#7: "Benaroya is a giant space dolphin who's only interested in pleasure"

Well, if you were surrounded by dolphin penis, would you blame her?

I've read zero of those.

Any worth the effort?

Kinda expected some Rudy Rucker on that list.

I've read a LOT of science fiction. I have read a lot of weird science fiction. I have never read any of those.

/anyone ever read The Godwhale?
//THAT was pretty weird
///but not bad, actually
////slashies

Needs more Philip Jose Farmer

(yeah, not obscure, but some of his stuff was *way* the fark out there perverted. Gilles de Rais as a spider demon living in Joan of Arc's vagina, anyone?)

I liked All of an Instant. It found new ore in the tapped-out vein of time travel.

I read a different Isidore Haiblum novel, The Mutants are Coming, and got some strange looks on the subway.

I always knew Starbucks was founded by haiku-writing telepathic sauropods!

I really liked the Butterfly Kid. But it's sadly the only one on that list that I've read. I have some new books to look for though.

I think the thing which cheezes me off the worst is that they got published at all!

I spent 30 years writing Science-fiction and horror and I KNOW I write better than quite a few authors I've read, and I couldn't get published. (I just finished reading a book called 'Beast House' which left me wondering how the author made it into print.)

The best I got was a rejection letter from a publisher, suggesting corrections, telling me to keep trying. (The Editor was Isaac Asimov. He was kind enough to red pen his way through my work, suggesting things.) 99% of the others just sent standard rejection letters.

I've read books that have been so poorly written that I tossed them out in disgust. I've read others that were well written but had plot lines that sucked -- badly. I especially hate the ones which end leaving questions unanswered -- like the author got bored and wanted to end the book quickly.

Either that, or everything is going good until the end, which turns out mystifyingly crappy and makes you think the author ran out of steam in the final pages.

I've heard from many a published author that they basically papered their walls with rejection slips before getting that first book in print. Others told me to get a representative, who would critique my work and if deemed satisfactory, would them pitch it to publishers. Some publishers will not accept self-submitted work.

However, to have to pay this guy and there are no guarantees you'll get published.

I stopped submitting work years ago and stopped compiling manuscripts shortly after. It got too frustrating to spend months pouring out my soul into a work, then putting up with the quiet desperation of submitting it to various publishers and the agonized waiting for the inevitable rejection letter.

What made it worse was buying a new book and finding out that it had apparently been written by a 6 year old and went from crayon right into print.

I do so enjoy good Sci-fi and horror, something which seems to be lacking on both the Sci-fi and Chill TV channels. (I'm SOOOOO darn tired of Zombies and Vampires that I could scream!)

Self publishing seems somehow -- wrong. I don't know of any great authors who got started that way. Plus, thanks to e-books, publishers of REAL books are starting to get even more picky about what they accept. Before that, mega-bookstores appeared and started telling publishers what to publish!

(Sigh!) I don't even write story lines anymore.

Rik01: I think the thing which cheezes me off the worst is that they got published at all!

I spent 30 years writing Science-fiction and horror and I KNOW I write better than quite a few authors I've read, and I couldn't get published. (I just finished reading a book called 'Beast House' which left me wondering how the author made it into print.)

The best I got was a rejection letter from a publisher, suggesting corrections, telling me to keep trying. (The Editor was Isaac Asimov. He was kind enough to red pen his way through my work, suggesting things.) 99% of the others just sent standard rejection letters.

I've read books that have been so poorly written that I tossed them out in disgust. I've read others that were well written but had plot lines that sucked -- badly. I especially hate the ones which end leaving questions unanswered -- like the author got bored and wanted to end the book quickly.

Either that, or everything is going good until the end, which turns out mystifyingly crappy and makes you think the author ran out of steam in the final pages.

I've heard from many a published author that they basically papered their walls with rejection slips before getting that first book in print. Others told me to get a representative, who would critique my work and if deemed satisfactory, would them pitch it to publishers. Some publishers will not accept self-submitted work.

However, to have to pay this guy and there are no guarantees you'll get published.

I stopped submitting work years ago and stopped compiling manuscripts shortly after. It got too frustrating to spend months pouring out my soul into a work, then putting up with the quiet desperation of submitting it to various publishers and the agonized waiting for the inevitable rejection letter.

What made it worse was buying a new book and finding out that it had apparently been written by a 6 year old and went from crayon right into print.

I do so enjoy good Sci-fi and horror, something which seems to be lac ...

Go on tvtropes, and cobble together a story based on as many hackneyed premises as you can, and add whatever is in vogue these days.

Pud: but should he trust the girl who turned him into a clown and stole his pants? Probably not, but he does anyway.

Now, THAT'S funny


Who among us hasn't had that happen?

StoneColdAtheist: Can some kind-hearted soul copy pasta the titles for those who don't use scripts?

10. This Business of Bomfog, by Madelaine Duke (1967)
Cover tagline: "The Astonishing World of 1989 - A World of People Gone Mad, Mad, Mad." This is recursive bit of Philip K. Dick-esque metafiction, set in a Orwellian dystopia where the Brotherhood of Man, Fatherhood of God (BOMFOG) complex tries to prevent wars by giving Important Guests access to perpetual-motion art and private swimming pools. Key line of dialogue: "Sex is part of our reeducation program."

9. The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders by Isidore Haiblum (1971)
A Tsaddik is a Hasidic spiritual leader or wise person, and this book is legendarily steeped in Jewish lore, as the main character visits various times and places in Jewish history. Writes Eleanor Skinner in her Amazon review, "The tsaddik wanders around through time & space, while a wisecracking Retief/James Bond sort of figure from a galactic bureaucracy accidentally rescues a Polish princess. Eventually they all meet to fight an intergalactic real estate conspiracy, culminating in a climactic battle between hordes of demons & time-hopping Chassidim in a Polish castle. 60s psychedelia meets Yiddish humour."


8. All of An Instant by Richard Garfinkle (1999)
A scientist discovers a place called the Instant which, as Amazon's summary puts it, is "a paradoxical nonplace that is simultaneously all times and no time." Soon everybody's battling to control the Instant, where changes ripple forward and alter the future. Every little ripple erases entire cultures and wipes out whole timelines. The SFSite review conveys just how weird this book gets:

In addition to the normal dimensions of height, width and depth, duration forms a fourth dimension in the Instant, and it places limitations on the memories and abilities of its inhabitants. Kookatchi, for instance, has a particularly short duration, and therefore his memory recycles frequently, only allowing him to retain the most vital of information. Nir, the War Chief from the Now, has a duration of a decade which allows him to take part in longer term planning, although Garfinkle reveals that those inhabitants with longer a duration have a more difficult time seeing the Instant for what it really is.


7. Passing for Human, by Jody Scott (1977)
Benaroya is a giant space dolphin who's only interested in pleasure, until she decides to study humans. To do this, she disguises herself as Brenda Starr, the girl reporter from the newspaper comics. As she tells one human, "You might say I try to relate in a meaningful, concerned way to autochthonous bipeds in general." Later, Benaroya disguises herself as Emma Peel (from The Avengers) and author Virginia Woolf. Other members of her species are disguised as Abraham Lincoln and George S. Patton, while their support drones look like Richard Nixon. While disguised as Virginia Woolf, Benaroya gets herself captured by a race of psychopathic aliens who want to destroy the Earth, and you get a weird scene where Virginia Woolf debates whether it's a bad thing to fall in love with the leader of a group of genocidal alien psychopaths.

6. Time Snake and Superclown by Vincent King (1976)
We reviewed this one back in 2008, and it's still hard to come up with a summary of the plot. Let's just say that the main character is living on Earth, observing a species of wraiths who are pretending to be human. While investigating this insidious plot, the hero has bad sex with a female wraith, who transforms his face into a clown mask - permanently - and steals his pants. He doesn't notice his pants are missing for about 20 pages, and when it finally dawns on him that he's pantless, he observes, "I must have been really bad not to have noticed that." The girl also cuts off his "strobe," trapping him on our planet because he can't access his spaceship. She eventually tells him he's destined to fight the Time Snake, which is coming to eat the world - but should he trust the girl who turned him into a clown and stole his pants? Probably not, but he does anyway.

5. Flesh & Gold by Phyllis Gottlieb (1999)
From the Amazon.com synopsis:

Travelling judge Skerow, of a race of moral haiku-writing telepathic sauropods, stumbles upon two mysteries while on duty on grimy mining planet Fthel V. The same day she discovers her senior judge and colleague of 25 years was under investigation for accepting bribes, said colleague is murdered in his bedroom; and Skerow espies a genetically-altered, almost-human mermaid held captive in the display tank of a brothel window.

Luckily, it sounds like Skerow gets lots of help from her ancestors, whose brains are all in bottles, Futurama-style, plus she teams up with a human gladiator-for-hire named Ned. Too bad the food on Fthel V is so awful.

4. Panda Ray by Michael Kandel (1996)
Christopher looks like a normal 10-year-old boy, but he's actually a member of a superpowerful race of creatures who control the world using their technology and psychic powers. When Christopher starts bragging about this at school, including details about how ESP killed the dinosaurs, his mother gets mad and decides that he should be "scooped out" - robbed of his psychic powers and turned into a shadow of his old self. So the boy escapes with his grandfather in a time machine disguised as a bathroom, fleeing through multiple universes. They go in search of the grandfather's mentor, Panda Ray, who may be able to save the boy, but only by turning him into a completely different person. Kandel is best known as the English translator of Stanislaw Lem, and by all accounts this is a very Lem-esque satirical coming-of-age novel.

3. The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer by Carol Hill (1996)
From the official synopsis: "A brilliant, philosophical, and athletic physicist, Amanda Jaworski is in training to be the first person to journey to Mars. With her magic cat, Schrodinger, Amanda goes on the ultimate space odyssey. She finds herself in a battle for her life and her planet with the greatest seductress of all, The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, a being from forty million light years away." Oh, and apparently the magic cat learns to order off a Chinese menu. And apparently Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is put to unexpected tests, in a storyline that combines physics and silliness. Eventually, according to Amazon reviewers, Amanda ends up meeting red and blue robots, a creature named Ooze, a "smelly overlord" and omniscient computers.

2. The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy by Harold Bloom (1979)
The only novel that the famous literary critic ever wrote - and he has disowned it utterly. Don't let Harold Bloom see you reading this book! It's a quasi-sequel to the space-faring novel A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. And like Lindsay's book, this involves a flight to another world, in which Gnostic philosophy is explored - and this time, it's the planet Lucifer, where a guy named Olam guides the travelers to escape from Crystalman. As one Amazon reviewer explains:

set on a distant world where time and space shift back and forth and where the conflicts of first-century religion are still being played out. Harold Bloom's story begins with an Aeon, Olam, descding to earth to bring two men, Valentinus, a reincarnation of a Gnostic prophet, and his young warrior escort Perscors, back to Lucifer on a quest to help Valentinus recover the call that motivated his previous life. For Perscors, the quest is a search for a transcendental principle, but to reach it, he has to do battle with enemies both divine and semi-divine, to finally reach his inner discovery of his own uniqueness.

1. The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson (1967)
As the book's blurb says: "The Hippies had a New Kick: From Outer Space!" Here's how we summarized this book a few years ago: Anderson's semi-autobiographical novel has a main character named after himself, and a supporting character named after his roommate at the time. Aliens are supplying a new kind of drug, known as "Reality Pills," which cause your LSD hallucinations to become physically real. One character takes the Reality Pills and is able to make butterflies appear spontaneously, all colors and sizes. Chester faces the vicious Blue Lobster aliens, who hook him up to a machine that forces him to experience horrifying visions that he would have paid to see otherwise. He writes: "I was the rabbit in the moon. I was as corny as Kansas in orbit. I wasn't thinking very well at all!"

No Golem¹⁰⁰ by Alfred Bester? A book so weird a chapter was "written" in nothing but inkblot pictures.

Haven't read any of them. Probably the strangest (but good) ones I've read were:

Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem, which is sort of a funny, surreal, futuristic mystery novel, and
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delaney, which I don't even know what it is. Starts of weird, gets much more understandable, then slips into insanity by the end.

inkblot pictures

A short story by Gahan Wilson has an inkblot for a title. It is transliterated as "*" or "spot" in computer files. ISFDB tells me it first appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions.

tdyak

I read several books by the Strugatsky brothers and a collection by Kir Bulychev, and liked most of them.

madanimalscientist: I read this one book once about super-evolved killer manta rays that had been mutated by some oceanic virus and migrated onto land and used their invisibility powers to hide in the forests of the Pacific NW and kill people. I forget the title, but it was one of those books that's weird and really tests the suspension of disbelief but at the same time you can't put it down because it so farking strange.

/Wish I could find that book again.
//No idea what the title was.

Maybe Natural Selection (new window) by Dave Freedman?

FloydA: madanimalscientist: I read this one book once about super-evolved killer manta rays that had been mutated by some oceanic virus and migrated onto land and used their invisibility powers to hide in the forests of the Pacific NW and kill people. I forget the title, but it was one of those books that's weird and really tests the suspension of disbelief but at the same time you can't put it down because it so farking strange.

/Wish I could find that book again.
//No idea what the title was.

Maybe Natural Selection (new window) by Dave Freedman?

I was going to guess "A Manta For All Seasons"

Space War Blues -Richard A. Lupoff

Autumn Angels -Arthur Byron Cover

tdyak:

There used to be a TotalFark Writers Workshop, that helped me get really far. There are several published authors on Fark (both self and traditional). In short, if you want to write and get published, and work at it, you can get there.

...is this still around in any form? I have a lot to offer and a lot to learn.

/My previous "writers workshop" was the Fark classifieds, which Drew stopped doing last year. Tough crowd, but I got excellent feedback.