pseudorandom name posted:Nah, about half of Tim Powers' output is crap. It's been a while since I've seen a troll as good as this.
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Apr 8, 2015 02:18
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pseudorandom name posted:The problem isn't that his magic system is opaque, the problem is that there's no reasonable explanation as to how any of his characters know any of this stuff. Are you really asking why ordinary people would know and believe in folk magic?
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Apr 8, 2015 21:35
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pseudorandom name posted:I'm asking how their knowledge could possibly be widespread, accurate and effectual given the in the world Powers' presents, magic is generally unknown and treated as distasteful and to be avoided by those actually in the know. Because that's not a universal condition of his novels, and, for example, the Fault Lines books are largely about the subcultures that lie underneath mainstream American society. It's mainly a condition in Declare, which has multiple reasons for that worldview, and The Anubis Gates, which then refutes that position with the ending of the novel. People tend to sum them up this way because they're very tilted towards the horrific and grotesque, but it's not a particularly accurate worldview of his.
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Apr 8, 2015 23:41
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thehomemaster posted:Why do people itt get so hung up on racism in old books? I mean, no duh? They think racism is bad and feel uncomfortable when around it. Personally, I am in favor of more people feeling comfortable with calling other people wetbacks or redskins.
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Sep 6, 2015 01:29
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Any time someone feels uncomfortable reading or hearing an ethnic slur, that's a failure of liberalism. We will only be free when we call homosexuals fudgepacking faggots without a quiver of guilt.
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Sep 6, 2015 01:40
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The whole dismissive attitude on display is really weird when it comes to genre fiction, especially when it comes to motherfucking Conan. Like, it's understandable when it comes to someone talking about literary fiction, or even something that's been massively influential like Lovecraft, but Howard's influence is much, much smaller than that of pastiches and homages nowadays, along with reinterpretations like the comics and movies.
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Sep 6, 2015 02:04
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PINING 4 PORKINS posted:It's what you get when you try to jam something through the lens of modern social activism instead of taking a more insightful and context-based analytical approach. Oh, never mind, I get it. It's about the dang SJWs, who don't give eugenics the insightful analysis it deserves.
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Sep 6, 2015 02:06
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DeusExMachinima posted:So to boil down what you're saying, a majority of people in the West gave eugenics more than passing thought but wait you guys there were exceptions to that rule! Okay, great. That's not necessarily exclusive to the point I made. No, what he's saying is that it's invalid for people to openly respond negatively to racist things in old stories, because it's trying to jam something through the lens of modern social activism instead of taking a more insightful and context-based analytical approach. Which is bullshit on two levels, because first of all, it's good when people don't like racism and admit that fact, and second, a more insightful and context-based analytical approach is something that Conan cannot really withstand without getting to the point where Robert E. Howard was a pretty racist man and this lay underneath not just Conan, but Bran Mak Morn, Kull, Solomon Kane, etc. as well.
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Sep 6, 2015 02:17
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thehomemaster posted:Goddamn you are one facetious person. How dare someone be flippant on a comedy forum.
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Sep 6, 2015 02:48
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coyo7e posted:I think he's running some sort of bombastic donald trump esque long troll. He just hasn't gotten around to making GBS threads on cuckservatives yet, he's still stuck on SJWs and white guilt, while fully displaying the white fragility he thinks he's shrugging off manfully. This is gibberish, would you mind clarifying your telepathic insights into what I must really be doing?
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Sep 6, 2015 15:53
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Hedningen posted:Starting a read-through of all of Zelazny's work, as I finally have enough time to read for my own enjoyment again. Debating how to go about it - my original plan was to go chronologically, but after reviewing the wall of stuff he's written, I'm working to pare down the list to something more manageable. I've read most of his stuff, barring some of his Dilvish stuff and a variety of short stories, so I don't think I'm missing too much if I skip some of his pulpier fantasy, but the goal here is to get a complete picture of his writing career. Read his collaborations. The Black Throne, with Fred Saberhagen, Dies Irae, with Philip K. Dick, The Mask of Loki, with Thomas Thurston Thomas, and any of his Millennial Series, with Robert Sheckley. Read the collection The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of his Mouth, or, if you can find them, the 2009 six-volume complete edition of his short stories. If you can't, also track down the collection The Last Defender of Camelot. Some of his short novels that are somewhat harder to find: Bridge of Ashes, The Dream Master, the YA novel A Dark Traveling. The two novels Jane Lindskold finished after Zelazny's death are, in my opinion, fairly weak, but if you want a look at his last works, track down Donnerjack and Lord Demon, along with the adventure game Chronomaster, or, if you don't want to fiddle with DOSBox, the novelization, also written by Lindskold from Zelazny's drafts and notes. This is all assuming you've read through the Amber novels, Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness, This Immortal, Roadmarks, Isle of the Dead, Eye of Cat, A Night In The Lonesome October, and Today We Choose Faces, which seems pretty safe to assume.
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Sep 8, 2015 23:58
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The Limyaael rants are good. People on this website have basically no grounds to talk about how awful Benjanun Sriduangkaew is. Silver2195 posted:Limyaael stopped posting in 2010, back when some people still liked Requires Hate. I'm a bit surprised they'd be friends, though; Requires Hate hated a lot of the stuff Limyaael held up as good, and Limyaael seemed rather unenthusiastic about feminism (at least in the forms it tends to take in fantasy). I don't understand what the last clause is supposed to mean. Silver2195 posted:Tying this back to Limyaael, how do people feel about her dislike of words in fantasy that refer to real-world people, places, or legends, like herculean (https://curiosityquills.com/limyaael/modern-language-in-fantasy/)? I noticed the use of "sodomite" in The Traitor Baru Comorant, in a world without any Sodom. I'm not sure it's possible to totally avoid eponyms and so forth. A month or so ago I was reading The Eyes of the Overworld and noticed the word "quixotic," but it's technically set in the future of our world. I'm not sure how I feel about the eponym issue myself. I think that implicit in this is her talking about its use in dialogue or internal thoughts, where someone saying "Brobdingnagian" in speech will raise questions that using it in omniscient description will not (not that using it in description won't raise some other questions). Obviously there's a limit, but these aren't supposed to be catch-all rules.
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Sep 23, 2015 06:08
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MrFlibble posted:She harassed people (women and women of colour predominantly, which is weird), sending them death threats and directing her friends and fans to do the same. Hows dem grounds? The definition of harassment in use by Mixon is such that you yourself are probably technically a harasser, just from making fun of some trashy book. Someone willfully posting on a website where a person told someone their poison womb was making heaven too crowded should drat you by association as well. Mixon's graphs are basically the same thing as a JFK conspiracy theorist seizing on the supposed difficulty of the shot to conclude JFK was shot from the grassy knoll. It ignores a whole world of other evidence in favor of a prearranged conclusion. There's also no evidence for any coordinated harassment by Sriduangkaew that isn't at least as strong or stronger for coordinated harassment of her. Sriduangkaew is an rear end in a top hat who said some unkind things to people, but nobody's engaging in this kind of campaign against the hundreds or thousands of people who called for other people to "die in a fire" over the last decade, only one against a nonwhite lesbian, with a campaign dedicated to implying she's neither of those things, supported largely by white people. That is, regardless of whether the desires of some people to forbid Sriduangkaew from ever mentioning reading their books are considered reasonable or not, there are still many people who are doing this for inherently unreasonable reasons. Also, the revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband not getting nominated for a Hugo while Mixon's post did should be infuriating even if you loathe Sriduangkaew with a passion that cannot be assuaged.
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Sep 23, 2015 10:50
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MrFlibble posted:I don't care about any of this, at all. The reason I know about all the requireshate drama at all is because I actually read the requireshate blog. Reading someone tear into another piece of work is fun. I brought it up when I recognised Winterfox in the essay, because I read about all the poo poo requireshate did (or apparently didn't do?) from the Mixon essay. I was curious if it was the same Winterfox, and if it was related. The "accusations" were the result of several of their (MZB and her husband) victims deciding to come forward and tell their story. This was completely ignored in the nominations for Best Fan Writer. If you didn't care, it would have been nicer to indicate that from the beginning, instead of writing what you did, which implied some desire to know.
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Sep 23, 2015 11:08
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johnsonrod posted:MrFlibble and Effectronica please shut the gently caress up and take your stupid "requireshate" chat to some irc channel or something. No one but you gives a poo poo about a stupid blog from 2010. Well, frankly, I'd rather be the kind of wretched hellspawn that "derails" than a goddamn liar, which is what anyone who says you should read genre fiction is, by definition.
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Sep 23, 2015 13:40
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angel opportunity posted:can someone just go ahead and make the thread in the book barn that is like "Racism, Dog Whistling, , Gaslighting, Lampshading, Petty Feuds and other problematic issues in the SFF writer community," and then this thread can be for talking about books? Can somebody take you (and all the other people who'd rather shriek about how much you hate a topic than let it die naturally) out behind the chemical sheds and put you out of your misery? 
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Sep 23, 2015 13:59
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angel opportunity posted:To be completely serious, this derail happens nearly every single month. It's always like 2-3 people discussing it, and it kills discussion about books for the entire course of the derail. The derail does end naturally after a few days, but then it comes right back up again just about every month, and I'm pretty sure most of the people in this thread don't care about any of this poo poo. Even if they care about it, they'd probably rather just read an article about Sad Puppies instead of discussing it at length in a thread that's supposed to be about books. If it kills discussion, I'm guessing the problem is with you and the other people so infuriated by those posts happening you can't scroll over them, or skim them. I mean, maybe if you weren't a giant prick at first, I'd feel more sympathetic. But too late for that now.
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Sep 23, 2015 14:15
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Now, to throw a grenade into all of those theories, there's a short story by Asimov about an Imperial bureaucrat manipulating his superiors to allow an alien species to escape the Milky Way before being confined to reservations/zoos. Also the short stories in Gold that link Nemesis to the other stuff. The first three Foundation books work best if you read them close together, because they're really one complete story.
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Nov 8, 2015 02:04
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Telsa Cola posted:That short story sounds like my type of poo poo, can I get a title? I'll gladly look it up. jng2058 posted:Then read Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis. I unironically enjoy the prequel novels, but that may be relief that Asimov ratcheted down the ol' tit fetish from all his other late novels.
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Nov 8, 2015 08:40
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Telsa Cola posted:That short story sounds like my type of poo poo, can I get a title? Title is "Blind Alley", it was published in 1945, and the Complete Asimov Short Stories, Vol. 1, should have it.
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Nov 8, 2015 09:10
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freebooter posted:My favourite theory about the Shire being ruled over by Saruman is that it's an allegory for when the officer class returned home from WWII and found that, shock horror, the Labour Party was in government. It was introduced far too early in writing for that to be the dominant aspect, and I feel it's also probably a commentary on American soldiers as much. There's also a lot of the Lost Generation culture shock in there too. Kalenn Istarion posted:He wrote it right into he intro of one of the books. Something like 'despising allegory in all its forms'. And yet he wrote an interesting and depressing little allegory, "Leaf by Niggle", as an illustration of his beliefs about artistic creation. House Louse posted:Maybe; it was definitely written during another long bout of rationing in Rings' case. And in the Scouring of the Shire the rationing is the work of Saruman, although I don't think that's a potshot at contemporary rationing. The Tooks and Brandybucks are landowners, the Tooks being more urbanized nobility and the Brandybucks being country squires. The Baggins family are "new money", and there's not much of a distinct middle class- everyone is either leisurer or laborer.
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Nov 29, 2015 20:56
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:This is an interesting question really. I've always read those elements of the Scouring as more part of the general critique of totalitarianism in the book, just this time with a communist rather than a fascist inflection. Well, Smith is another case of applicability, in my opinion. I think you could view it allegorically as well, and to a much greater extent than anything other than it or Leaf, but the latter is purely allegory.
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Nov 29, 2015 23:37
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freebooter posted:This suddenly reminded me of the modern writer Paul Kingsnorth and his novel The Wake, which is a historical novel set in and after 1066, and which often reads like fantasy and which has a similar environmental subtext. The Scouring as a basic concept emerges in early drafts of Lothlórien, before even the emergence of Galadriel as a character, around 1941 IIRC. Years before Attlee's government.
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Nov 29, 2015 23:49
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andrew smash posted:what? link http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3503677&pagenumber=219&perpage=40#post418925098
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Dec 20, 2015 21:27
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coyo7e posted:I think scooch/skooch is kind of a cultural signifier of a certain kind of gentrified northeasterner, they use it all the time. I heard it last week and I live on the west coast, I hear new york liberals use it a lot. So inn the Magicians "scooch over!" is apropos. It's a general Old North thing, you hear older people here in the Upper Midwest say it too.
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Jan 15, 2016 19:14
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Ani posted:Is there a canonical list of good Tim Powers books? I read Declare and it was just absolutely amazing. I want to read more, but the descriptions (and some of the reviews) of his other books make me doubtful. Nothing Powers has done has been as ambitious as Declare. That being said, this is how I internally classify Powers's novels and short-story collections: Essential: Declare, Last Call, The Anubis Gates. These three are what I would use for a course on Powers or the genres he represents, and they offer the most tightly-focused approach to his motifs and concerns. Excellent: The Stress of Her Regard, On Stranger Tides, Expiration Date, Dinner at Deviant's Palace, The Bible Repairman: These are not necessarily worse in quality, but they aren't quite as elegant a statement, to be hifalutin, as the tier above. They are all well worth reading. Good: Earthquake Weather, The Drawing of the Dark, Night Moves, Salvage and Demolition, Hide Me Among the Graves: These have structural flaws (or in the case of Night Moves have generally weaker stories) that end up leaving me feeling a bit colder about them than the previous tier. Okay: The Skies Discrowned, An Epitaph in Rust, Three Days to Never: The first two are Powers's first novels, written close together, and are very clearly first novels. They don't really have the sort of power Powers would (haha) discover with The Drawing of the Dark. Three Days to Never suffers from feeling almost like a retread of Declare and the three Fault Lines novels, with some additional structural issues that end up leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Bear in mind that these are still pretty good genre fiction. I have not read Strange Itineraries or the independent novella Nobody's Home. There's also Medusa's Web, which will be released in about a month.
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Jan 24, 2016 03:30
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