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

thanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLlj_GeKniA

omg

Lmao

Maybe we should poll that

Thats from... 1993?

(A Cybernaut I Should Turn to Be)

Simak was such a weirdo: https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2020/02/08/book-review-the-werewolf-principle-clifford-d-simak-1967/#more-19629

Dow- Again ashamed to admit that aside from some articles written by him, I haven't started on Stableford yet, so it's questionable that I own 5 novels by him (some were charity shop finds and some might have been going scarce).

He's written all kinds. He's a specialist in biological hard SF; he's done a fair amount of stuff in the vein of Kim Newman's Anno Dracula and Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, sometimes with characters, writers and trends even more obscure and out of fashion; he written a bunch of Warhammer and vampire/werewolf stuff in the 90s for cash but it's some of his most acclaimed work; he done a lot of decadent, Lovecraftian and dying earth stuff.

I was originally going to start with Curse Of The Coral Bride but I want to read all my Clark Ashton Smith first (it's a sort of tribute).

Then I was going to start with Empire Of Fear (his most popular book) and Young Blood, but they're quite long and I've been getting plenty of vampires recently.

But right now I'm decided on Cassandra Complex (the start of a bio-tech series that was published out of order, but can seemingly be read in any order) and his anthology Scientific Romance (pre-pulp writers from france, usa and uk). Maybe then some of his Maurice Renard, Jean Lorrain and Jacques Spitz translations.

Walking Shadow was chosen by Pringle for 100 Best Novels and Cassandra Complex was in Di Filippo/Broderick's 101 Best Novels.

I found these two overviews extremely helpful.
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/stableford_brian_m
http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=stableford_brian_m

Are those two (noticeably? completely?) different?

I thought so. Second is much shorter.

First one's his SF, second one's his fantasy work.

Much more colorful and appealing track record than expected, Robert! I've read a few things, incl. a whole novel, that I can't remember the titles of, only left with faint impression of work way too reined in: maybe he was overcompensating for vampire/werewolf etc.? The Scientific Romance anth def up my alley, will check for that, thanks.

There's also this one coming next month that looks really cool.
https://blackcoatpress.com/forthcoming-weird-fiction-in-france.html

And this which really exemplifies what I said about his delving into forgotten trends
https://blackcoatpress.com/fiction-tales-of-enchantment-and-disenchantment.html
He's written fanfiction about some of these writers and their creations.

Awes---although will have to think about digesting 38 fay stories in one slab---but that other anth---!

https://thebedlamfiles.com/fiction/aniara/

Sounds interesting

https://www.abc-clio.com/Praeger/product.aspx?pc=A5676C
http://www.nerds-feather.com/2020/02/interview-jess-nevins-author-of-horror.html

This should be impressive. His previous books are very highly praised and extensive.

There was an opera of Aniara composed by Karl Blomdahl, it’s really cool actually. Some bits got used in 2001 iirc.

Nevins is a good 'un, loved his LOEG annotations.

I am reading Foundation and good Lord the writing is abysmal.

Yeah I tried awhile ago and just couldnt

He makes Andy Weir read like Faulkner!

^Brutal

I tried This Is How You Lose The Time War, it was not to my taste. The prose was too precious and there was no forward momentum.

mentioned on the other general reading thread but adding here cuz why not - M. John Harrison's latest short story collection, "You Should Come With Me Now" is quite good. Looks like some of the shorter pieces were posted on his blog, but large majority of it is unfamiliar to me. Stylistically diverse, occasionally dense and/or elliptical, much of it in that peculiar liminal space he specializes in that is both very British and somewhere between horror, sf, and idk magical realism... or something? Good stuff.

some of it is very Ballardian

A recent plot summary of Gibson's new Agency lured me, although I'm not a fan. Also cautiously sniffing around this (March 31 trade pb/ebook), as linked from tor newsletter:
(Alex Irvine's) Anthropocene Rag is "a rare distillation of nanotech, apocalypse, and mythic Americana into a heady psychedelic brew."—Nebula and World Fantasy award-winning author Jeffrey Ford

In the future United States, our own history has faded into myth and traveling across the country means navigating wastelands and ever-changing landscapes.

The country teems with monsters and artificial intelligences try to unpack their own becoming by recreating myths and legends of their human creators. Prospector Ed, an emergent AI who wants to understand the people who made him, assembles a ragtag team to reach the mythical Monument City.
Also:
WEEK ONE (March 3)
Docile—K.M. Szpara (Tor.com Publishing)

To be a Docile is to be kept, body and soul, for the uses of the owner of your contract. To be a Docile is to forget, to disappear, to hide inside your body from the horrors of your service. To be a Docile is to sell yourself to pay your parents’ debts and buy your children’s future. Elisha Wilder’s family has been ruined by debt, handed down to them from previous generations. His mother never recovered from the Dociline she took during her term as a Docile, so when Elisha decides to try and erase the family’s debt himself, he swears he will never take the drug that took his mother from him. Too bad his contract has been purchased by Alexander Bishop III, whose ultra-rich family is the brains (and money) behind Dociline and the entire Office of Debt Resolution. When Elisha refuses Dociline, Alex refuses to believe that his family’s crowning achievement could have any negative side effects—and is determined to turn Elisha into the perfect Docile without it.
Some of these other plot presentations (pretty detailed for "summaries") tend to make my eyes hurt, but these eyes is old (not sorry_:
https://www.tor.com/2020/02/25/all-the-new-science-fiction-books-arriving-in-march/

Description of new M. John v appealing also, have only read him in occasional anth.

currently reading The Weapon Shops Of Isher, because i hate myself.

you can tell it's the 7000s because they don't have mirrors, they have energy mirrors. They also have a machine called "the Pp machine".

haha Van Vogt's appeal eludes me, what I have read of his has been v frustrating

like Dow, Gibson doesn't really appeal to me much anymore, surprised at his relatively loyal ILX fanbase

i recently reread neuromancer and count zero and they are still really, really good, good enough that i'm planning to keep going. the recent LRB piece made a strong case for gibson as Major Author

that said the 50 pages of the peripheral i read were kinda bad

i really liked 'this is how you lose the time war' but yes it is precious

Gibson's 80s work was seminal and massively influential and yet I viscerally hated both the concept and execution of Virtual Light and Idoru so much that I've never given him another change.

the last time I cracked open Neuromancer, which was a few months ago, it just felt kinda corny but I think it's just acquired a lot of baggage for me over the years. Prefer Sterling at this point tbh (even though he burned out in the 90s too imo)

Sterling! Always look fwd to his anthologized stories (the only way I've read them) because never know of his kneejerk "punk" attitude is going to come on and remain all glib and half-assed hipster---or if his artful alternate voice will (just in time) slip on through to the other side, to leave me hanging and filling in the gaps, with a buzz that lasts awhile. Kind of his own worst enemy, but it kind of works for him--storywise, anyway. The only longer work I've read is the one about the old people dominating culter, --b-but they're all disgustingly rich; what about the rest of us, eh? Oh well maybe tongue-in-cheek, but didn't hold my interest.
So damn old I remember getting a buzz from WG's "New Rose Hotel" in Omni, but some others seemed instantly dated, and think it was Count Zero, as serialized in Asimov's, where he really seemed to be folding in elements of smoggy 70s made-for-TV "movies, " which put me off: in the tradition of clunky and clinical SF idea-mongers, but grubbier----that may all be wrong, but that's where I stopped. But this new one, h'mmm.

Sterling's range of ideas is broader than Gibson's imo, and some of his best short fiction has left an indelible mark on my psyche, particularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_(novelette) and "The Moral Bullet"

Shakey posts reminding that there are multiple places in the archives where Martin Skidmore basically calls Asimov the worst stylist and M. John Harrison the best.

calling Asimov a "stylist" at all seems like a misnomer

Heh, fair enough, but
Prose Stylist

And this, although the relevant post is now above the zing fold: Science Fiction : search and destroy

i reread the foundation trilogy a few years ago and not only is it terrible writing, he doesn't have the chops to make the psychohistorical path plausible. cool ideas, too bad about the rest

Still like Gibson a lot, but Agency is just a lot of running around to no real purpose. At least it avoids using the same plot it feels he's done over and over again, whereby some rich person improbably sends an odd savant on a quest to locate the origins of some vaguely artistic Macguffin.

This Is How I Win (The Time War)

I'm bracing myself for Van Vogt, not any time soon but I'm sure it's something that needs to be done and a good chance I'll like some of it.

I've heard that Sterling once called Mary Doria Russell the Shania Twain of SF to her face in a panel. Rude.

Yeah, see, you never know with that guy (although such a comparison is not necessarily such a putdown, unless he explained how he meant it that way). On the other hand, once turned on BookTV just in time to see him address a group of librarians on digitalization: "Who'd wanna rely on this? "(ruffles book pages), "When they could have this?" (snaps CD-R, then the latest thing)

I'm pretty sure he meant it as an insult, it was at a time when many science fiction people were getting really pissed about what they perceived as mainstream fiction dilettantes getting undue attention for mediocre work (most recent time was the hubbub over Ian McEwan). Jeff Vandermeer written about it somewhere and said that Russell had more genre background than Sterling had assumed. Her novel polarized people a bit.

Interview with Gwyneth Jones. Half of the interview is about Joanna Russ but the rest is about her new collection, videogames and the Bold As Love series reprinted in SF Masterworks series soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aQIEehLuRo

Russell's novel seemed to borrow a bit too heavily from James Blish, as I recall, plus it had the absurd thing of people on a starship packing extra supplies in case time dilation didn't actually exist.

https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2020/01/copter-crash-isabel-fall-and-the-transgender-sf-debate/
Interesting times.

Back onto Joanna Russ, this time the collection "Zanzibar Cat", which appears to cover a broad swathe of the 70s and a scattering of other pieces, a couple I've read before. A worshipful foreword by Marge Piercy. As with the collection I read a few months ago, the stylistic breadth and the humor are really striking, it seems like she really stretched out in shorter fiction as opposed to her novels. So far:
- Nebula-winning "When it Changed" is brief but dense, theme is adjacent to "The Female Man" but posits the (re)introduction of men to an all-female colony as a kind of "first contact" scenario; the interactions with the male explorers are so well rendered.
- "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand" is a relatively straight Jules Verne homage, although there is a feminist undertone in the titular protagonist's fate (forbidden any further "voyages" and compelled to deny she ever took any at all by her oppressive husband).
- "Soul of a Servant" delves into racial politics, specifically assimilation, in a quasi-medieval scenario.

"New" old stories by Octavia Butler coming soonish:
https://subterraneanpress.com/news/announcing-unexpected-stories-by-octavia-e-ebutler/