/lit/ - Literature

russian is hard to read if you don't pick it up at an early age learning it later in life is too difficult for most people. so only translations that are widely distributed are typically read.

> Gromov, Tyurin, Chumanov, Kalugin (Get Out Of My Dreams is so kino), Korepanov, Sviridov, Shvedov

nobody in russia has heard of these people and definitely nobody outside.

but have you read
CL Moore, EE Smith, Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, Algis Budrys, Brian Aldiss, Kurt Vonnegut, JG Ballard, Thomas M Disch, Philip Jose Farmer, Fritz Leiber, Bob Shaw, Tanith Lee, James Tiptree Jr?

because stuff like Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert is hot garbage SF.


see anyone can play this dumb game.

>>23325798
Thats just the short story "Descending" by Thomas Disch
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pKMfFHkr4aI

>>23290096
>OP here. Thanks for the discussion. I am mainly just interested in societies or people that place more value on subordination rather than liberation or "emancipation".
No societies other than post-Enlightenment European ones ever placed more value on 'emancipation' than on subordination. If you want a picture of such societies, look at Sparta or Rome, or better yet, pre-colonial Africa. Mungo Park estimated that 75% of black Africans were enslaved by the blacks themselves. Slavery was the universal legal punishment among tribes there.
If you're OK with fictional representations--aside from bullshit history like "Roots"--you might want to read Thomas Disch's The Puppies of Terra, or even The Story of O.

>>23285738
>Delaney
Nova or his short stories
>Disch
Camp Concentration or 334
>Crowley
Little, Big
>Lafferty
Wrote only short fiction IIRC

>>23284899
The founders wrote literature: Wells, Verne, Poe. Arguably so did Mary Shelley (more for The Last Man than Frankenstein).
Somewhat below that level, but high indeed: Olaf Stapledon, of course. Dick, Lem, H. P. Lovecraft, Yefremov, the Strugatskys. A few one-shot wonders like Orwell for 1984.
That said, there are works and writers than I can't quite classify as literature but can't quite ignore. Colin Wilson for The Philospopher's Stone and The Mind Parasites. Thomas Disch.
And then there are scifi writers who can't remotely be considered literature, but who one delights in even though you know you're consuming junk food. I'm thinking of A. E. Van Vogt, beloved by both Wilson and Dick.
The best science fiction published in recent decades? The Doomed City by the Strugatskys, and the Golden Oecumene trilogy by John C. Wright.

>>23285738
>Delaney
Dhalgren

>Crowley
Little, Big

>Lafferty
Is best in short stories. His stuff is hard to find but the Best of R.A. Lafferty is a good starting point. If you are dead set on a novel go with Past Master or Fourth Mansions (if you can even find it for a reasonable price).

>Vance
Read anything in The Dying Earth cycle.

Haven’t read Disch so can’t recommend anything. Also, OP mentioned him but go with Wolfe if you haven’t already. He’s in the upper echelon of SFF writers.

>Samuel Delaney
>Thomas Disch
>Crowley
>R. A. Lafferty
>Vance
What is their best work?

>>23284899
Try Samuel Delaney or Thomas Disch. Also John Crowley though he's mostly alt hist/fantasy.

>>23266298

>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Delany
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Zelazny
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Sturgeon
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Disch
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Guin
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=LeGuin

>>23266268
>>23266262
It's pretty grim. Can't remember the last time I saw an earnest discussion here of authors like Le Guin, Delany, Zelazny, Sturgeon, Disch, etc. It's all lowest common denominator garbage (and tired circlejerking over Lem, Peake, Wolfe, Vance, Strugatskys). No aspiration to read anything bigger. Truly sad.

>>22650050
Read 334 by Thomas M Disch

>>22464513
Ironically less drug use. Also less pretentious faggots like Ellison, Delaney and Disch trying to prove how literary they could be.

>>22306118

Here are some examples

https://collection.eliterature.org/4/

https://literariness.org/2018/07/27/introduction-to-electronic-literature/

> With the publication in 1984 of Mindwheel, Robert Pinsky contributed not only a pioneering work of electronic literature but also a rare crossing over from the literary world, where he was a recognized poet teaching English at Berkeley. Pinsky brought his abilities to interactive fiction, which many people at the time saw as “just games.” Thomas Disch, a novelist and poet, did something similar with his game Amnesia, but Disch was frustrated that no one would recognize and review Amnesia as literature and he denounced interactive fiction afterwards. Pinsky didn’t do this, but neither did he remain active as an author of electronic literature. The same can be said of Robert Coover, who introduced a generation of graduate students at Brown University to the practice of electronic literature but himself continued to write print novels.

>>22271624
>Harold Bloom included this work in his book The Western Canon, calling it "A neglected masterpiece. The closest achievement we have to the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll."
>Thomas M. Disch described Little, Big as "the best fantasy novel ever. Period."
> Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that Little, Big is "a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy."

>>22162033
03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat
17 by Bill Drummond
32 by Sahar Mandour
69 by Murakami Ryu
334 by Thomas M. Disch
1914 by Jean Echenoz
1922 by Stephen King
1984 by George Orwell
1985 by Anthony Burgess
2666 by Roberto Bolaño

>>22082873
The New Wave was a science fiction (SF) style of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories, greater imitation of the styles of trendy non-science fiction literature, and an emphasis on the psychological and social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. New Wave authors often considered themselves as part of the modernist tradition of fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate change from the traditions of the science fiction characteristic of pulp magazines.
Many young writers entering the field came to feel, either instantly, like Thomas M Disch, or after some years' slogging away at conventional commercial sf, like Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg, that genre sf had become a straitjacket; though widely supposed to emphasize change and newness, sf had somehow become conservative (not in the political sense but rather if your novel wasn't inspired by Lensman, John Carter or Foundation it would be very hard to get it published)
By 1965, then, sf was ripe for change. In fact, many of the so-called sf experiments of the period were not experiments at all, but merely an adoption of narrative strategies, and sometimes ironies, that had long been familiar in the Mainstream novel (see Modernism). Thus Philip José Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" (in Dangerous Visions, anth 1967, ed Harlan Ellison) echoed the manner of the "Aeolus/Cave of the Winds" segment of Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce, while John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968) homaged the narrative and Infodump techniques used by John Dos Passos in the USA trilogy (1930-1936 3vols)
some of the sf writers who felt they now had the freedom to experiment, especially Ballard and perhaps (rather later) Moorcock, were to add something new to the protocols of prose fiction generally; the New Wave may have taken from the Mainstream, but it gave something back in return (this is now a truism of Postmodernist criticism, but it was by no means clear at the time), and certainly New-Wave sf did more than any other kind of sf to break down the barriers between sf and mainstream fiction.
Sorry for the long post.

Judith Wright, Les Murray, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, Kevin Hart, Peter Carey, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Elinor Wylie, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, John Crowe Ransom, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, Conrad Aiken, Eugene O'Neill, Edward Estlin Cummings, John Brooks Wheelwright, Robert Fitzgerald, Louise Bogan, Léonie Adams, Hart Crane, Allen Tate, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, Nathanael West, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Langston Hughes, Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, Joseph Mitchell, Abraham Cahan, Kay Boyle, Ellen Glasgow, John Phillips Marquand, John O'Hara, Henry Roth, Thornton Wilder, Robert Penn Warren, Delmore Schwartz, Weldon Kees, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Paul Bowles, Randall Jarrell, Charles Olson, Robert Hayden, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, James Agee, Jean Garrigue, May Swenson, Robert Duncan, Richard Wilbur, Richard Eberhart, Melvin Beaunorus Tolson, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, William Styron, Jerome David Salinger, Wright Morris, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, John Hawkes, William Gaddis, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edwin Justus Mayer, Harold Brodkey, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, Raymond Carver, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, John Crowley, Guy Davenport, James Dickey, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, Stanley Elkin, William Howard Gass, Russell Hoban, Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, William Kennedy, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Walker Percy, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Cynthia Ozick, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth, James Salter, Robert Stone, John Barth, Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Michael Disch, Paul Theroux, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Edmund White, James McCourt, James Wilcox, Archie Randolph Ammons, John Ashbery, David Mamet, David Rabe, Sam Shepard, August Wilson, Anthony Hecht, Edgar Bowers, Donald Justice, James Merrill, William Stanley Merwin, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Irving Feldman, Donald Hall, Alvin Feinman, Richard Howard, John Hollander, Gary Snyder, Charles Simić, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Jay Wright, Amy Clampitt, Allen Grossman, Howard Moss, James Applewhite, J. D. McClatchy, Alfred Corn, Douglas Crase, Rita Dove, Thylias Moss, Edward Hirsch and Tony Kushner (David Foster Wallace is OK)

>>21580631
The Best one is Stand of Zanzibar (1968), it's like John Dos Passos USA Trilogy but scifi, and it's still very relevant to this day.
Canticle for Leibowitz, so depressing that the author killed himself lmao
The Genocides thomas disch (spoiler: it's shit)
The Long Loud Silence

>Philip K. Dick: A Scanner Darkly (1977)
Could have picked almost any of his books. Like all of them, this deals with identity, power, and betrayal, here tied in more directly to social structures than in some other works (though see Counter-Clock World and The Man in the High Castle). Incredibly moving.

>Thomas Disch: The Priest (1994)
Utterly savage work of anti-clericalism. A work of dark fantasy GBH against the Catholic Church (dedicated, among others, to the Pope…)

>Gordon Eklund: All Times Possible (1974)
Study of alternative worlds, including an examination of hypothetical Left-wing movements in alternative USAs.

>Max Ernst: Une Semaine de Bonté (1934)
The definitive Surrealist collage novel. A succession of images the reader is involved in decoding. A Whodunwhat, with characters from polite commercial catalogues engaged in a story of little deaths and high adventure.

>Claude Farrère: Useless Hands (1920; trans. 1926)
Bleak Social Darwinism, and a prototype of ‘farewell to the working class’ arguments. The ‘useless hands’ — workers — revolt is seen as pathetic before inexorable technology. A cold, reactionary, interesting book.

>Anatole France: The White Stone (1905; trans. 1910)
In part, a rebuttal to the racist ‘yellow peril’ fever of the time — a book about ‘white peril’ and the rise of socialism. Also interesting is The Revolt of the Angels, which examines now well-worn socialist theme of Lucifer being in the right, rebelling against the despotic God.

>Jane Gaskell: Strange Evil (1957)
Written when Gaskell was 14, with the flaws that entails. Still, however, extraordinary. A savage fairytale, with fraught sexuality, meditations on Tom Paine and Marx, revolutionary upheaval depicted sympathetically, but without sentimentality; plus the most disturbing baddy in fiction.

>Mary Gentle: Rats and Gargoyles (1990)
Set in a city that undermines the ‘feudalism lite’ of most genre fantasy. An untypical female protagonist has adventures in a cityscape complete with class struggle, corruption, and racial oppression.

>Charlotte Perkins Gilman: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892)
Towering work by this radical thinker. Terrifying short story showing how savage gender oppression can inhere in ‘caring’ relationships just as easily as in more obviously abusive ones. See also her feminist/socialistic utopias ‘Moving the Mountain’ (1911) and Herland (1914).

>Lisa Goldstein: The Dream Years (1985)
A time-slip oscillating between Paris in the 1920s, during the Surrealist movement, and in 1968, during the Uprising. Uses a popular fantastic mode to examine the relation between Surrealism as the fantastic mode par excellence and revolutionary movements (if nebulously conceived).

>>20555738
Agreed. Wolfe has an almost legendary status amongst fellow authors; Gaiman called him 'a ferocious intellect', Swanwick said he's "the greatest writer in the English language alive today", and Disch called this series "a tetralogy of couth, intelligence, and suavity".

You can rarely trust the popular market to single out good authors, but you'd think it might be safe to listen to the opinions of other writers (especially an assemblage of Nebula and Hugo winners in their own right). I will give his fans one concession: Wolfe is an author who defies expectations. Unfortunately, I was expecting him to be remarkable and interesting.

This book had been sitting on my shelf for months, along with other highly-praised works I've been looking forward to, but I bade my time, waiting for the mood to strike. Few live up to their reputation, but most at least deliver part of the promise.

I would expect any author mentioned in the same breath as Peake to have an original and vibrant style, but I found Wolfe's writing to be simple without being elegant. His language and structure serves its purpose, only occasionally rising above mere utilitarianism, and then he rushes to florid flourishes that fall flat as often as they succeed. Sometimes, it is downright dull. The prose of the second book is stronger than the first, but its plot and characters are more linear and predictable.

I appreciated his 'created language' more than most fantasy authors, but I didn't find it particularly mysterious or difficult, because all of his words are based on recognizable Germanic or Romantic roots. Then again, after three years of writing stories about Roman whores in Latin, I had little problem with 'meretriculous'. Even those words I wasn't familiar with seemed clear by their use.

The terms are scattered throughout the book, but rarely contribute to a more pervasive linguistic style, as might be seen in The Worm Ouroboros, The Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast, or The King of Elfland's Daughter. Wolfe's terms pepper otherwise and unremarkable modern style, which hardly helps to throw us into a strange world.

He is better than the average fantasy author, but he resembles them more than he differs from them. His protagonist started off interestingly enough: an apparently weak and intelligent man, which made it all the more disappointing when he suddenly transformed into a laconic, wench-loving buttkicker who masters sword-fighting, finds the Super Magic Thing and follows the path of his Awesome Foretold Fate. Again, I must agree with Nick Lowe: Wolfe's plot owes more to magic and convenience than good storytelling.

>>20552802
I agree with you on Wolfe. Wolfe has an almost legendary status amongst fellow authors; Gaiman called him 'a ferocious intellect', Swanwick said he's "the greatest writer in the English language alive today", and Disch called this series "a tetralogy of couth, intelligence, and suavity".

You can rarely trust the popular market to single out good authors, but you'd think it might be safe to listen to the opinions of other writers (especially an assemblage of Nebula and Hugo winners in their own right). I will give his fans one concession: Wolfe is an author who defies expectations. Unfortunately, I was expecting him to be remarkable and interesting.

This book had been sitting on my shelf for months, along with other highly-praised works I've been looking forward to, but I bade my time, waiting for the mood to strike. Few live up to their reputation, but most at least deliver part of the promise.

I would expect any author mentioned in the same breath as Peake to have an original and vibrant style, but I found Wolfe's writing to be simple without being elegant. His language and structure serves its purpose, only occasionally rising above mere utilitarianism, and then he rushes to florid flourishes that fall flat as often as they succeed. Sometimes, it is downright dull. The prose of the second book is stronger than the first, but its plot and characters are more linear and predictable.

I appreciated his 'created language' more than most fantasy authors, but I didn't find it particularly mysterious or difficult, because all of his words are based on recognizable Germanic or Romantic roots. Then again, after three years of writing stories about Roman whores in Latin, I had little problem with 'meretriculous'. Even those words I wasn't familiar with seemed clear by their use.

The terms are scattered throughout the book, but rarely contribute to a more pervasive linguistic style, as might be seen in The Worm Ouroboros, The Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast, or The King of Elfland's Daughter. Wolfe's terms pepper otherwise and unremarkable modern style, which hardly helps to throw us into a strange world.

He is better than the average fantasy author, but he resembles them more than he differs from them. His protagonist started off interestingly enough: an apparently weak and intelligent man, which made it all the more disappointing when he suddenly transformed into a laconic, wench-loving buttkicker who masters sword-fighting, finds the Super Magic Thing and follows the path of his Awesome Foretold Fate. Again, I must agree with Nick Lowe: Wolfe's plot owes more to magic and convenience than good storytelling.

>>19993671
Disch, Dick, and Delaney.

>>19585097
Delany, Zelazny, Ballard, Silverberg, Sturgeon, Stapledon, Wells, Disch, Sheckley, Simak, Malzberg, M John Harrison, John Crowley, Bester

>>19583062
Delany, Zelazny, Ballard, Silverberg, Sturgeon, Stapledon, Wells, Disch, Sheckley, Simak, Malzberg, M John Harrison, John Crowley, Bester