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Kirk posted:alright so where are we sitting with good sci-fi and fantasy
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# ¿ Nov 9, 2011 01:54 |
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 13:20 |
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NINbuntu 64 posted:im pretty sure it should say "fifth and later" because im pretty sure ive heard fans talking about how poo poo five was The first five are a linked story arc, and some people didn't like how it ended. I think it turned out just fine, and that it's one of the best fantasy narratives I've read. The sixth and later novels are sequels starring the son of the original protagonist. They were written after Zelazny started interacting with his fans on BBSes and the like, and they read like terrible fanfiction of the original series. They are also full of dumb "hacker magic" plot devices. I couldn't get past the first two. The more recent Amber novels "authorized by the Zelazny estate" are so terrible they make the Dune prequels look good. </sperg>
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2011 00:04 |
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Kirk posted:choke on cum, maggot Mindbridge is actually a much better book than The Forever War but it's got like a hundredth of the readership, if that. quote:Arnold Bates spends half his life sleeping or taking drugs. Most of the drugs are to help him get to sleep. He is a millionaire several times over, but spends little: rent and food and drugs. He has no hobbies.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2011 01:04 |
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Amethyst posted:The Cyberiad SEVEN.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2011 02:30 |
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Amethyst posted:haha. If I ever have kids I'm going to read that to them. Based on experience, the Steelypips chapter is better for reading out loud.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2011 03:13 |
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golgo13sf posted:No Kindle version It really needs to be read in print, I think. A significant part of what makes it unique is that large chunks of the narrative are told in the form of transcripts, science papers, and other "found documents" that include charts and the like. I doubt that these elements would make the jump to ebook very well. There was a cheap Gollancz edition printed which isn't terribly hard to find. There's an ebook edition from the publisher but I can't really recommend it without checking to see if it's really intact.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2011 04:58 |
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Wilhelm_Scream.wav posted:my buddy has a whole bunch of these and whenever i see them i'm like "why don't you read a real book" A rare quality post from the Book Barn. quote:Here is the thing about genre fiction.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2011 05:00 |
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golgo13sf posted:gently caress physical media Your loss, kid.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2011 06:08 |
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LooseChanj posted:explain to me what in the holy blue gently caress was going with that dude and his insect g/f in perdido street station You mean the woman and her ape boyfriend?
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# ¿ Nov 15, 2011 09:14 |
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FMguru posted:but after all that quality reading, will you still have time left over for the sanderson?
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# ¿ Nov 18, 2011 04:56 |
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Cheap Trick posted:did I choose poorly If you like extruded fantasy product, then you have a winner.
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# ¿ Nov 18, 2011 05:10 |
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My mother asked me yesterday if there's a box set with all the Star Trek movies. I worry sometimes.
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# ¿ Nov 18, 2011 19:13 |
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Ken MacLeod's version of the Singularity (from The Cassini Division et al) is a lot of fun because it focuses on the people who weren't the "upload myself into a computer" guys.
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# ¿ Nov 22, 2011 18:50 |
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pseudorandom name posted:Have you read his latest? No, I've been on a nonfiction kick lately. Why?
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# ¿ Nov 22, 2011 19:39 |
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pseudorandom name posted:He has a different take on computer uploads this time around. Ugh. The big spoiler-moment near the end of The Cassini Division was fantastic and if he's changed his mind on that sort of poo poo I'm going to be very disappointed.
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# ¿ Nov 22, 2011 23:56 |
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Also, if anybody hasn't read Heavy Weather you really ought to, because it's looking really, really accurate at this point.
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# ¿ Nov 22, 2011 23:58 |
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NINbuntu 64 posted:most of her stuff seems really female oriented. Only in a pandering, "Twilight"-esque sense.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2011 08:01 |
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axolotl farmer posted:check out google today, it's a Stanislaw Lem tribute and has a little game with nice art It's a thanksgiving thing on this end, instead of what I'm supposed to be seeing. Which is a shame, because I adore The Cyberiad, and the Google thing is obviously based on illustrations from it. [edit] Hah, the "2 + 2 = 7" thing is straight out of one of the first stories.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2011 10:45 |
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Turns out you can get to the Lem thing on Google with this URL.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2011 15:47 |
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Kirk posted:for some reason whenever i start seeing words about ship combat, be it victorian era or modern day, my eyes roll back into my head and i pass out The ship battles at the end of Startide Rising are pretty awesome and very atypical. Only ones I've ever really found fun.
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# ¿ Nov 24, 2011 20:50 |
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raruler posted:Speaking of the Uplift stuff, is the second trilogy worth reading? It didn't really look that interesting when I looked. It is boring as gently caress and has nothing to do with anything cool in the original series.
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# ¿ Nov 25, 2011 00:15 |
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duTrieux posted:the aliens in farscape are so much better than the usual cgi bullshit. poo poo's bananas. Practical effects are so much better than CGI. Well, they can be so much better than CGI. The fact that the marketplace in Hellboy 2 is 95% practical effects still blows my mind.
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# ¿ Nov 28, 2011 03:43 |
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Bad rear end Boutique posted:just finished Ringworld and uhhhhhh...it wasn't really all that good Ringworld is one of those books that's important to the history of SF, but not actually that good a book when examined on its own. There's a lot of these, obviously.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2011 00:04 |
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This is why William Gibson doesn't write SF anymore. He explains this through a character in Pattern Recognition.quote:"Of course," he says, "we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile."
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2011 00:21 |
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TOOT BOOT posted:It's kinda dumb to stop writing SF for that reason though. It's entertainment, not a crystal ball. Neuromancer is still a great book even if was almost totally wrong about what the future would look like. The thing is, Neuromancer is a great book, independent of it being SF. That's why it holds up okay. If you're capable of writing great books without having to cover them in a layer of SF to cover up any serious flaws with Big Cool Science poo poo, then why not just do so? It's less likely that in twenty years, people are going to go nitpick how you got the future wrong. My next read is going to be Banks' Transition, which I know is going to be good, because Banks can write good books without the superscience that drives the Culture novels.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2011 03:33 |
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unleash the unicorn posted:I [...] have no place in this thread
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2011 09:49 |
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atomicthumbs posted:what does steampunk jesus need with an air rifle
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2011 12:52 |
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Woz My Neg rear end posted:and james cameron putting huge amounts of work into coming up with a complete integrated alien ecosystem based on fundamentally different biology and then going "oh yeah and give them sweet rear end racks cause that's awesome" Didn't Cameron say somewhere that he specifically wanted the blue cat people to evoke certain emotional responses in people? And that they went through various incarnations where they figured out which designs were the most appealing to test audiences? Or am I remembering something else and attaching it to Cameron?
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2011 23:31 |
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theflyingexecutive posted:nobody would have given a poo poo about the aliens if they weren't hot The entire movie was structured around making the audience emphasize with the aliens on an emotional, instead of treating it like an actual ethical quandary. It's lazy, shallow bullshit and it's not even treading any new ground. Hell, Star Trek did this better back in the 60's with "Devil in the Dark", and when your SF isn't as intellectually rich as loving Star Trek then you've got a real problem.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2011 00:24 |
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toby posted:i have long said that a series of basic ethics classes should be added to the curriculum of every school system in america and required for all children, just like math and science The content of said course would be decided by local school boards, so no, this is kind of a useless idea.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2011 01:18 |
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rotor posted:hm, let me see, what would I rather do. I haven't been excited about seeing breasts in a non-porn movie since I was about thirteen.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2011 07:55 |
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SHITPOST.BAT posted:dont bother with the 3 witches books Oh god you are so completely wrong.
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# ¿ Dec 26, 2011 07:02 |
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Jeff Goldblum posted:I've been looking for films similar to The Fly (its a great film, if you haven't seen it you really should) but the market for cross-special mutation fiction seems to be pretty slim. The best thing I could find was a film entitled Perverted Stories 32 , which had a short film about a woman who was half-spider. I haven't actually seen it and people seem to either love it or despise it, but "Splice" seems like it might be what you're looking for. Amethyst posted:hey if I liked lord of light will I also like the amber books? Pen-and-paper RPGs were inspired by the original Amber novels, not the other way around. Read the first five, through "The Courts of Chaos", and skip the rest. The quality level drops dramatically, and they get annoyingly RPG-like.
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# ¿ Dec 31, 2011 08:59 |
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Woz My Neg rear end posted:solaris remake? I was going to suggest this. When people complained about how slow it was (compared to your typical explosion-driven SF movies), Soderbergh said something like, "if you don't like the first ten minutes, get up and leave because it's not going to change".
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# ¿ Jan 4, 2012 23:43 |
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Really old Doctor Who is great, they make sure that all of the special effects are outlined in blue or orange so you don't miss that they're special effects!
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# ¿ Jan 5, 2012 20:26 |
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axolotl farmer posted:best thing about Doctorin' the Tardis is that it was basically the KLF creating a theory on how to get a number one hit in the UK with the least effort and money and then following through. Still the finest moment in the history of popular music.
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# ¿ Jan 7, 2012 02:07 |
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Transporters in Trek exist because TOS didn't have a budget high enough to show people taking shuttles down to planets every week. Any attempt to make them internally consistent is doomed to failure because they were literally plot devices. I've got this paperback "making of star trek" book that was published while TOS was still on the air and it is loving fascinating, since it was before everybody started taking it so goddamn seriously.
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# ¿ Jan 13, 2012 08:43 |
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duTrieux posted:please post interesting and/or funny things from it, tia. It's in a storage unit at the moment and unfortunately I don't remember all that much. (It's this one, by the way, I had forgotten that Roddenbery helped write it.) One bit that I do remember is that many of McCoy's medical instruments were actually fancy salt shakers. Somebody bought a whole bunch of "futuristic" ones for a scene, but they realized that nobody would be able to tell that they were salt shakers, so they used them as medical props instead. I think pretty much every Trek nerd knows that one, though.
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# ¿ Jan 13, 2012 22:42 |
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duTrieux posted:huh. If you're the sort of person who prefers DVDs over streaming because you like watching making-of documentaries and listening to commentary tracks (like me), and you'd like to have some of that kind of material for TOS, then yes. It's been ~20 years since I read it, though.
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# ¿ Jan 13, 2012 23:02 |
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 13:20 |
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NINbuntu 64 posted:holodecks take a bunch of power and also the power is completely incompatible with the other power systems on the ship for no reason that makes sense. The ship runs on red electrons, the holodeck runs on blue electrons.
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# ¿ Jan 13, 2012 23:03 |