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Fantasy Literature

INT21 said:
Can anyone remember the author and title of a sci-fi story that had the following as characters.


A bunch of dogs that had been modified to allow them to converse with humans and a robot butler who could talk to the dogs.
The dogs discover that ants are gradually taking over the land, and they get the robo butler to try and find out why the ants are doing it.

The butler comes to the conclusion that the ants are driven by some inner urge, and can't stop.

The butler asks his master how the humans dealt with ants. And is told that they poison them.

The butler realises that they are doomed. While the dogs can communicate, they are still dogs; and the dogs don't have chemistry.

I've been wanting to re-read this story. But can't recall the title.

INT21.
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Clifford D Simak - City
 
The story elements you mention remind me of Clifford Simak's City.
 
Thanks to both for that.

Funny thing is I was reading up on City a few minute ago but didn't make the connection. Maybe the blurb covered different aspects.

I'll go look on Ebay for a copy.

INT21
 
Just read the wiki on 'City'.

Definitely the story I was thinking of.

INT21
 
Naughty_Felid said:
Yeah, I wouldn't say he's the easiest of reads, but I still read them every few years. I've enjoyed his latter works too. Who's your favorite Champ Myth?
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Favourite Eternal Champion books are the second loose trilogy of Corum, books The Bull and the Spear, The Oak and the Ram, and The Sword and the Stallion, where he's Corum Llew Erient, Corum of the Silver Hand, in a quasi-Celtic world.
 
Anybody read any Paul Biegel? I just heard about him in a podcast recently, and he seems to have been very prolific. Dutch, with a preference for children's fantasy literature, and a number have been translated into English (though possibly not very well, according to the podcast).

Info:
Paul Biegel Wiki

The King of the Copper Mountains appears to be his biggie.
 
pandacracker said:
Has any one read "The Worm Ouroboros" by E.R. Eddison? ...
It pleased a teenager who'd finished T.L.O.T.R. and was looking for another fantasy world to immerse himself in. :reading:
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Yes, I read it circa 50 years ago, and in the same context (a Tolkien fan who'd exhausted JRRT's inventory and was looking for another such body of work). I recall I was snowed in with a few days to kill (probably a college holiday break) and invested the idle time in reading it. It served the purpose, and I liked it well enough to read more of Eddison's work.
 
Back in the 80's an elderly theatre director friend of a friend had an original Peake. It was called something like "Woman in a hat"

It was small with a largish frame, maybe a sketch, I can't remember the detail but seeing it in a domestic setting made it seem more special.
 
An article about Fantasy author Kelly Links.

MAR. 14, 2023

The Fabulist in the Woods​

In Northampton with Kelly Link and her community of like-minded writers..​


Kelly Link lives in a yellow farmhouse in Northampton with her husband, the editor Gavin J. Grant, and their 14-year-old daughter, Ursula. They have a Labradoodle named Koko and, out back, six chickens named after dragons and fonts: Toothless, Falkor, Fafnir, Midgard Serpent, Bembo, and Chancery. When I arrived on a snowy night in January, she offered me wool slippers and tea. “I’m an absolute hobbit,” she said — a creature fond of a warm hearth and a quiet evening at home. We settled at the kitchen table beside a potted sweet-potato vine that had sprouted in the pantry. “I didn’t have the heart to …” She petted the leaves. “It was so determined.”

In the stories of Kelly Link, strange things happen in otherwise ordinary settings. A teenage girl from Iowa travels to New York to find an older guy she met online and ends up at a hotel hosting a pair of conventions: one for dentists and one for superheroes. A girl from the Boston area discovers a lost world preserved inside her grandmother’s old handbag (which is made from the skin of a dog that lives inside it). Her stories do not abide by the rules of conflict and resolution — they make sense in the way that dreams make sense. Pressed to explain these phenomena, Link’s characters tend to change the subject. “The mechanics of how I can speak are really of no great interest, and I’m afraid I don’t really understand it myself, in any case,” a talking cat insists in a story from Link’s new collection, White Cat, Black Dog. Since 2001, Link has published four books of short stories, with the fifth — a series of unsettling retellings of classic fairy tales — out this month. For much of that time, she has worked in relative obscurity. Early reviewers were impressed by her originality, but she remained largely unknown outside of M.F.A. programs and fantasy circles. When her first book was published more than 20 years ago, serious literature, for the most part, meant one-pound tomes of psychological realism.


That has changed as Link’s stature has grown. In 2016, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; a few years later, the MacArthur Foundation awarded her a “genius” grant for “pushing the boundaries of literary fiction.” This shift owes something to the influence Link, 53, has had on a generation of younger, mostly women writers, including Helen Oyeyemi and Karen Russell. Like Link, they draw on old storytelling forms, including fairy tales and Greek myths. The author Carmen Maria Machado, who has a line of Link’s tattooed on her bicep (“She didn’t look back, but stepped off the edge of the known world”), said when she first encountered Link’s fiction more than a decade ago at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, it expanded her notion of what a story could be. “I feel like she put her fingers in my eyeballs and gave me powers,” Machado said.

Most working days, Link meets up with two of her closest friends, the fantasy novelists Cassandra Clare and Holly Black, in an Amherst barn that Clare had converted into a studio. The three work there together, surrounded by steampunk-themed decorations and appliances: a wooden “assassin’s hand” equipped with needles designed to inject poison into the intended victim, a microwave encased in the shell of an old-fashioned camping oven. The trio became friends after they started running into one another at fantasy conventions two decades ago, and all ended up living within ten miles of one another in the woods of Western Massachusetts. From a certain perspective, they are unlikely workshop partners: Black and Clare write hugely popular commercial novels, mostly for young adults (they have each written more than 20 books, including five together). But they share Link’s interest in the esoteric and the uncanny. Over the afternoon, their conversation ranged from the laudanum-soaked writers’ retreat where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein to the CW series The Vampire Diaries. Eventually, they turned to the challenges of revision. Black, whose curtains of blue-black hair conceal ears surgically altered to make her look like an elf, said improving her drafts usually came down to plugging up the plot holes. Simple. She turned to Link. “There’s stuff about your process we will never truly understand,” she said. Link, soft-spoken and unassuming, protested that she wasn’t so unusual. “I think that’s true in general about the revision process,” she replied. She was cocooned in a green sweater, little moons and cat skulls dangling from her ears. “The reasons are sometimes very opaque but satisfying to the person who makes them.” ...

https://www.vulture.com/article/kelly-link-white-cat-black-dog-profile.html
 
Naughty_Felid said:
The Eternal Champion series its usually best to start with something like Elric of Melnibone...
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I have since read this and did enjoy it. Much better than the other I had attempted.

Checking dates, it seems like I've also read a lot of stuff influenced by it, too!
 
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