Bizarro Fiction is, apparently, a thing.
Co-worker flew in and thanked me for letting him borrow Niven/Pournelle’s Inferno
I admit to not having started it yet.
In doing some research into Bizarro, I found that the authors consider themselves to be part of the tradition of Gogol which, honestly, sounds really, really good to me. I mean, seriously. Gogol is one of those guys who writes some seriously old-school parables set in the modern day. Not parables that leave you saying “Oh, I see what the moral is!” but the old ones, the parables that leave you saying “I have no idea what the moral is” (or “the only morals of that story that make sense are bad ones”) but they get stuck in your head and you can’t help but glimpse flashes of those stories as you go throughout the little trivial interactions of the day.
But then I read that title again and think “Maybe I’ll just read Inferno or Viy again.”
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
(Photo is “Movie Night“, taken by Ginny, used under a creative commons license.)
I have started listening to the old A&E series The Killing. Almost done with Season 2, which is much better than Season one.
The TV has mostly been the Mother Goose Club, which is a battery of songs that will get stuck in your head. But the little girl loves it so much, and she’s really engaged with it (singing along, pointing to things and saying what they are, and so on).Report
My big brother passed away 5 years and 11 months ago. He left behind a library that I’ve been storing in my basement of my old house. I moved the last load out of that house today, so it looks like I’ve got a lot of reading to do. I’ll start with the Hemingway and Philip K Dick tonight for sure.Report
Sounds like a righteous dude. Those are great places to start.Report
I’ve recently started listening to The British History Podcast and am thoroughly enjoying it. I’m only up to episode 12, having just listened to the two-part episode devoted to Boudica’s rebellion against the Romans. There are at the moment over 160 episodes, which takes us up to King Ceonwulf’s reign, so I have 70 some odd hours of listening just to get caught up. It’s rivaling Revolutions as my favorite history podcast, though I do wish it had devoted more episodes to pre-Roman Britain.Report
Here’s the page for Carlton Mellick III, author of I KNOCKED UP… He looks like you’d expect sorta.
Now, if you really, really want bizarro, may I recommend The Groovy Age of Horror?
http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/
Hadn’t been back there in a long time. It’s where I first learned about Fumetti and tentacle porn. You have been warned.Report
I like the ‘III’. Adds a little class to the proceedings.
Damn, dude is prolific.
He also looks like my German friend David, if David were to glue 70’s-themed merkins to his cheeks.Report
I’m kind of thinking of giving him a try…
Quicksand House
The descriptions make me think of Philip Jose Farmer – A FEAST UNKNOWN, IMAGE OF THE BEAST/BLOWN.Report
Man, “prolific” isn’t the half of it. Apparently he puts out books QUARTERLY (every January, April, July, and October) and has put out 40 since 2001. Wow.
Honestly, whether they are any good or not, that’s something right there.Report
so is thisReport
I finished Utopia series 1. It was a little less satisfying than I’d hoped, though it remained stunning to look at, and was still pretty good pulpy fun.
Speaking of pulpy fun, I need to check and see if I am getting Showtime (I shouldn’t be, but then again I don’t pay for HBO either and I have that for some reason) since Penny Dreadful comes back tonight.Report
Well dang. No Showtime.Report
After recent discussions of the Hugos, I splurged this week and read through the first three of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War books. Somehow I’d missed them. By the end, I can see why right-wing MilSF authors would be inclined to ignore Scalzi’s nominations as representative of “their” work.Report
Well, admittedly the militaristic Union is, you know, not terribly awesome as governments go. But right-wing milSF writers aren’t wedded to government-by-military.
Admittedly, the whole “just war” concept generally gets a pretty good hearing, but there’s plenty out there that have the usual murky mess of mistakes, bad ideas, banal greed, and the general feeling that “Seriously, this was a pointless waste”.
THe later books are a LOT less military — I wouldn’t necessarily call them MiLSF, but the first certainly was. If I’m being cynical, it’s not military SF because Scalzi wrote it. Cynical in another direction says it’s the lack of Tom Clancy or David Weber style hardware porn.
There are no multi-page expositions on the awesome military toys. Well there are, but they’re rather quickly deconstructed.
(And I’m a fan of hardware porn, dirty liberal that I am. I own a whole lot of Weber’s work, for instance).Report
I’ve read a few of the Honor books, and i my humble opinion they’re best use is as starters in the other kind of Weber.Report
I am reading a 1000 pager called Ideas: From Fire to Freud by Peter WatsonReport
Sounds elementary.Report
I just finished Wolf Hall. My non-fiction read is Family Britain, the second volume in the Tales of the New Jerusalem series by David Kynaston.Report
Currently reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, an intriguing piece of speculative fiction (closer to fantasy than science fiction, but neither term feels quite right).
Just finished The Player of Games by Iain Banks, a science fiction novel about a skilled game-player from a utopian society who travels to an empire where all the positions of political power are determined by succeess in an incredibly complex game. It’s quite good.Report
Perdido is a great book. I think Mieville likes the phrase Weird Fiction which started back with Lovecraftian craziness way back when. Sort of throwing science, scares, horror and anything else someone can think of into a blender.Report
I started The Player of Games a while ago, got about 50 pages in, and absolutely nothing had happened, so I put it down. Sounds like I should give it a bit longer.Report
Oh, man, I loved Player of Games, I just read it a few months ago. It is definitely slow at first put picks up rapidly once the protagonist leaves home.Report
Finished The Americans, finished season 5 of Justified, finished Daredevil, watched a bit of Halt and Catch Fire (probably won’t watch the rest anytime soon), and started watching Season 3 of Longmire. I was sick for a week, and spent a lot of time lying on the couch watching TV.
Oh, and Wolf Hall.Report