What are you reading?

[Adam_Autist]

Good to know. I'm making progress in finding my niche when it comes to horror.

[f4stjack]

Currently I am reading Bruce Sterling's Shaping things, omnibus of SCP archives and thanks to RPPR Actual Play, because they have piqued my interest on Eclipse Phase, the short story collection After the Fall.

[CADmonkey]

Reading another story from The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.  This one is Bracelets, written by Katherine Brocklebank, the only woman (known) to have contributed to Black Mask magazine.

[Adam_Autist]

Read the comic Renato Jones: The 1% today.

It's fantastic like if someone took Frank Miller's visual aesthetic and then got rid of all the problematic material.

It boils down to a masked vigilante punishing the rich and exploitative.

[CADmonkey]

Reading another story from The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.  This one is Bracelets, written by Katherine Brocklebank, the only woman (known) to have contributed to Black Mask magazine.

I misread Brocklebank's blurb in the book.  There were other women published in Black Mask, but they all used initials or pseudonyms.  Brocklebank was the only woman to be published under her own name.

[CADmonkey]

But what a story he had to tell me, as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard, it took me a year to understand it:
"Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened."
I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story: when I asked him what had happened he just looked like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he'd waste time telling stories to anyone dumb as I was.

I'm almost finished Dispatches, Michael Herr's account of life as a combat correspondent in Vietnam.  I haven't read much of the 'New Journalism' of the 60's & 70's (even if you include Hunter S. Thompson) but this is the best that I've encountered.  Herr's prose is amazing, his insights cutting and his humour bitterly dark.  This is without a doubt the best book on (the American side of) the Vietnam war I've read.  This is one of the books that Full Metal Jacket was based on (Herr worked with Kubrick on the project) and if you're familiar with the movie you'll recognize a number of lines:

"How can you shoot women and children?" and he'd answered, "It's easy, you just don't lead 'em so much."

"Wow, Greene," he said "Greene was all fixed to get out.  He's jerkin' off thirty times a day, that fuckin' guy, and they's all set to give him a medical.  And out."
"That's no shit," the other one said.  "Thirty times a day.  Disgusting, man.  That sombitch had come all over his pants, that fuckin' Greene.  He was waitin' outside to see the major about gettin' sent home, an' the major comes out to find him an' he's just sittin' there jerkin' off.  Then he gets blown away the night before."

... but at least nobody under the rank of captain ever asked me whose side I was on, told me to get with the program, jump on the team, come in for the Big Win.

"Good mornin', little schoolgirl, I'm a li'l schoolboy too."

There's much more to the book than that, though, and I highly recommend it.  For a book covering such a dark subject in an often loquacious manner, I found it a very easy read and I'm rather sorry that I'll be finishing it soon.

I found out a couple of things when I started reading Dispatches: Firstly that Michael Herr passed away earlier this year, which makes me sorry that I didn't read this book earlier.  Secondly, I found out that Herr was friends with Stanley Kubrick and wrote a memoir, Kubrick, about their friendship and their collaboration on Full Metal Jacket; I'll have to find a copy of this now.

And finally, here's a photo of my latest book haul:


I Spy, with My Little Eye, something That Begins With... "M" by Bryan Rombough, on Flickr

[Adam_Autist]

Listening to The Quantum Thief. It's very good. It opens with a game theory prison.

Edit: This book is amazing! Post/Transhuman fights are really good and the prose is really great. A ton of gamable ideas in there too.

Makes me want to listen to what a More Space Opera RPPR game would be like.

[CADmonkey]

Just finishing:



It's a short bio/profile of Pierre Trudeau from 1968, shortly after he became prime minister.  I found it at a second-hand book store, and couldn't resist, particularly with his son now being our PM.  And it's a rather interesting look at Trudeau's history before most of the events he's most famous for today, as well as the early days of "Trudeaumania".

And here's my latest book haul:


I Spy, with My Little Eye, something That Begins With... "E" by Bryan Rombough, on Flickr

[clockworkjoe]

I recently finished Big Machine by Victor LaValle (excellent) and I am working on Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross, which is quite fun.

[D6xD6 - Chris]

Victor LaSalle is great; love how he inverts Lovecrafts racism to add that level of institutional horror

[CADmonkey]

Recently finished a couple of books.

First, there's this:



It's the catalogue/companion book for an exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 2002, which looks at images and ideas about 'cyborgs' in art, psychology, literature and cinema.  I first noticed this book because of the image on the cover: Fernand Léger's Le Mécanicien, a painting in our national gallerey's collection which I've known since I was a child (another piece that I've been fascinated with since childhood, Jacob Epstein's Torso in Metal from the 'Rock Drill', was also featured in the VAG exhibit).  The book has reproductions of, and commentary on, works from the early to late 20th century, from Lewis Hine's photos of factory workers, to the performance art of Stelarc and Survival Research Laboratories, to the pop art of Takashi Murakami and Mariko Mori.  There's also excerpts of psychological and literary works, Sigmund Freud's essay The Uncanny, Bruno Bettelheim's Joey: A "Mechanical Boy", Donna Haraway's A Manifesto for Cyborgs, and an excerpt from William Gibson's Neuromancer.  And of course, Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop feature in the discussion of the cyborg in cinema.

I thought it was an interesting look at attitudes, aspirations, hopes and fears about what we now call 'Transhumanism' over the past 100+ years.  I remember that when I first heard about 'Transhumanism', the first thing I thought of was Futurism, an early twentieth-century art movement obsessed with speed, technology, youth, and violence; so naturally I think it would be an appealing book for anyone interested in the subject.

Secondly, I picked up a load of books at an art book sale:



And from that haul, I've read The Building of Castle Howard.  Castle Howard is one of the most famous of the English country houses, and played the role of Brideshead Castle in the early 80's TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, a novel filled with nostalgia for the society and architecture of the past.  The Building of Castle Howard is a study of the political, social, financial and economic circumstances behind the house's construction, as well as an examination of the architecture, interior decoration & furnishings, and parks & gardens of the house.  I think the author sometimes goes a little far in trying to present the house and it's circumstances from the point of view of it's builders, privileging the eighteenth-century English nobility's rationales for their behaviour over modern sociological theories, but he at least trusts the reader enough to present both points of view, and even includes a rather piquante quote about the nature of early eighteenth-century English capitalism from E. P. Thompson.  An interesting book not just for a study of architectural aesthetics, but also for the wider context that is supplies.

[Lordsloth]

Just finished reading William Gibson's "Neuromancer". Very, uh... interesting! I'm sure for it's time it was groundbreaking and all. Also, Neil Gaiman's "Graveyard Book", which was pretty good for a  kids(?) book.

Just started reading another one of the Ravenloft D&D novels.

[clockworkjoe]

Reading Last Days of the Incas, a book about the fall of the Incan empire. Conquistadors were monsters.

[PirateLawyer]

Reading Last Days of the Incas, a book about the fall of the Incan empire. Conquistadors were monsters.

In that vein I recently finished Jungle of Stone, a great book detailing the exploits of John Lloyd Stevens and Frederick Catherwood - an American diplomat and a British illustrator - most notably their discovery of the Mayan civilization. It, too, details atrocities by the Spanish in the Americas.

[Twisting H]

More Modern Mythos Writers


Free mythos story "Black Hills" by Orrin Grey that deals with prospecting for oil on a verboten place.

It is short, but hits that note of questioning what lies in the dark.

http://www.strixpublishing.com/black-hill/

Excerpts:

"The digging didn't go easy. It seemed like every day, there was
something new went wrong. A storm come up and dropped
bucketfuls of hail on the whole field, blew a derrick over. Two of the
men got into it over something, and one pulled a knife and killed the
other. Three of the men took sick and couldn't work. Four more
vanished over the course of a week and weren't never found. And,
through it all, the pipe went down and down and down."

""I got no need ta tell you what oil is," he finally said, after we'd
drained most of the bottle. "Dead stuff. Rotted a thousand years,
pressed down by th' dirt. You know who th' first wildcatters in this
country consulted 'fore diggin'? Not geologists. Mediums.
Spiritualists. They knowed, even then. Hell, mebbe they knowed
better. Mebbe it's us has forgot."

"He stopped and raised his glass, only to find it empty. He sat it
back down and continued, without refilling it, "Somethin' dies an'
you put it down in th' dirt; it' don' disappear. It stays, forever. They's
not a place on this earth somethin' ain't died, where somethin' don'
lay buried. All this world's a boneyard an' us just ghouls crouched on
top, breakin' open tombs"

"I see ships as big a whales, plying the sea with bellies full of black blood.  I see a world of perpetual light and motion, powered by the unquiet dead."

---------------

From Peztopiary on Something Awful.

I'd never heard of Anders Fager, he's a Swedish mythos writer. Being Swedish, most of his work isn't available in English. The only story I could find that is translated, The Furies From Boras is really well written. There's a Tor article about the story as well, if you like that kind of thing.

"The Furies From Boras" is certainly creepy.  Overall the plot is ... linear and predictable but well written.  Worth reading.

Evidently he also made a Lovecraftian related roleplaying game called "The Cult's World"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Fager

Anders Fager (born in Stockholm 1964) is a Swedish horror writer. After a career as an army officer and game designer he made his debut in 2009 with the short story collection Swedish Cults (Svenska kulter) that received a most favourable review in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter[1] and launched Fager's career as full-time writer. Fager writes modern urban horror in a style he has repeatedly described as ”what would happen if James Ellroy took on H.P. Lovecraft”. Set in present-day Sweden, his interconnected stories form a modern part of the Cthulhu mythos with entities such as Dagon and Hastur making appearances. Fager's fictional world, known as "The Cult's World", has been made into a role playing game and is also currently being turned into a graphic novel and a theartrical play.

Anders Fager lives in Stockholm. His other works includes role playing games, a children's book and work with TV and film scripts. His novel "Kaknäs Last Tape" is set in the postapocalyptic world of the role playing game Mutant - Year Zero.

Outside of Sweden, Fager has so far been published in Finland and France [2] and has been introduced in the British Lovecraftiana magazine Cyäegha.[3] A film version of Collected Swedish Cults is being developed by director-team Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein.[4][5]

Cyaegha is available here: http://www.freewebs.com/batglynn/cyaegha.htm

(Anders Fager) Bibliography
Swedish Cults (2009, Svenska kulter)
Collected Swedish Cults (2011; Samlade svenska kulter – An omnibus featuring the short stories from Swedish Cults as well as “Interspecies Liaisons” and ”You can not live”)
I Saw Her Today at the Reception (2012; Jag såg henne idag i receptionen)
Under the bridge at Arcole (2014; - Short story in Paradox Entertainment's anthology Europa Universalis)[9]
The Substitute Teacher from Hell (2014, Den elaka vikarien)
A Man of Wealth and Taste (2014, En man av Stil och Smak)
Kaknäs' last tape (2015, Kaknäs sista band)
Dirty Black Summer (2016, Smutsig svart sommar graphic novel adopted from The Furies from Borås)

If anyone knows if there are English translations of his work or the roleplaying game, please let me know.

------------

"The Litany of Earth" by Ruthanna Emrys

http://www.tor.com/2014/05/14/the-litany-of-earth-ruthanna-emrys/

What if the Innsmouth Raid had actually happened and this started a World War?  What if the American government reacted to citizens with the Innsmouth Look by putting them into internment camps?

What happens after?

Stellar world building here.  Plot is above average.