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Post by Knygathin on Jun 1, 2017 21:59:24 GMT
Michael Shea was a remarkable writer. Very special. Great imagination, and an original sense of underhand humour. If you like Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, and Fritz Leiber, his stated influences, you are likely to find his books interesting. His voice is reminiscent of those writers, but at the same time completely unique. So far I have read his short stories in the collection Polyphemus. That was enough to see his exceptional talent. Another short story, published separately, is called "Fat Face", a Cthulhu mythos tale; Incredibly good. I have not read his novel Nifft the Lean yet, but looking at the first page tells me it is refined and dynamic writing. Another book he wrote is called In Yana, the Touch of Undying. That has to be the most brilliantly resonant title I have ever come across. Why? I can't clearly say why. Just a short line of a few words. It is somehow dynamic, humorous, horrifying, convoluted, and strangely mystical with hidden meaning and rhetorical backward tangle. It vibrates. Sounds like Dunsany, but even better.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jun 3, 2017 13:04:48 GMT
I had already set aside to reread The Dark Descent: The Evolution of Horror edited by David G Hartwell. It contains Michael Shea's "The Autopsy" from Polyphemus. It is a graphic but excellent horror story about alien infestation.
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Post by jamesdoig on Jun 3, 2017 21:47:21 GMT
My only experience of Shea is Polyphemus, but it's a landmark book. I've got Nifft the Lean and now I'll have to give it a go:
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Post by Knygathin on Jul 19, 2018 17:43:09 GMT
This is the first paragraph of his novella The Fishing of the Demon-Sea:
Just after dawn they buckled us into the strappadoes. The mechanism is fairly simple. Your wrists and ankles are pulled toward the four corners of the upright frame, and you're splayed in the center like a moth in a web. Each machine has three executioners. Two work the winches until all the joints in your body are pulled apart. The third has a long-handled pruning scissors for starting the cuts around your separated joints. Then the winchmen go to work again, to tear you apart at the cuts. They alternate. It's considered good winch-and-scissors work when your trunk falls all at once out of the splayed wrack of your limbs. They don't like thieves in Kine Gather.
That is horrible. I was shocked.
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Post by Knygathin on Jun 27, 2023 11:58:16 GMT
Hello,
I am trying to find Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, issues August 1996 and November 1996, in jpg or pdf files, that contain the second and third installments of The Mines of Behemoth. I have not seen them at Archive.org or Luminist.org. Can you lead me to them?
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Post by andydecker on Jun 27, 2023 15:43:52 GMT
Hello, I am trying to find Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, issues August 1996 and November 1996, in jpg or pdf files, that contain the second and third installments of The Mines of Behemoth. I have not seen them at Archive.org or Luminist.org. Can you lead me to them? I have only found some issues on Ebay. Aside those two I don't know any sites who have this stuff.
I own the Shea novel version of this. I wanted to read his continuation of Vance for a long time, had read such raving reviews about it, but when I finally had the four books I couldn't get into it.
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Post by Knygathin on Jun 28, 2023 15:57:59 GMT
I wanted to read his continuation of Vance for a long time, had read such raving reviews about it, but when I finally had the four books I couldn't get into it. A Quest for Simbilis perhaps worked as a preliminary writing exercise. He perfected his own pen later.
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Post by andydecker on Jun 28, 2023 16:50:22 GMT
I wanted to read his continuation of Vance for a long time, had read such raving reviews about it, but when I finally had the four books I couldn't get into it. A Quest for Simbilis perhaps worked as a preliminary writing exercise for him. He perfected his own voice later. I guess so. If I remember correctly they were large gaps between the books.
The problem with Vance is that I read so much about him, all those accolades, so clever, ironic and wonderful. But never read him myself in my younger days. So finally starting with him, I thought some of his lesser space operas as rather boring. I finally started with The Dying Earth and couldn't get into it either. C. A. Smith did it already and much better in my opinion, and even the early Moorcock had left a deeper impression with me, when he covered the topic. I got one of the Trullion novels for free recently. Of course I acknowledge the great word building and the knack with names Vance had, but still I found it rather boring as a story and didn't finish it.
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Post by helrunar on Jun 28, 2023 18:27:45 GMT
I thought Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series was rather sublime--sort of what might happen if Oscar Wilde and Simon Raven had collaborated on phantasmagorical apocalyptica. Maybe one of these days I'll re-read the original three novels.
I might have read a couple of Jack Vance short stories in anthologies, but if I did, they left no impression.
cheers, Steve
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jun 28, 2023 19:09:06 GMT
A Quest for Simbilis perhaps worked as a preliminary writing exercise for him. He perfected his own voice later. I guess so. If I remember correctly they were large gaps between the books.
The problem with Vance is that I read so much about him, all those accolades, so clever, ironic and wonderful. But never read him myself in my younger days. So finally starting with him, I thought some of his lesser space operas as rather boring. I finally started with The Dying Earth and couldn't get into it either. C. A. Smith did it already and much better in my opinion, and even the early Moorcock had left a deeper impression with me, when he covered the topic. I got one of the Trullion novels for free recently. Of course I acknowledge the great word building and the knack with names Vance had, but still I found it rather boring as a story and didn't finish it. I have been a big fan of Jack Vance, but these days I feel little desire to read him. My Vance experience has been gravely tainted by my exposure to other Vance fans, a disturbing number of whom are raving lunatics.
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Post by jamesdoig on Jun 28, 2023 21:52:11 GMT
My Vance experience has been gravely tainted by my exposure to other Vance fans, a disturbing number of whom are raving lunatics. Luckily I haven't had the misfortune of meeting any. Someone from the Vault recommended the Dying Earth series after I picked up the Masterworks volume, and it's excellent - very amusing.
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Post by Knygathin on Jul 7, 2023 6:47:50 GMT
My Vance experience has been gravely tainted by my exposure to other Vance fans, a disturbing number of whom are raving lunatics. That is liable to happen if one frequents forums, because few fans will ever be as bright as the author. One must learn to separate the wheat from the chaff - emotionally too. In my case, members at one forum raised a vicious discussion, and argued with militant persistance that verse was superior to prose. This unwelcomely tainted my innocent joy of prose, and caused me to doubt the worth of my favorite writers.
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