Bruce Dazzling wrote:Camp Concentration, by Thomas M. Disch has to be on that list, as do any number of Stephen Baxter books.
Carry on.
Twyla gave me this book last I saw her and I have not read it yet! Adios, RI. Picking it up now!
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by 82_28 » Tue Dec 06, 2011 6:23 am
Bruce Dazzling wrote:Camp Concentration, by Thomas M. Disch has to be on that list, as do any number of Stephen Baxter books.
Carry on.
by gnosticheresy_2 » Tue Dec 06, 2011 6:32 am
Bruce Dazzling wrote:Camp Concentration, by Thomas M. Disch has to be on that list, as do any number of Stephen Baxter books.
Carry on.
by petron99 » Tue Dec 06, 2011 10:32 am
by Plutonia » Tue Dec 06, 2011 5:18 pm
by DrEvil » Tue Dec 06, 2011 8:37 pm
). I also think Lord of light by Zelazny should be on there, and A Fire upon the deep should be higher.
by Hammer of Los » Tue Dec 06, 2011 10:14 pm
Plutonia wrote:I'm also surprised that I've read so many of the ones that have - including Fritz Leiber's Fafard and Grey Mouser stories, lol! I'd read those again in a heartbeat!
DrEvil wrote:I also think Lord of Light by Zelazny should be on there.
by Plutonia » Tue Dec 06, 2011 11:04 pm
DrEvil wrote:After a quick count I've read 42 of the books on the list.
+1 for adding Peter Watts, but I'd go for Blindsight. Creepiest first contact story I ever read (with vampires. The non-sparkling awesome kind). And you forgot the part where part of his leg got eaten by flesh-eating bacteria (His blog has pictures
Watts' blog : http://www.rifters.com/crawl/
Hammer of Los wrote:..Plutonia wrote:I'm also surprised that I've read so many of the ones that have - including Fritz Leiber's Fafard and Grey Mouser stories, lol! I'd read those again in a heartbeat!
Rats live on no evil star!
Me too, me too! I have a nice first edition AD&D Deities and Demigods in slightly faded hardback here on my shelf, which has Newhon mythos as well as other copyrighted material like Elric of Melnibone. They took all the fictional sections out in later editions because of copyright infringement. Er, is that off topic?DrEvil wrote:I also think Lord of Light by Zelazny should be on there.
Damn right DrEvil, its the best thing Zelazny ever wrote. I must reread that one fer sure!
by barracuda » Wed Dec 07, 2011 12:39 am
petron99 wrote:Kinda off topic but I gotta ask.
I'm reading Stranger in a Strange Land right now (about 2/3 of the way through) and I still can't grok it's rightness. It seems to ramble on and it's not that cohesive. Spoiler ahead: Spoiler:For example, when Mike and Jill leave Jubal's they end up in a carnival? What the hell is that about?
I'm wondering if the problem is that I'm reading the uncut version that Heinlein first submitted to his editor. Perhaps much of the superfluousness was rooted out upon it's first printing. I don't know but I'm kind of turned off of Heinlein now.
by crikkett » Wed Dec 07, 2011 12:53 am
barracuda wrote:petron99 wrote:Kinda off topic but I gotta ask.
I'm reading Stranger in a Strange Land right now (about 2/3 of the way through) and I still can't grok it's rightness. It seems to ramble on and it's not that cohesive. Spoiler ahead: Spoiler:For example, when Mike and Jill leave Jubal's they end up in a carnival? What the hell is that about?
I'm wondering if the problem is that I'm reading the uncut version that Heinlein first submitted to his editor. Perhaps much of the superfluousness was rooted out upon it's first printing. I don't know but I'm kind of turned off of Heinlein now.
Honestly, Petrone, I understand your dismay at the "wandering in the desert" that Mike and Jill do, but it the lessons they learn there are played out when they "return to Jerusalem" in the final third of the book and relate to his deeper understanding of the methods of the Fosterite Church. Stranger is handicapped in some ways by its sheer prescience with regard to the manner in which the 1960's played out, I think. The times caught up with the book and were reflected in it, and then moved on. Nonetheless, the ending scenes of the book are among my favorite science fiction passages, and rightly have been coopted into our culture, even if this very cooption has rendered them cliche by repetition.
Somebody make the damn movie, please.
by Hugh Manatee Wins » Wed Dec 07, 2011 3:07 am
by vanlose kid » Wed Dec 07, 2011 3:52 am
Epic Pooh
© Michael Moorcock
Author's Note: 'Epic Pooh' was originally published as an essay by the BSFA, revised for its inclusion in the 1989 book Wizardry and Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy, and slightly revised again for this publication. It was written long before the publication and much-deserved success of Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy which, in my view, merits all the optimism I have expressed here. The essay did not attempt to deal with all fantasy, such as Alice in Wonderland or other children's fantasy, but only epic fantasy from its origins in romance poetry to the present day.
Certain highlighted phrases indicate additional comments from the author: mouse over the phrase to read the note.
Epic Pooh
Why is the Rings being widely read today? At a time when perhaps the world was never more in need of authentic experience, this story seems to provide a pattern of it. A businessman in Oxford told me that when tired or out of sorts he went to the Rings for restoration. Lewis and various other critics believe that no book is more relevant to the human situation. W. H. Auden says that it "holds up the mirror to the only nature we know, our own." As for myself I was rereading the Rings at the time of Winston Churchill's funeral and I felt a distinct parallel between the two. For a few short hours the trivia which normally absorbs us was suspended and people experienced in common the meaning of leadership, greatness, valor, time redolent of timelessness, and common traits. Men became temporarily human and felt the life within them and about. Their corporate life lived for a little and made possible the sign of renewal alter a realisation such as occurs only once or twice in a lifetime.
For a century at least the world has been increasingly demythologized. But such a condition is apparently alien to the real nature of men. Now comes a writer such as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and, as remythologizer, strangely warms our souls.
Clyde S. Kilby: "Meaning in the Lord of the Rings",
Shadows of Imagination, 1969
I have sometimes wondered how much the advent of steam influenced Victorian ballad poetry and romantic prose. Reading Dunsany, for instance, it often occurs to me that his early stories were all written during train journeys:
Up from the platform and onto the train
Got Welleran, Rollory and young Iraine.
Forgetful of sex and income tax
Were Sooranard, Mammolek, Akanax:
And in their dreams Dunsany's lord
Mislaid the communication cord.
The sort of prose most often identified with "high" fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft:One day when the sun had come back over the forest, bringing with it the scent of May, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow's fault, but it didn't matter very much; on such a day as this Christopher Robin whistled in a special way he had, and Owl came flying out of the Hundred Acre Wood to see what was wanted.
Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926
It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful. It is the tone of many forgotten British and American bestsellers, well-remembered children's books, like The Wind in the Willows, you often hear it in regional fiction addressed to a local audience, or, in a more sophisticated form, James Barrie (Dear Brutus, Mary Rose and, of course, Peter Pan). Unlike the tone of E.Nesbit (Five Children and It etc.), Richmal Crompton (the 'William' books) Terry Pratchett or the redoubtable J.K.Rowling, it is sentimental, slightly distanced, often wistful, a trifle retrospective; it contains little wit and much whimsy. The humour is often unconscious because, as with Tolkien, the authors take words seriously but without pleasure:One summer's evening an astonishing piece of news reached the Ivy Bush and Green Dragon. Giants and other portents on the borders of the Shire were forgotten for more important matters; Mr. Frodo was selling Bag End, indeed he had already sold it-to the Sackville-Bagginses!
"For a nice bit, too," said some. "At a bargain price," said others, "and that's more likely when Mistress Lobelia's the buyer." (Otho had died some years before, at the ripe but disappointed age of 102.)
Just why Mr. Frodo was selling his beautiful hole was even more debatable than the price...
The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954
I have been told it is not fair to quote from the earlier parts of The Lord of the Rings, that I should look elsewhere to find much better stuff so, opening it entirely at random, I find some improvement in substance and writing, but that tone is still there:
Pippin became drowsy again and paid little attention to Gandalf telling him of the customs of Gondor, and how the Lord of the City had beacons built on the tops of outlying hills along both borders of the great range, and maintained posts at these points where fresh horses were always in readiness to bear his errand-riders to Rohan in the North, or to Belfalas in the South. "It is long since the beacons of the North were lit," he said; "and in the ancient days of Gondor they were not needed, for they had the Seven Stones."
Pippin stirred uneasily.
The Return of the King, 1955
Tolkien does, admittedly, rise above this sort of thing on occasions, in some key scenes, but often such a scene will be ruined by ghastly verse and it is remarkable how frequently he will draw back from the implications of the subject matter. Like Chesterton, and other orthodox Christian writers who substituted faith for artistic rigour he sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalized in such fiction because traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo. They are a type familiar to anyone who ever watched an English film of the thirties and forties, particularly a war-film, where they represented solid good sense opposed to a perverted intellectualism. In many ways The Lord of the Rings is, if not exactly anti-romantic, an anti-romance. Tolkien, and his fellow "Inklings" (the dons who met in Lewis's Oxford rooms to read their work in progress to one another), had extraordinarily ambiguous attitudes towards Romance (and just about everything else), which is doubtless why his trilogy has so many confused moments when the tension flags completely. But he could, at his best, produce prose much better than that of his Oxford contemporaries who perhaps lacked his respect for middle-English poetry. He claimed that his work was primarily linguistic in its original conception, that there were no symbols or allegories to be found in it, but his beliefs permeate the book as thoroughly as they do the books of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, who, consciously or unconsciously, promoted their orthodox Toryism in everything they wrote. While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban, which is what leads some to associate them with a kind of Wagnerish hitlerism. I don't think these books are 'fascist', but they certainly don't exactly argue with the 18th century enlightened Toryism with which the English comfort themselves so frequently in these upsetting times. They don't ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what's best for us.
Continued . . .
http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953
by Freitag » Thu Dec 08, 2011 6:03 am
by justdrew » Thu Dec 08, 2011 7:07 am
justdrew wrote:here's some choice cuts... The rhythms of the spoken Bard should be evoked when reading... A proper rolling incantō; I used to have a terrible time finding the songs meter, better now.They hastened up the last slope, and stood breathless beside her. They bowed, but with a wave of her arm she bade them look round; and they looked out from the hill-top over lands under the morning. It was now as clear and far-seen as it had been veiled and misty when they stood upon the knoll in the Forest, which could now be seen rising pale and green out of the dark trees in the West. In that direction the land rose in wooded ridges, green, yellow, russet under the sun, beyond which lay hidden the valley of the Brandywine. To the South, over the line of the Withywindle, there was a distant glint like pale glass where the Brandywine River made a great loop in the lowlands and flowed away out of the knowledge of the hobbits. Northward beyond the dwindling downs the land ran away in flats and swellings of grey and green and pale earth-colours, until it faded into a featureless and shadowy distance. Eastward the Barrow-downs rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning, and vanished out of eyesight into a guess: it was no more than a guess of blue and a remote white glimmer blending with the hem of the sky, but it spoke to them, out of memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains.As they passed beyond the green field of the Tongue, the trees drew down to the river’s brink. Here and there golden leaves tossed and floated on the rippling stream. The air was very bright and still, and there was a silence, except for the high distant song of larks.
They turned a sharp bend in the river, and there, sailing proudly down the stream towards them, they saw a swan of great size. The water rippled on either side of the white breast beneath its curving neck. Its beak shone like burnished gold, and its eyes glinted like jet set in yellow stones; its huge white wings were half lifted. A music came down the river as it drew nearer; and suddenly they perceived that it was a ship, wrought and carved with elven-skill in the likeness of a bird. Two elves clad in white steered it with black paddles. In the midst of the vessel sat Celeborn, and behind him stood Galadriel, tall and white; a circlet of golden flowers was in her hair, and in her hand she held a harp, and she sang. Sad and sweet was the sound of her voice in the cool clear air:
I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:
Of wind I sang, a wind there came and in the branches blew.
Beyond the Sun, beyond the Moon, the foam was on the Sea,
And by the strand of Ilmarin there grew a golden Tree.
Beneath the stars of Ever-eve in Eldamar it shone,
In Eldamar beside the walls of Elven Tirion.
There long the golden leaves have grown upon the branching years,
While here beyond the Sundering Seas now fall the Elven-tears.
O Lórien! The Winter comes, the bare and leafless Day;
The leaves are falling in the stream, the River flows away.
O Lórien! Too long I have dwelt upon this Hither Shore
And in a fading crown have twined the golden elanor.
But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?
Aragorn stayed his boat as the Swan-ship drew alongside. The Lady ended her song and greeted them. ‘We have come to bid our last farewell,’ she said, ‘and to speed you with blessings from our land.’
‘Though you have been our guests,’ said Celeborn, ‘you have not yet eaten with us, and we bid you, therefore, to a parting feast, here between the flowing waters that will bear you far from Lórien.’
The Swan passed on slowly to the hythe, and they turned their boats and followed it. There in the last end of Egladil upon the green grass the parting feast was held; but Frodo ate and drank little, heeding only the beauty of the Lady and her voice. She seemed no longer perilous or terrible, nor filled with hidden power. Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.For about an hour they went on, silently, in single file, oppressed by the gloom and by the absolute stillness of the land, broken only now and again by the faint rumbling as of thunder far away or drumbeats in some hollow of the hills. Down from their hiding-place they went, and then turning south they steered as straight a course as Gollum could find across a long broken slope that leaned up towards the mountains. Presently, not far ahead, looming up like a black wall, they saw a belt of trees. As they drew nearer they became aware that these were of vast size, very ancient it seemed, and still towering high, though their tops were gaunt and broken, as if tempest and lightning-blast had swept across them, but had failed to kill them or to shake their fathomless roots.
‘The Cross-roads, yes,’ whispered Gollum, the first words that had been spoken since they left their hiding-place. ‘We must go that way.’ Turning eastward now, he led them up the slope; and then suddenly there it was before them: the Southward Road, winding its way about the outer feet of the mountains, until presently it plunged into the great ring of trees.
‘This is the only way,’ whispered Gollum. ‘No paths beyond the road. No paths. We must go to the Cross-roads. But make haste! Be silent!’
As furtively as scouts within the campment of their enemies, they crept down on to the road, and stole along its westward edge under the stony bank, grey as the stones themselves, and soft-footed as hunting cats. At length they reached the trees, and found that they stood in a great roofless ring, open in the middle to the sombre sky; and the spaces between their immense boles were like the great dark arches of some ruined hall. In the very centre four ways met. Behind them lay the road to the Morannon; before them it ran out again upon its long journey south; to their right the road from old Osgiliath came climbing up, and crossing, passed out eastward into darkness: the fourth way, the road they were to take.
Standing there for a moment filled with dread Frodo became aware that a light was shining; he saw it glowing on Sam’s face beside him. Turning towards it, he saw, beyond an arch of boughs, the road to Osgiliath running almost as straight as a stretched ribbon down, down, into the West. There, far away, beyond sad Gondor now overwhelmed in shade, the Sun was sinking, finding at last the hem of the great slow-rolling pall of cloud, and falling in an ominous fire towards the yet unsullied Sea. The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.
Suddenly, caught by the level beams, Frodo saw the old king’s head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. ‘Look, Sam!’ he cried, startled into speech. ‘Look! The king has got a crown again!’
The eyes were hollow and the carven beard was broken, but about the high stern forehead there was a coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of his stony hair yellow stone-crop gleamed.
‘They cannot conquer for ever!’ said Frodo. And then suddenly the brief glimpse was gone. The Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at the shuttering of a lamp, black night fell.Though they rode through the midst of the Shire all the evening and all the night, none saw them pass, save the wild creatures; or here and there some wanderer in the dark who saw a swift shimmer under the trees, or a light and shadow flowing through the grass as the Moon went westward. And when they had passed from the Shire, going about the south skirts of the White Downs, they came to the Far Downs, and to the Towers, and looked on the distant Sea; and so they rode down at last to Mithlond, to the Grey Havens in the long firth of Lune.
by justdrew » Thu Dec 08, 2011 7:08 am
DrEvil wrote:Hammer of Los wrote:..
Me too, me too! I have a nice first edition AD&D Deities and Demigods in slightly faded hardback here on my shelf, which has Newhon mythos as well as other copyrighted material like Elric of Melnibone. They took all the fictional sections out in later editions because of copyright infringement. Er, is that off topic?
That reminds me (I have a copy of Deities & Demigods too), this fellow is missing from the list :
Ia Ia Fthagn
by Elihu » Mon Dec 12, 2011 12:33 am
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