometimes reminds me of the corny humour of Fantasy people.

I read Gregory Benford's most recent novel, and criticised it on Goodreads, and he started bitching at me in the comments

lol

Hahaha

Just started my first R A Lafferty collection, the intro-heavy one referred to above.

and he started bitching at me in the comments

i saw that when you posted it before, your response was considered and otm!

Cheers. If it's a bad idea for a writer to respond to a reviewer, it's surely a much much worse idea for them to respond to some random dickhead on Goodreads.

Um, link please?

i tried the Traitor Baru Cormorant and i couldn't get into it. it was interesting but a little idk schematic or something. half felt like someone narrating their last catan game to me or something

Too dumb to work out how to link to a review on goodreads. Reproduced here, with apologies to all:

Me: Very weird and unsatisfying alternative-history novel about the Manhattan Project in which Benford's Mary Sue hero, his real-life father-in-law Karl Cohen, gets to save the world, minimises geniuses like Oppenheimer, Szilard and Fermi, gets to tell off and outsmart Heisenberg and Groves, etc, and is fawned over by people like Rommel. Not without some merit (though the prose is functional at best), but still very odd. Like an incredibly ambitious present for his wife that somehow got published for a wide audience by mistake.

Gregory Benford: this is simply an ignorant personal attack, not a review

Me: No, it's an honest and accurate summary of my response to the book I paid for, read, and was disappointed by. An ignorant personal attack would have used terms of abuse and given the book one star.

otm

Bunch of fanfiction that confused me at first then the next second made total sense: Phantom Thread.

Dover reissued Nine Horrors And A Dream and The Shapes Of Midnight months ago.
https://doverpublications.ecomm-search.com/search?keywords=Joseph%20Payne%20Brennan

so, has anyone else read Lidnsay's "Voyage to Arcturus"? This book is insane. The closest point of comparison I can think of is Silverbob's "Son of Man" but the tone is much more allegorical and also violently disturbing (there is a lot of murdering). Granted, I can't really make out what the allegory *is* in any given scene per se, but it's written with this sort of weighty spiritual tone that gives the impression everything the protagonist is going through is intended to reveal some hidden truth, even though it's being cloaked in really bizarre imagery and seemingly random plot machinations. Everything - the way the characters interact, the descriptions of the landscape and weather, the physical transformations - has this psychedelically grotesque quality.

That sounds deeply unpleasant

well, it's not really gross or explicit in any way, so it's not that unpleasant as much as it just kind of disorienting. I mean, it was written in 1920, so there's a certain kind of archaic stodginess to it. It's just like ... well here's an excerpt:

Other creatures sported so wildly, in front of his very eyes, that they became of different “kingdoms” altogether. For example, a fruit was lying on the ground, of the size and shape of a lemon, but with a tougher skin. He picked it up, intending to eat the contained pulp; but inside it was a fully formed young tree, just on the point of bursting its shell. Maskull threw it away upstream. It floated back toward him; by the time he was even with it, its downward motion had stopped and it was swimming against the current. He fished it out and discovered that it had sprouted six rudimentary legs.

Maskull sang no paeans of praise in honour of the gloriously overcrowded valley. On the contrary, he felt deeply cynical and depressed. He thought that the unseen power—whether it was called Nature, Life, Will, or God—that was so frantic to rush forward and occupy this small, vulgar, contemptible world, could not possess very high aims and was not worth much. How this sordid struggle for an hour or two of physical existence could ever be regarded as a deeply earnest and important business was beyond his comprehension The atmosphere choked him, he longed for air and space. Thrusting his way through to the side of the ravine, he began to climb the overhanging cliff, swinging his way up from tree to tree.

Colin Wilson wrote a study of his works.

it's very phantasmagorical and portentous so that's not surprising

I really want to get a copy of Colin Wilson’s 60s book on music - apparently he was an early proponent of Bax (very few were at that stage)

was sick last week, so i re-read zelazny's two amber series for the first time in like 25 years. easy and fun

Another Colin Wilson thing
https://thebedlamfiles.com/nonfiction/ken-russell-a-director-in-search-of-a-hero/

so how did a genre that (at least in its initial decades) prided itself on extrapolating many of its trappings from science (rockets, atomic power, space exploration, mass communication, etc.) get so besotted with something as un-scientific as telepathy/psychic powers? Seems like it was a common trope from the 40s through at least the 70s, but where did it come from? cuz it wasn't Popular Mechanics.

Campbell, no? Before he got into dianetics.

that's what I'm wondering, is it really largely down to one guy? Residual fascination w previous century mesmerists and table-knockers?

also Rhine's book about his ESP experiments came out in 1934 and wasn't debunked for quite a while

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasensory_Perception_(book)

interesting, did not know about that book thx

William Hope Hodgson - Carnacki The Ghost Finder

I'm a big fan of Hodgson's other major works and I found this a bit disappointing. A lot of his fans rate Carnacki very highly but then so many people love strong detective elements in their horror and I never have, so far. But like everyone else today, I don't welcome faked supernatural Scooby Doo explanations but I do try to keep an open mind about this approach and the early stories even warm you up for this possibility.
4 stories are genuinely supernatural, 2 stories are fakes, 2 are a mixture of faked and genuine supernatural, 1 story is a completely different genre (about book swapping/fraud, would have been more appropriate for his Captain Gault stories).

I think "The Horse Of The Invisible" is particularly spoiled by the fakery, could have been a much better story without the daft and very unconvincing explanations. The only one where the fakery brought some real interest to me was "The Searcher Of The End House" but that's largely because the ghosts were left intact.

Many of the stories are a bit too drawn out and have too much of Carnacki arranging his electric apparatus.
"The Haunted Jarvee" tried my patience the most of them but is somewhat redeemed by its later scenes, a highlight of the book. "The Hog" is the best thing in the collection, sharing with House On The Borderland the threat of pigs from the depths of the earth; the concept is more developed than the other stories and has an interesting science fictional origin for the monsters but the story would have been a lot stronger if it were a tad shorter.

After reading more of Hodgson's characters, I'm seeing humour in places I previously wouldn't have.

I'm very curious to see how a few of these stories are condensed in Nightshade's Dream Of X collection.

"Out you go!"

Pretty cool cover gimmick
https://littleredreviewer.wordpress.com/2019/09/20/special-edition-six-for-friday/

Read the script of Clair Noto's unmade THE TOURIST, supposedly the greatest science-fiction movie never to escape develoment hell, and it's about on a par with the worst episodes of Torchwood.

What is Hodgson's other major creation? Think I only know about Carnacki, from LOEG - bought a cheap Wordsworth Classics anthology of his stories but haven't read (story of my library's life).

I bought that Vandemeer Fantasy doorstop after hearing about it on this thread. Less humungous than their Weird Fiction tome, which I actually finished. They end at Tolkien, i.e. fantasy's commodification into a genre in a marketing sense. Very difficult for me to think of what "fantasy" is before that - where the borders lie with, like, fairy tales and such. The Vandemeers seem to think the origins are mostly germanic.

Yeah, that's the premise of Douglas A. Anderson's Tales Before Tolkien---or at least, while of course pointing out that Mr. T. himself was a deep scholar of Beowulf etc,, and mentioning ancient Greek etc., he has to draw the line somewhere for a non-doorstop, and starts from Tieck, eventually goes on to Brits: he says he's picked stories that Tolkien discussed in his correspondence and notebooks, others he mentioned, others that he prob knew, and a few he may not have known about, but hey. Contents: (ends with one from the rarely seen, yet notoriously and proudly something David Lindsay)
https://vufind.carli.illinois.edu/vf-icc/Record/icc_87441/TOC Seemed like a very edutaining collection to me, but maybe duh to someone who really knows fantasy.
I did miss Estimated Time of Arrival Hoffman who can show up on the expressway to my skull, but maybe his approach is different from what the editor was going for---also missed the no-anesthetic woodcarvings of Lucy Clifford, like this:
http://seanconnors.net/eng3903/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/The-New-Mother.pdf

Oh yeah, I'd heard about that anthology before, thanks for bringing to my attention.

The Vandermeer book has ETA Hoffman. Also the Grimm Bros.

Dan Simmons is a twat:

http://file770.com/dan-simmons-criticized-for-remarks-about-thunberg/

Daniel - I was referring to his 4 novels, although not everyone would consider them all major works. 2 of them are the sort of supernatural sea stories he did a lot of. But Carnacki, House On The Borderland and The Night Land are worlds that numerous other writers have played with.

http://file770.com/tiptree-name-will-be-removed-from-award/

Time for a thread related to Arthur C. Clarke and the allegations of pedophilia against him. This is response to someone who tweeted me wondering if the allegations against Clarke had been debunked. All of this is relevant b/c one of the genre's major awards is named after him.

— Jason Sanford (@jasonsanford) September 27, 2019

that's a dumb reason for renaming the Tiptree award imo

I don't like it either but some say the distress it causes people is reason enough. Difficult for me to come round to that and I doubt I will. Really not enough evidence to judge her.

Amazed Bram Stoker hasn't had his award name changed yet (Lair Of The White Worm is said to be extremely racist).

Not that I'd ask for Stoker award to be changed, but I'd be more sympathetic than with the Tiptree issue.

as i said upthread, i don't think the charges against clarke are very credible -- the evidence cited in that twitter thread is very thin, and the quotes from that daily mirror story are frankly unbelievable. sanford also seems unaware that sri lanka had some of the harshest anti-LGBT laws in the world till fairly recently, which places some of the stuff he cites in a different context.

has anybody else here read Matthew Derby's "Super Flat Times"? seems super obscure. he has yet to write anything else, he doesn't get an entry in the sf encyclopedia, he got great reviews but appears to have sank without a ripple. too bad. was idly thumbing through my copy last night and it seems like such a lost gem.

New to me. There's also a collaborative novel and a bunch of short stories (some in Unstuck magazine).

Quite cool that Valancourt is so eager to take suggestions for possible reprints. I wish there was a more sff orientated publisher like that because horror has been very well reprinted in the last two decades.

It's a shame that a Bob Leman collection has been in development hell or some sort of unknown limbo for several years.

I’ve read Super Flat Times and it’s awesome.