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

Downbelow Station won the Hugo, or Nebula? I always tend to pick award winners up when I see them, so have that, unread. Not that SF award winners are always 'classic', but trying to hack a way through the huge, still largely uncharted swamp of the genre, awards are, for me, at least some kind of working guide, however divorced from the actual terrain once stepped through.

Re: Aldiss. I think I've already noted on this thread, just how insanely prolific he was - up there were the Silverbergs, Andersons etc in terms of sheer productivity. And I can see why he got a lot published - even when the actual story isn't up to much, Aldiss rarely dips below a certain functional elegance, and he doesn't often descend into pure cliche or melodrama either (tho' I'm sure there are examples of such dotted throughout his career.) And when he's on song, he's really very top tier SF - Greybeard, for example, is easily one of the ten best SF novels I've ever read, brilliantly structured - and overall has a good or better hit rate than most any other genre bigname you care to toss into the mix.

Ward Fowler otm throughout post

James Sallis provides an extended review of The Water Cure, by Sophie MacKintosh, with intriguing excerpts

Don't bother, it's a thinly imagined book that isn't very good.

Re Cherryh, have a soft-spot for the vividly-imagined gritty day-to-day life on a space station stuff in 'Rimrunners'. Years ago, when trying to work out what the title of this book was (I'd read it from the library and then forgotten), and faced with the bewildering size of Cherryh's bibliography, I emailed her to describe the plot and ask which book I'd read. She was kind enough to reply with the info and without abusing me.

Cherryh!

I just finished the first of four books in the Morgaine omnibus and it's very good (sword & sorcery peppered with epic fantasy and time travel). Will write a more detailed review when I finish the whole fourogy. First book is from 1975 and also interesting because the epic fantasy boom was two years later, but already she was into the deep history stuff. Bits of it very probably inspired by Elric.

Here reviews by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy and Adam Roberts (watch out as the latter includes a ton of spoilers and slightly exaggerates the monsters, because you barely see them)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/274588056
https://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/gate-of-ivrel-cj-cherryh/

I've heard that 40,000 In Gehenna is one of many standalones in Alliance-Union. Got the impression that Cyteen, Faded Sun trilogy and Angel With A Sword are highpoints. I found her Dreaming Tree omnibus in Oxfam this week.

cyteen is on my shelf but it's fuckin huge! been enjoying the mass market papaerbacks on my commute. been buying old mass markets on ebay for basically nothing, my lois mcmaster bujold shelf groans

Bujold seems to answer every question she gets on goodreads and answers even what looks like obvious spambot questions. Someone asked her why and she gave this great answer (I wish I could find) about not being too presumptuous about those questions, which might be genuine questions from unusual varieties of people. She's amazingly patient.

https://www.theincomparable.com/hoarse/34/

Want to listen to this after I've finished Morgaine.

The only Bujold I've read is Memory, which I carried on about way upthread---still struck by how strong and translucently layered it is, how strong a stand-alone read it makes, from deep in series, with seamless backstory bits, just enough of those---amazeballs am I! (And it seems like a crucial transition in Miles V.'s life, which she did not fumble.)

the first 40 pages of downbelow station are a very dry description of interstellar trade policies.

yeah i did not make it past this

https://www.tor.com/2019/10/22/science-fictional-rulers-from-undying-emperors-to-starlike-sovereigns/

Interesting thread about rulers and systems of government.

silkpunk

wot

Usually set in something like centuries old east asia. I think Ken Liu coined it, and if he didn't, he is a famous example of someone who writes it.

refreshingly diverse list anyway, might check a couple of them out.

Although as one commenter says, they are mostly Tor books but I don't think Nicoll is under that pressure.

I use cyberpunk, splatterpunk and grudgingly acknowledge steampunk just because you cant quite avoid it. But if it doesn't have a sufficiently punk attitude or aesthetic, I say you have no business adding "punk" to the name of your genre. It makes genre names really fucking boring too.

Yeah, seems like a meaningless suffix at this point

Like you probably didn’t even notice that all my posts on this thread were Blecchpunk.

Kelly Link Is Punk

Judy Merril is a Runt

Went to the Futurian club and both got drunk

And oh I don’t know why
Oh I don’t know why
Sci-fi
Oh yeah
Sci-fi
Oh yeah

Multiverse
Same as the first

Haha

This Joanna Russ short story collection I got from the library, "The Hidden Side of the Moon", has been something of a revelation for me. Having only read the few novels of hers that are widely available (The Female Man, We Who Are About To..., etc.) it's been pretty eye-opening to read such a stylistically wide-ranging set of works, and also to realize that not everything she wrote was shot through with that almost paralyzing anger and nihilism that pops up in her longer works. Some of these stories are downright whimsical, others are impenetrable academic exercises, others border on magical realism, others are discursive meta-narratives on sci-fi itself, etc. "Window Dressing" has a fantastic opening hook ("Mannequins - as everyone knows or should know - have only one aim in life: to make some pervert fall in love with them."), "The Throwaways" is a very funny dialogue between two representatives of rival ideological factions in some near-future fashionista dystopia, "Mr. Wilde's Second Chance" a wry exploration of Wilde's trials in the after life. Way more humor and affection than I expected.

Lol I have the trade pb of Cyteen. It’s a doorstop. Probably read it 15 years ago and haven’t pulled it out since. Maybe I should.

Went through an obsessive Bujold/Vorkosigan phase last year. It was fun.

i only have two vorkosigans left (the two most recent) and i am torn between reading immediately or saving for a special occasion. also factoring in is the INSANE cover of "captain vorpatril's alliance" for commuting purposes

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51imJYWcztL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

haha

Lol

Bill Campbell on another Bunch collection
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/9667757

Kind of afraid to get his book because of the cover
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/796482720

I thought Cherryh was finished with Foreigner but there's a 20th book coming in January. I doubt I'll be going there but I do have the first book. I'm more interested in most of her other stuff.

Third Clark Ashton Smith collection (of the Night Shade collected stories series) seems a lot stronger than the previous ones, 80 pages in.

Don't remember if this was noted on the obituary thread.
https://www.blackgate.com/2019/10/28/michael-blumlein-june-28-1948-october-24-2019/

I'm fairly sure he had cancer for years. Some of his stuff was reprinted by Valancourt a while ago.

it's interesting what seems to be dominating the shelves these days (at least in my local bookstores):
- loads of YA fantasy type stuff
- emphasis on formerly marginalized voices: women, people of color, etc., including many authors who are clearly (and in some cases deservedly) being retroactively canonized but in prior eras could be really hard to find (Russ, LeGuin, Delaney, etc.) I just saw two - TWO! - copies of Francis Stevens' "The Heads of Cerberus", which would have been a totally impossible-to-find obscurity 10+ years ago.
- in contrast to this, the "big" white guy names of prior eras that still get stocked: Heinlein (lol why does this schmuck still get a pass), Asimov (the majority of his writing is terrible wtf), Herbert, Tolkien.
- Apart from PKD, who still seems to have some currency, it's like the 60s/70s/80s never happened, to say nothing of the 50s. No Wolfe(!), no Silverberg, no Ballard, no Moorcock, no Malzberg, etc.

how times change

Yup

also loads of more recent "big names" I don't give a shit about like Martin, Doctorow, Mieville, Bacalagupi, etc. It's sad to see what fluorishes in the market sometimes.

Still want to do a poll based one of those mini-catalogues of an old Ballantine paperback, say.

DO IT

Maybe this weekend

Would vote

This kind of thing doesn’t need to be scheduled like the big music polls, does it?

Lol no

- in contrast to this, the "big" white guy names of prior eras that still get stocked: Heinlein (lol why does this schmuck still get a pass)

― Οὖτις, Thursday, November 14, 2019 9:28 PM (yesterday)

i was laid up w/ flu a while ago and digging around for something easy to read and realized i had a copy of "stranger in a strange land" for some reason even though i'd never read it and didn't remember buying it. so, i read it. and hoo boy, that is...not a good book. i wonder how any ppl who pick it up now even finish it. it is genuinely weird to me that RAH's reputation is still as high as it is.

meant to write "i wonder how many ppl" but i guess "any ppl" works just as well

really pisses me off whenever 'grok' appears in a crossword

In UK bookshops - which basically means the Waterstones chain - the SF offering is generally a bit broader than the one Shakey describes. I think that's partly because most Waterstones stock at least some of Gollancz's SF Masterworks series, which of course includes classics from the fifties, sixties, seventies and earlier. PKD is always well represented, I think in part because his reputation in Europe was always higher than in the US, and because nowadays he scores as both a cult author and as the source for lots of movies and TV series. But yes, very little of the back catalogue of people like Silverberg, Salzburg, Sheckley etc etc is still in print here - maybe because a lot of it is so easy to source online?

Haven't read much Heinlein in the last thirty or so years, but would tentatively vouch for Puppet Masters, Door into Summer, some of the juveniles and short stories. Definitely a better stylist than Asimov - who isn't - although Asimov never had the same disastrous drop-off as the last thirty or so years of Heinlein's writing career.

like J.D. I too find the persistence of Heinlein in this market something of a mystery. I mean I find him interesting in a historical way, given his huge impact on the genre, but in the new woke age idg how this guy gets a pass (or is it that the "sad puppy" types see him as a forefather and they're propping up his rep? idk) Asimov was terrible as a stylist and notoriously handsy with the ladies but he wasn't nearly the sexist cryptofascist that Heinlein was.

It's also interesting to see what women/POCs *haven't* made the cut for canonization in the new era - Emshwiller, Wilhelm, CL Moore. Apart from the occasional copy of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever collection you never see anything else from Tiptree/Sheldon.

And for all its impact in the 80s, the OG cyberpunk guys have also been largely erased. Stephenson seems like something of an exception, but Sterling and Rucker have disappeared, and Jeter (if he's available at all) is a footnote to steampunk. The occasional Gibson book still sneaks through, but I don't see lavish reprints of his original trilogy or anything.

erased from where? Online discussions, critical surveys, bookstores?

Reminds me, this fairly recent Library of America anth is in local library and bookstore:

The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin
Edited by Lisa Yaszek
"

Space-opera heroines, gender-bending aliens, post-apocalyptic pregnancies, changeling children, interplanetary battles of the sexes, and much more: a groundbreaking new collection of classic American science fiction by women from the 1920s to the 1960s
"

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents
Contributors

Introduction by Lisa Yaszek

CLARE WINGER HARRIS: The Miracle of the Lily | 1928
LESLIE F. STONE: The Conquest of Gola | 1931
C. L. MOORE: The Black God’s Kiss | 1934
LESLIE PERRI: Space Episode | 1941
JUDITH MERRIL: That Only a Mother | 1948
WILMAR H. SHIRAS: In Hiding | 1948
KATHERINE MACLEAN: Contagion | 1950
MARGARET ST. CLAIR: The Inhabited Men | 1951
ZENNA HENDERSON: Ararat | 1952
ANDREW NORTH: All Cats Are Gray | 1953
ALICE ELEANOR JONES: Created He Them | 1955
MILDRED CLINGERMAN: Mr. Sakrison’s Halt | 1956
LEIGH BRACKETT: All the Colors of the Rainbow | 1957
CAROL EMSHWILLER: Pelt | 1958
ROSEL GEORGE BROWN: Car Pool | 1959
ELIZABETH MANN BORGESE: For Sale, Reasonable | 1959
DORIS PITKIN BUCK: Birth of a Gardener | 1961
ALICE GLASER: The Tunnel Ahead | 1961
KIT REED: The New You | 1962
JOHN JAY WELLS & MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY: Another Rib | 1963
SONYA DORMAN: When I Was Miss Dow | 1966
KATE WILHELM: Baby, You Were Great | 1967
JOANNA RUSS: The Barbarian | 1968
JAMES TIPTREE, JR.: The Last Flight of Dr. Ain | 1969
URSULA K. LE GUIN: Nine Lives | 1969

Biographical Notes
https://www.loa.org/books/583-the-future-is-female-25-classic-science-fiction-stories-by-women-from-pulp-pioneers-to-ursula-k-le-guin

Agree with Ward that the early Heinleins seemed pretty decent, when I was a juvenile (this was before the term Young Adult was applied). Stranger In A Strange Land was where I got off the bus.

bookstores

I was referring strictly to bookstores in my city

It's also interesting to see what women/POCs *haven't* made the cut for canonization in the new era - Emshwiller, Wilhelm, CL Moore.

― Οὖτις, Friday, November 15, 2019 4:06 PM

I don't think there's much interest there, sadly. If it gone before Norton (and isn't Mary Shelley), it probably wont have much chance but reviving interest in any author that old is tough for most demographics. Oddly enough, puppygaters rep hard for CL Moore and Brackett, but puppygaters are too small in number to have any impact on bookshelves.

As Ward says, Gollancz covers a lot of stuff like Wolfe and Silverberg but Moorcock seems to be slipping away (I still see the newest series though).

How well is DAW books stocked in America? Because they're the American publisher I most wish had more presence in the UK.

Probably said this a year ago but Heinlein is interesting to me because he really polarizes people in unpredictable directions. The most lefty person I know in the spec fiction circles loves Heinlein.