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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 15, 2019 21:16:49 GMT -5
I haven't read Gateway in eons.
I had a similar experience with first reading non-Burroughs, non-space opera SF. My first foray was my Uncle's copy of Stranger in a Strange Land.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 16, 2019 4:40:14 GMT -5
Love that Vallejo-channeling-Berkey cover, though.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 16, 2019 7:24:15 GMT -5
That is a great cover! I completely disagree with Ellis about sci-fi though. Seeing people from the 60s and 70s predict the future is exactly what I do like. I find it interesting to take the point in time they are writing from, see where they went, and compare it to what happened.. did it make sense? What left turn happened to cause us to fall short of those expectations? What do we have that a person of 19xx couldn't even conceive of?
Does it date the work? Absolutely, but it's EXTREMELY difficult to writer a non-fantasy book and not date it, just by the everyday tech, never mind speech, gender roles, etc.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Apr 16, 2019 8:11:57 GMT -5
That is a great cover! I completely disagree with Ellis about sci-fi though. Seeing people from the 60s and 70s predict the future is exactly what I do like. I find it interesting to take the point in time they are writing from, see where they went, and compare it to what happened.. did it make sense? What left turn happened to cause us to fall short of those expectations? What do we have that a person of 19xx couldn't even conceive of? Does it date the work? Absolutely, but it's EXTREMELY difficult to writer a non-fantasy book and not date it, just by the everyday tech, never mind speech, gender roles, etc.
and
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Post by brutalis on Apr 18, 2019 7:55:59 GMT -5
Finished the 1st book of a new series (for me, written 2014) called A Mick Oberon Job: Hot Lead, Cold Iron by Ari Marmell. There is currently 4 books out so I may have to track the other 3 down. This kind of falls under the general title of Urban Fantasy but it is more a detective series within a fantasy world. Set in the time frame of Chicago 1932 Mick Oberon is a Fae (elvish, pointy ears, magic wand, etc) detective who has chosen to remain in the human world. He is paid to track down a mobster's daughter who was kidnapped and replaced 16 years ago with a changeling. So Mick is forced into going back to the Fae Otherworld realm to face the Seelie Court in his attempt to solve this mystery.
This is written in the hard boiled tough guy detective mode made famous by Raymond Chandler with the slight additions of the fantasy aspects. The magic is not outlandish and more based upon focusing one's own abilities to influence luck, emotions and such. The vernacular is straight up 1932 and Oberon walks the tough guy walk and talks the tough guy talk expertly. Mick is not even trying to be "nice" and is simply trying to get by in the human world by taking his lumps (gets beaten up a lot, but luckily as a Fae he has fast healing abilities aside from that little problem with iron and mechanical contrivances) as the typical smart mouthed private detective.
A bit of a slow start with so much to introduce in the world building but quickly enough you become very interested and find yourself absorbed with reading more. Quirky, interesting and historical at the same time with film noir intentions and the fantasy/mythology mixture makes this an intriguing book. Works quite well as an introduction creating a stylish world you want to spend some time reading about. Now I have to seek out the remaining books to see if this grumpy gumshoe's pulp fiction adventures teach him anything more about himself and his life with humans and Fae...
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 20, 2019 10:08:11 GMT -5
That sounds pretty interesting... I haven't heard of it before, I'll have to check it out at some point! Conan the Warriorby Robert E Howard It was quite interesting reading the original of these so quickly after reading the comic book versions... I recently re-read "Jewels of Gwahlur" in the semi-recent Dark Horse miniseries, while a the story of Conan avenging Balthus from 'Beyond the Black River' just recently appeared in the new Marvel series. These have a bit of a darker tone that some of the earlier works... one can't really say Conan 'won' in any of the 3 stories, even fleetingly... but rather escaped. I love that Howard allows his character to grow and mature as time passes. That's definitely not something today's writers do a whole lot of, especially anything that could be a franchise or a 'property'. That Howard was able to create a whole world with it's own geography and history and be consistent enough to make is so believable (even with a healthy dose of modern analogues) is impressive to me every time I read one of his stories... I think that's the main thing that can be lacking in those written by others... they're just visiting, while you get the sense Howard has been there. Then, of course, there's the Frazetta cover, which are always a treat, and why I'm reading these stories from disintegrating paperbacks meant to have been disposed of quite a long time ago. It gives it even more character, really .
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Post by Rob Allen on Apr 20, 2019 19:29:49 GMT -5
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spainby Maria Rosa Menocal An interesting look at a nearly forgotten golden age - the seven centuries when all educated people in the Iberian peninsula wrote in Arabic. For a while, the "Peoples of the Book" really did live in harmony. The tombs of Castilian kings were inscribed in Latin, Castilian, Arabic and Hebrew - and no one thought this was unusual. The Christians, Jews and Muslims of the peninsula had more in common with each other than with their co-religionists elsewhere. This book illuminated a piece of history that I hadn't been familiar with.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 21, 2019 15:19:17 GMT -5
World Without MenCharles Eric Maine (pen-name for David McIlwain) (Later republished in the 1970s under the title Alpha) This one had been sitting on my shelf for some time - I picked it up out of a bookseller's discount box at an SF con a few years ago. I thought it would be amusing based on the cover art, but it was anything but. The basic idea is that about 5,000 years in the future, humanity consists exclusively of women who apparently reproduce by parthenogenesis. 'Apparently' because we later learn it's a lie, as they employ a form of cloning, but it's all part of a program of propaganda and mind control put forth by the world's largely totalitarian governments dependent on super-powered computers to organize them. The narrative shifts to the past several times, going back to show how this came about: first in the late 1950s, highlighting the efforts of the R&D section of a pharmaceuticals company to create an effective contraceptive, then the early 21st century (2021), when it's becoming apparent that the number of male children being born has drastically fallen (the 'scientific' explanation for this not plausible), and then some point about a century later, when there's only one, elderly man left on the planet - and then back to the 5,000 year mark. This is pretty well-written book, in the sense that it's plotted and structured well and it presents its ideas rather well inside the narrative, but man is it wrong-headed. Basically, the central message of this book is: wide use of contraceptives = male apocalypse. There's also a lot of preaching about how morality is exclusively tied to very rigid heterosexual gender norms, as well as offensive characterizations of homosexuality as a form of 'perversion.' Also, a society consisting only of human women, besides apparently being morally perverse, will also stagnate technologically. I realize it's a product of its time (late 1950s), when ideas like these were far more mainstream, but that didn't make certain passages any less troubling to read. The text on the back cover of this paperback edition concludes with this little gem that made me chuckle: "Slanted for the intelligent adult reader, it will be ranked with 1984 and Brave New World." Yeah... no.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 21, 2019 16:46:16 GMT -5
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester Gully Foyle is my name And Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, The stars my destination. Having recently re-read The Demolished Man I decided that I should do a re-read of Bester's other classic SF novel. The last time I read these two in close proximity I preferred The Demolished Man. This time they swapped places, though both are absolutely classic SF.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 22, 2019 10:37:28 GMT -5
All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky by Joe R. Lansdale. I'm not given to reading YA books...at least not since I stopped reading to my boys. I will read YA's if it's by an author whose work I really value, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett come to mind. I would put Lansdale in that company so I decided to read one of his small number of YA novels. This is pretty prototypical Lansdale. Set in the Dust Bowl era in Oklahoma and East Texas we have three orphaned kids (a brother-sister pair and our teenage narrator) trying to get from Oklahoma to east Texas. Along the way they run into a variety of gangsters, railroad hobos, carnivals and a adventures ensue. This is a toned down YA Lansdale so it doesn't have his signature feel. For a kid who wants a bit of adventure and a little feel for the Dust Bowl era this would be a great read. For an adult used to vintage Lansdale it's a bit tame. But that's okay.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2019 17:03:08 GMT -5
I've picked up a bunch of vintage pulp related novels recently and have started diving in to some of them. First up was The Avenger #1 Justice, Inc. by Kenneth Robeson... I've read some of the Justice Inc. comics but never any of the prose before, so it was a different exposure to the character. The prose is typical purple pulp prose, but I enjoy that, so it was a fun read. And starting with book one, I got a better sense of how the character evolved, something that was missing from the comics even though they touched on the events of this book. I'll be skipping around a bunch of different pulp series as I work through these, and I have a bunch of other Avenger novels, but not all, so I won't be working through the series chronologically. -M
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 23, 2019 22:44:32 GMT -5
Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities by James Lovegrove
I have definitely decided that James Lovegrove is a good writer... as he says himself in the prologue, anyone trying to mimic two different classics in the same book is either very bold or very foolhardy.
While he does pull it off, this one is far more Lovecraft than Doyle, so it didn't engage me nearly as much... perhaps once I get around to reading Lovecraft I'll appreciate it more.
I also kinda hated the ending. He fell into the fan fiction trap, and while it was a surprise, it wasn't a welcome one.
I'm not sure if I'll read the final installment or not... he already has fast forwarded through the Doyle catalog, so the last book is likely to be more yet another version of 'the last Sherlock Holmes story' that every pastiche writer seems to love.. we'll see.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Apr 24, 2019 4:00:56 GMT -5
Haven't read anything by Lovegrove, yet, but he's an incredibly nice and intelligent guy. I attended a few of the talks he gave at the SF convention here in Zagreb about 2 years ago - one about all of the Holmes pastiches following Doyle and another about comic book heroes. He's also a very engaging speaker.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 24, 2019 21:12:18 GMT -5
Haven't read anything by Lovegrove, yet, but he's an incredibly nice and intelligent guy. I attended a few of the talks he gave at the SF convention here in Zagreb about 2 years ago - one about all of the Holmes pastiches following Doyle and another about comic book heroes. He's also a very engaging speaker. He has a bunch of regular Holmes pastiches that aren't mash ups, too. I'll definitely try one of those at some point.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Apr 25, 2019 18:53:21 GMT -5
Hell up in Houston by Garnett Elliott Jack Laramie, the Drifter Detective is back in a new novella. When Laramie's DeSoto breaks down outside Houston he knows it could be trouble. He'd been warned away from Houston by a Cajun P.I. named Lameaux, who has that market sewn up in Houston...along with a lot of the crime. But Laramie has to have some money to pay for repairs and takes a temporary gig as a house detective in a Houston hotel. That gets him embroiled in a blackmail scheme, a patron undergoing drug detox and cross-ways with Lameaux again. This one was a bit better than the first novella. Still not the best of neo-noir, but not too bad especially for the limited commitment.
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