Wilbur

Very odd ad made by Audi America and then pulled from Youtube.  This guy saved and re-uploaded it.

One of the most insightful works of historical fiction for the final days of the Roman Republic is actually the SPQR series of mysteries by John Maddox Roberts.

JMR's writing is always smooth and professional, but in this series he really plumbs to the heart of the political and personal struggles that ended the Roman Republic, highlighting the religious and mystery cult feuds, the interpersonal hatreds of different factions in the streets of Rome and Ostia, and the incestuous nature of the inter-familial relationships among the powerful families of the Senatorial class.

The sense of gritty realism and the personal stakes at risk for the individuals involved really make these books shine, and they emphasize the sense of despair and loss among the people who make the wrong choices or back the wrong players.

• SPQR (1990) (also SPQR I: The King's Gambit)
• The Catiline Conspiracy (1991)
• The Sacrilege (1992)
• The Temple of the Muses (1999)
• Saturnalia (1999)
• Nobody Loves A Centurion (2001)
• The Tribune's Curse (2003)
• The River God's Vengeance (2004)
• The Princess and the Pirates (2005)
• A Point of Law (2006)
• Under Vesuvius (2007)
• Oracle of the Dead (December 9, 2008)
• The Year of Confusion (February 16, 2010)

God DAMN this is a performance!

Benjamin Bagby performs the first half of Beowulf in the original Old English and accompanies himself on the harp.

The attack on the mead-hall hits at 1:08 if you want to get straight to the slaughter.

Harry Harrison and Tom Shippey, the noted Tolkien scholar writing as "John Holm", collaborated to write three historical fiction > edging into alternate fiction > glancing coyly at science fiction books that I recommend to anyone interested in 9th Century English and Continental history.

The Hammer and the Cross

One King's Way

King and Emperor

These books have a strong protagonist and antagonist, cover interesting aspects of the Pagan/Christian conflict during the Viking invasions, include an aspect of the Pagan Gods incarnate matched thematically with a Grail Quest, and follow a plotline with enough twists and turns to maintain the reader's interest.  I would put this in the "realistic history" rather than the "high fantasy" pile, as Harry Harrison drives the details of description and circumstance in the story, although the input of Tom Shippey is clear in how certain aspects of The Hero are handled.

Published from 1993 to 1996, these are the crossover between Harry Turtledove and JRR Tolkien you never knew you needed.  Clearly written and printed as a trilogy, apparently nobody told the cover illustrators, as all three books have unique artistic styles, and my own copies are not even the same size.

Greek history, anyone?  Harry Turtledove's PhD thesis focused on the later Byzantine empire, and he wrote four "Hellenic Trader" novels under the pen name H.N. Turteltaub.  These are excellent, focusing on the lives of two Rhodian cousins who ply the Eastern Mediterranean.

• Over the Wine Dark Sea (2001)
• The Gryphon's Skull (2002)
• The Sacred Land (2003)
• Owls to Athens (2004)
• Salamis (2020)

17 hours ago, DanielAbraham said:

We could try being nice to each other, I guess.

Ha, true.

Although I think that some earlier work already expressed the "do unto others as you would have other do unto you" worldview.

On 8/15/2021 at 9:50 AM, Lord Patrek said:

To a certain extent, I feel that this project has become somewhat irrelevant in the greater scheme of things of the speculative fiction genre. Given the span of time it took for this anthology to see the light, I don't believe that it will be a big commercial success...

This is my take as well.  What authorities or sensibilities are there left to overturn with LDV?

Wow, that is terrific to hear.  I am one of the few readers for whom The Crippled God seemed like a suitable capstone to the series, but I won't say no to another visit to Erikson's world.

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

 

That is a better film than about 78% of what gets released in theaters today.  Damn fine.

I went to college with Neebs and all his cousins.

Seven years have elapsed, and this show still holds up.

A fair amount of military science fiction, or even John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, has an ambient background that is pretty cyberpunk, where corporate governments and their oligarchical executives run things and the common man finds escape and the opportunity to use their practical technical skills through military service in space.  Peter F. Hamilton's Fallen Dragon partakes of that same cup, for instance.

On 1/15/2021 at 3:32 PM, Wilbur said:

...Many of our cutting-edge physics and pure science labs are located in the suburbs or small university towns of the southwest, and so a lot of Mormons, first-generation college grads, and salt-of-the-earth support staff work in those facilities...

Just to continue the connection between Mormons and cyberpunk, here is an article about how the FLDS operated the company that made the Challenger O-rings.  Now that is truly cyberpunk.

https://jalopnik.com/how-a-cult-built-the-o-rings-that-failed-on-the-space-s-1846151814

Whenever we read a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson novel where there are weird cults operating high-tech fabs or manufacturing facilities, it always struck me as too "out there".  But It is pretty true to life!  And Walter Jon Williams is the guy who captures that whole entanglement best.

One aspect of the cyberpunk movement that interests me is how Bruce Sterling was supposedly one of the prime movers of the genre as "Chairman Bruce", yet today he and his work seem relatively less prominent.

I bought all his books in the 80s and 90s, and his Hacker Crackdown was one of the books I put on the required reading list for my staff.  But in truth, none of his stories ever grabbed me or resonated with me the way Rucker / Gibson / Banks / Vinge / Stephenson did.

5 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Some less-generally-discussed but worthwhile reads:

...Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge. Bit less noir than cyberpunk tends to be, less dystopian, but it has some of the same themes so I'm counting it. It's almost kinda like the book Ready Player One wanted to be and also has shades of the anime movie Summer Wars if anyone's seen that (you should it's cracking). 

I am also firmly in favor of reading Vernor Vinge as formational cyberpunk.  He is an outstanding writer, and furthermore he writes realistically about both science and applied science in the form of technology, and even more importantly, he accurately captures the lives and attitudes of the people working in technology.  His description of one of our Motorola R&D facilities was so accurate that, having read the book before I had a chance to visit the lab, I had a strong sense of deja vu when I actually got there.  If you want to peek into the contemporary reality in the Southwest/West Coast of a cyberpunk world that William Gibson describes from a East Coast perspective, Vinge's The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime are your entry points.

Another writer with a powerful sense of what the environment and the people working in a lab/fab/R&D facility are like is Walter Jon Williams.  His book Days of Atonement is really the top of the pile, a sort of No Country for Old Men of the cyberpunk genre.  Many of our cutting-edge physics and pure science labs are located in the suburbs or small university towns of the southwest, and so a lot of Mormons, first-generation college grads, and salt-of-the-earth support staff work in those facilities.  Williams does a fantastic job with this milieu.  He is also great in his view of how Hollywood would operate in the near-future cyberpunk world with his Dagmar Shaw series.

As my avatar clearly indicates, I am a big William Gibson fan, but don't sleep on Neal Stephenson, either.  The Diamond Age doesn't get a lot of hype, but his use of a duo of female protagonists (who appear to be referenced briefly in some of his other work) is both skillfully handled and attractive to learn about.  Because of the viewpoint of the reader, this book takes some work in order to get into, but it repays the careful reader.  His political near-future thrillers as Stephen Bury (Interface and The Cobweb) have recently become less science fiction and more prescient warnings with the riots in DC last week.

Get down with your bad self.

2 hours ago, zapp said:

Thank you for the write up. I'm almost afraid to go back to them. As I say I have vague memories of reading the books. I don't think we had access to many of them back then ( I can't even remember which ones I read) but I do remember really liking them at the time. I've checked and some are available on the Kindle UK store.

I re-read them with my daughter over the last decade, and the Robert Arthur, Jr. ones hold up very well indeed.

Some of the books from the 1970s focus on things that were prominent in the 70s but don't pose much interest today (witchcraft, sharks, UFOs), and only a couple of the books in the 80s are worth a second reading.

William Arden seems to have done a competent job throughout his share of the books while Nick West and M.V. Carey are a little more variable in their quality.

Later the estate also authorized additional "Find Your Fate" and "Crimebusters" stories, but the attempts to update the Three Investigators to a more modern era don't really work.  Part of the original attraction of the 1960s era California setting is the limitations the boys work within - needing a ride from Worthington in the Rolls-Royce or from Hans or Konrad in the truck, needing to go to the library to look up facts, the constant question of how to communicate via telephone, secret signs, walkie-talkie, etc. when they were separated, and the question of whether Chief Reynolds will believe them.  Robert Arthur, Jr. solves those problems in a believable manner, while the later books use his ideas for wish-fulfillment fantasies that the reader can't really buy.

11 hours ago, zapp said:

...a series called the Three Investigators...

The Three Investigators series was an outstanding set of books, at least for the first thirty or so volumes, of which Robert Arthur Jr. wrote the first ten.  They were my favorite books as an elementary student, and they inspired me to settle in the West once I was an adult.  I also went out and found them for my own child, who also loved them.

The creator, Robert Arthur Jr. also wrote a couple of very good science fiction stories. He also wrote for The Twighlight Zone, and several Alfred Hitchcock Presents... anthologies.  His stories appeared on Dimension X and X Minus One, particularly the mystery/scifi hybrids, so if you want to listen to the stories read in mid-Atlantic accents and interrupted by ads for cigarettes, track down those audio files.  Similarly, he wrote for The Mysterious Traveler and The Sealed Book which were very popular radio serials that you can find online.

Audio stories on Librivox - some good readings in there.

Big Old List of his mystery stories - I have tracked down a few of these over the years, and they are very much of their time, but he is a master of evoking a time and place in prose.

He was an interesting guy - His daughter said that when he arrived in California, he couldn't believe how beautiful it was compared to Michigan, New Jersey, the Philippines, etc., and that is why he wrote with the backdrop of Rocky Beach or Sonoma County.

Some examples:

The Indulgence of Negu Mah

Ring Once for Death

Another Ring Once for Death

19 minutes ago, Zorral said:

...Donna Leon's latest Commissario Brunetti novel, Unto Us a Son Is Given -- the quality is as high as any of her others. I read this books at least as much for the descriptions of contemporary Venice, the continuing ensemble characters (and new ones) of the Commissario's professional life, the Commissario's friends and family's increasing anger and melancholy to the environmental, legal, corporate and criminal corruption of the world in general, and Italy and Venice in particular.  The consequences of mafiaization of the globe are front and center.  This is not how the series began, so many books ago...

That is an excellent characterization of the Leon mysteries!

1 hour ago, lady narcissa said:

...Speaking of locations, I also have a stash of Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti mysteries set in Venice that I also want to read.  Anyone read these?

Donna Leon's Brunetti books are very good, if quite melancholy in tone.  The sadness of a sinking city and the corporate corruption that is inherent in life around a US Airbase in Italy is pervasive in her books.  I think that reading them in order is important, as the characters grow and mature as the series progresses more so than in a lot of other mysteries where the detective character is rather static.  The other character with strong growth would be Decius in John Maddox Roberts' SPQR books, who grows and is damaged by the fall of the Republic and the destruction of his relationships that politics brings.

Thames TV and Granada created an entire televised version of both volumes of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes - a couple of them are in this playlist, and some of the actors appearing as much younger versions of themselves will surprise you!  Most of the authors of the original anthology are well worth a read as well.

An excellent thread with a lot of very interesting authors - thank you!  Others you might add to your list include the following.

Michael Pearce wrote two very fine period mystery series.

The Mamur Zapt books feature a Welsh chief of secret police in Cairo at the turn of the century during the British administration of Egypt.  Excellent characterizations and plot, sumptuous descriptions of Egypt under the khedive, and a fair bit of romance.

A Dead Man in... books cover the pre-WWI European scene, with a Scotland Yard etective sent by the British Foreign office to investigate deaths in foreign cities.  Again Pearce's characters are vivid and his place descriptions make the cities a character as well.

Margery Allingham was a stylist whose Albert Campion mysteries rival Dorothy Sayers.  Lug the former-thief-and-now-butler by himself is worth the price of admission.

Lawrence Block wrote a series of murder mysteries set in the 1970s and 1980s in New York City featuring the cat thief and bookstore owner Bernie Rhodenbarr where once again the city is a character as much as any of the human actors.

Ernest Bramah's stories of the blind detective Max Carrados outsold the Sherlock Holmes stories at the time of their publication, although they did not receive the popular movie treatments that kept them in the public eye as A.C. Doyle's did.  The late Andy Minter's readings of four of the stories are delightful.

John Maddox Roberts was an excellent writer in the science fiction and fantasy genres who never broke through to popularity the way I thought he should, but his SPQR historical mysteries set in the close of Republican Rome have political intrigue, romance, high personal and national stakes, the whole shooting match.

Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries are a timeless wonder, as Wolfe and his all-action secretary Archie Goodwin solve crime in New York City throughout the twentieth century.  The audio books read by Michael Pritchard are the gold standard for audio book readers.  Again, the plot details are excellent, and mid-century New York City is a sort of character in and of itself.

E.W. Hornung's Raffles is an early example of the tortured soul who must do what he does not wish to do, and also has some curious elements of mystery stories without being actual mysteries, probably because of the English Country House setting.

Science Fiction Grand Master Jack Vance wrote several very good mysteries set in California as Ellery Queen.  I recommend A Room to Die In and The Madman Theory to your attention, and of course there is the classic award-winning Bad Ronald.

Eric Ambler wrote a group of high quality socialist mystery adventure stories  that are often described as spy novels.  Don't let that fool you, they are mysteries set in central Europe with lots of critical views on the Cold War.

Hugh Laurie, aka Dr. House to Americans or Bertie Wooster to the rest of the world, wrote The Gun Seller.  If you like Ian Rankin, don't sleep on this one.

Georgette Heyer wrote romances posing as mysteries such as Why Shoot a Butler? starting during the Great Depression and set throughout English history.

Marion Chesney writing as M.C. Beaton wrote a large number of humorous British mysteries set in the Cotswolds (Agatha Raisin) and the Highlands (Hamish MacBeth).  These were realized as TV shows on Sky1 and the BBC, showing their popularity.  She also wrote an Edwardian mystery series about Lady Rose Summer, but those are harder to find.