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lots of things are like roadside picnic because roadside picnic loving owns
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Jan 1, 2019 23:59
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Djeser posted:The other problem is that the prose has a habit of getting cute. The main character from the second book, Control? At one point, he has to push the control button on his keyboard to page through a report. And it's the only control he has over the program. Do you get it? In the same book, there's a character named Grace, and she gets a whole bunch of business about how that's a word that means something. All the twee little winks about control and grace and Oh Christ, I just remembered the whole business that becomes a motif where one of the characters mishears the spoken word 'terroir' as 'terror' despite the fact that the words sound nothing alike.
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Jan 2, 2019 16:27
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Finicums Wake posted:what'd you guys think about stanislaw lem? i haven't read a ton of his stuff, but what i have read i found to be good, and not merely in the sense of being 'good, for genre fiction.' Parts of the cyberiad are so clever I can hardly believe it’s a translation.
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Jan 4, 2019 00:20
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I was having trouble falling asleep last night so I randomly grabbed Jack Vances "Rhialto the magnificent" from the shelf. It's fun to read because it's so unlike modern fantasy. There isn't a focus on spectacle or psychology. One thing that dates it heavily is the humor. The entire first chapter is about a bunch of wizards turning into women. As a result they find themselves spending hours selecting clothes to wear or cleaning up the kitchen.
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Jan 4, 2019 01:23
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Do you remember when FYAD got renamed to some weird rant about deconstrutivist humour being lazy? I feel like that sums up Snow Crash. There are bits where it almost wants you to take it seriously, but it's constantly hiding behind some Illuminatus! type irony. So it's hard to figure out what it's a tually trying to say. It's a post-modern surrealist comedy speculating about modern technology. Neal Stephenson seems to catch a lot of poo poo and he definitely wore out his schtick after a few books - holy god he needs an editor - but at least he tried to make something different. Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon are perfectly respectable, and reasonably novel. The diamond age is where he jumped the shark. That book is so long and so boring.
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Jan 4, 2019 01:26
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Schwarzwald posted:Snow Crash was frustrating. The main impetus behind the events of the plot, the central conflict, and everything that matters on the large scale, flies drat near completely over the heads over every viewpoint character. Hiro, YT, et al can be somewhat entertaining in their obliviousness, but it's certainly conveniently how their lets Stephenson skip past having to explain how the events of the story actually change things. The story is barely important. The entire thing regularly grinds to a halt so Stephenson can write a playful essay comparing linguistic quirks of an ancient babylonian language to a neurological syndrome. Stephenson and Charles Stross had an interesting thing going for a while there, playing with the style of contemporary forums posting and applying it to the novel. Now both just pump out horrid shelf benders.
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Jan 4, 2019 01:29
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side_burned posted:Those longs section of Hiro researching sumerian gods with the librarian are tedious. *cool
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Jan 4, 2019 01:29
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Amethyst posted:I was having trouble falling asleep last night so I randomly grabbed Jack Vances "Rhialto the magnificent" from the shelf. it's funny because the wizards are giant assholes and yeah Vance got some outdated social attitudes for sure. Rhialto came out in the mid 80s iirc so cant blame "the times" really. the story with them flying through space in a wizard palace to be assholes to their wizard friend is cool and good
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Jan 4, 2019 01:34
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Vance makes no effort to make his characters heroic and repeatedly describes the world as moribund. The humor is a bit of a paradox: it sticks out awkwardly but is also of a piece with the general run-down, amoral tone. I like his playful invention of words. Rhialto the womanizer is described as skilled in "calligynics"
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Jan 4, 2019 01:41
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A common refrain from fantasy fans is that they like "magic systems". In two pages Vance has more fun than Jordan, Martin, Bakker, or any of the other authors who spend pages and pages describing the spectacle of intermixing essences or whatever ever have. It's like reading the preface of a cookbook:  It's easy to see why rpg gamers love this stuff so much.
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Jan 4, 2019 01:46
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I'm the Green and Purple Postponement of Joy
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Jan 4, 2019 01:50
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Where a modern fantasy author would spend an entire pointless chapter describing a voyage across the ocean through descriptions of a protagonist standing on deck, sensory descriptions of said protagonist, and interminable recitation of internal anxieties, Vance writes:quote:"Three weeks Ulan Dhor sailed the nerveless ocean. The sun rose bright as blood from the horizon and belled across the sky, and the water was calm, save for the ruffle of the breeze and the twin widening marks of Ulan Dhor's wake." "Nerveless" is a really cool way to describe an ocean.
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Jan 4, 2019 02:03
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Amethyst posted:A common refrain from fantasy fans is that they like "magic systems". Speaking of magic systems, RPGs, and Vance, it's interesting how little focus the famous memory-based "Vancian magic" actually gets in the Dying Earth books. The first couple stories in the first book involve it heavily, and near the end of the second book Cugel uses it a bit when he steals Iucounu's spellbook, but that's about it; almost all the magic Rhialto and his frenemies do involves magical artifacts or genie-like beings rather than memorizing and forgetting incantations. Based on what I've read about Vance, it seems that this is because he became disillusioned with the "gadget stories" he used to write, where the protagonist encounters situations that force him or her* to use (and usually use up) all his technological or magic resources in turn, like a James Bond movie. The later Vance preferred to focus more on other things, like anthropological world-building and picaresque. * Protagonists in the Vance corpus are overwhelmingly male, so the sections from the POVs of T'Sais and T'Sain provide another way in which the first few chapters of The Dying Earth/Mazirian the Magician are unrepresentative.
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Jan 4, 2019 03:04
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Just finished a story where the hero wins because he's the only person in a 5000 year old city smart enough to figure out how to drive a car, which litter the streets, perfectly functional and unused.
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Jan 4, 2019 03:12
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Love you, Amethyst.
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Jan 4, 2019 04:35
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Nice! Love the classic look <3
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Jan 4, 2019 04:40
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You're still wrong about Pacific Rim.
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Jan 4, 2019 04:42
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I should watch it one day
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Jan 4, 2019 04:43
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So am I debating doing an honest-to-god effortpost on Lord Foul's Bane because I stumbled on it in my Kindle library. Any interest?
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Jan 4, 2019 04:52
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So am I debating doing an honest-to-god effortpost on Lord Foul's Bane because I stumbled on it in my Kindle library. Any interest? Definitely. I really hated that book.
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Jan 4, 2019 04:59
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So am I debating doing an honest-to-god effortpost on Lord Foul's Bane because I stumbled on it in my Kindle library. Any interest? Isn’t that the one with the rapist leper? Eviscerate it.
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Jan 4, 2019 05:00
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I was maybe 14 when I read it. Just finished 5 David Eddings books and wanted something similar. Not sure why the guy in the book store gave me Rapist in Elf Land.
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Jan 4, 2019 05:03
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So am I debating doing an honest-to-god effortpost on Lord Foul's Bane because I stumbled on it in my Kindle library. Any interest? yes
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Jan 4, 2019 05:11
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So am I debating doing an honest-to-god effortpost on Lord Foul's Bane because I stumbled on it in my Kindle library. Any interest? I say  , friend; we’ll all appreciate the fresh meat to chew on
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Jan 4, 2019 05:35
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Doctor Faustine posted:Isn’t that the one with the rapist leper? Eviscerate it. Yes. It might take me a while because I have to travel for work next week, but I should be able to deliver something.
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Jan 4, 2019 05:41
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Amethyst posted:I was maybe 14 when I read it. Just finished 5 David Eddings books and wanted something similar. Not sure why the guy in the book store gave me Rapist in Elf Land. David Eddings is just the worst though, so it seems a logical next step.
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Jan 4, 2019 07:13
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It's been a decade or more since I read Diamond Age, I should revisit it. I remember it being a really fascinating read.
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Jan 4, 2019 07:18
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So am I debating doing an honest-to-god effortpost on Lord Foul's Bane because I stumbled on it in my Kindle library. Any interest?
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Jan 4, 2019 12:58
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So am I debating doing an honest-to-god effortpost on Lord Foul's Bane because I stumbled on it in my Kindle library. Any interest? , the last one was great; BotL has a style and method that can be intimidating to follow, but we like all effort posts taking genre fiction seriously.
Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Jan 4, 2019 |
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Jan 4, 2019 14:37
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Amethyst posted:Where a modern fantasy author would spend an entire pointless chapter describing a voyage across the ocean through descriptions of a protagonist standing on deck, sensory descriptions of said protagonist, and interminable recitation of internal anxieties, Vance writes: Vance later does describe Cugel's journey across the ocean over a few chapters in one of the Cugel books, but it works out wonderfully because he's given something to do - drive the giant worms that power the ship - making for an excellent self-contained story with all the high notes of Cugel.
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Jan 4, 2019 17:14
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No one in history has gotten as owned as Cugel during that part
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Jan 4, 2019 17:26
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I Before E posted:It's been a decade or more since I read Diamond Age, I should revisit it. I remember it being a really fascinating read. Might as well repost my own thoughts on it here: Silver2195 posted:Just finished The Diamond Age. Not sure how to feel about it. There's a lot of interesting ideas, some great dark humor, and memorable prose. I'm just not sure it holds together as a whole very well. It almost feels like it should have been a trilogy rather than a single book; there's a lot that happens offscreen, there's some subplots that could have used more explanation, and it feels like the stuff about Nell's childhood and Hackworth getting coerced into making lots of copies of the Primer came from a different book from the stuff about the Drummers and the Seed, which in turn felt like a different book from the stuff about Boxer Rebellion 2.0. Some of the stories from the Primer, particularly Dinosaur's, don't even feel like part of the same series. Don't get me wrong, Dinosaur's story is hilarious, but it doesn't have much to so with anything else.
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Jan 4, 2019 18:24
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So am I debating doing an honest-to-god effortpost on Lord Foul's Bane because I stumbled on it in my Kindle library. Any interest? Please do. I could never get through those books and so many fantasy nerds(I'm a sucker for genre crap) were like "you just can't handle an unsympathetic protagonist". Maybe. But also the books suck and were a slog.
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Jan 5, 2019 00:05
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Edit - wrong thread
Ccs fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Jan 5, 2019 |
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Jan 5, 2019 00:28
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Reamde is the one that really put me off Stephenson, combining both the worst iteration of him taking a niche concept and becoming really enamored with it while taking it as a given that the reader will become just as enamored along the way and the most tiring, half baked Michael Mann plot
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Jan 5, 2019 04:05
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anilEhilated posted:Fairly sure it's hated even among the genre fans but don't let that stop you. From what I've read it's apparently considered influential by other fantasy authors and issued in the best of GRIMDARK. That said, I am 38% of the way through and am taking notes. Just gotta finish it and organize my thoughts coherently, which is hard because the book is thematically a mess with poor prose and Covenant is awful. I might bring in some of these reviews too - I read a few to see if I was actually nuts or if it is how I remember.
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Jan 5, 2019 04:54
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just taking notes over here for my brilliant takedown of a book called 'lord foul's bane', because otherwise no one would know it was bad
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Jan 5, 2019 06:33
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:From what I've read it's apparently considered influential by other fantasy authors and issued in the best of GRIMDARK. Funny, I read the first two trilogies (was not aware there was a third until this forum told me a year or two ago) forever ago, like 35 years maybe? Really young me thought they were ok (I had to wait for the last two books from the second series to get written) but he had awful taste and was dumber than current me. The rape scene was terrible, but essential to the entire rest of the arc. Was it good? gently caress if I am going to read it again to decide that, same if it was written WELL. I found the first trilogy stark and desperate, the second more positive and constructive. I look forward to your effort post to see what you think.
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Jan 5, 2019 06:36
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A human heart posted:just taking notes over here for my brilliant takedown of a book called 'lord foul's bane', because otherwise no one would know it was bad Don't ruin this
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Jan 5, 2019 06:38
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All you need to say is simply "thing good" or "thing bad," any elaboration comes from the evil one.
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Jan 5, 2019 06:53
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