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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt ... one side can't even operate door latches and the other side *gasp* has no magic?" I hate to be a pedant but those aren't the opposing sides in the Apt series, both sides are nonmagicals.
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Sep 22, 2019 09:09
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Larry Parrish posted:tbf, the Aubrey Marturin books are about two english nobles, and from their perspective. So of course they basically dismiss everyone unless they're ordered to play nice. anyway the French were the official good guys in the napoleonic wars and we need more books about how ftw killing aristocrats is. Please this is the milSF thread, they're going to be about how it was morally just to murder all those common criminals and prostitutes who had the misfortune to be in jail whenever a war panic hits neoParis.
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Sep 22, 2019 09:32
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Doctor Jeep posted:I hate to be a pedant but those aren't the opposing sides in the Apt series, both sides are nonmagicals. You might want to edit the Adrian Tchaikovsky wikipedia page then, to make the Shadows of the Apt series premise clearer. I was using the wikipedia summary of Adrian Tchaikovsky Shadows of the Apt series which states: quote:Shadows of the Apt series The one Tchaikovsky book I have read (within the past three weeks for the 1st and only time) was Children of Time, which I found shaky-terrible because it read like a 1st time author trying to cram as many borrowed concepts from other scifi writers as possible in their book because the 1st time author wasn't sure if they would ever get a 2nd book published......instead of being written by an author with 10 previously published novels to their name. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Sep 22, 2019 |
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Sep 22, 2019 13:08
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:You might want to edit the Adrian Tchaikovsky wikipedia page then, to make the Shadows of the Apt series premise clearer. The point Jeep is making is that the conflict in the books (the "sides", as you put it) isn't Apt/Inapt, it's aggressively expansionistic, racially homogenous Apt slaver empire vs. loose coalition of Apt city-states, with the Inapt mostly as second-class citizens in both, or as isolated settlements on the fringes of the war.
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Sep 22, 2019 14:33
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:You might want to edit the Adrian Tchaikovsky wikipedia page then, to make the Shadows of the Apt series premise clearer. lol there's nothing to edit, it's clear as day there's apt and inapt kinden the wasp empire (apt) is warring against other empires and city states (both apt and inapt) how you decided that this is an apt-inapt conflict is a mystery NoNostalgia4Grover posted:The one Tchaikovsky book I have read (within the past three weeks for the 1st and only time) was Children of Time, which I found shaky-terrible because it read like a 1st time author trying to cram as many borrowed concepts from other scifi writers as possible in their book because the 1st time author wasn't sure if they would ever get a 2nd book published......instead of being written by an author with 10 previously published novels to their name. we'll have to agree to disagree
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Sep 22, 2019 16:11
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ToxicFrog posted:The point Jeep is making is that the conflict in the books (the "sides", as you put it) isn't Apt/Inapt, it's aggressively expansionistic, racially homogenous Apt slaver empire vs. loose coalition of Apt city-states, with the Inapt mostly as second-class citizens in both, or as isolated settlements on the fringes of the war. That is a 100% better summary of the Shadows of the Apt series than what has been up on wikipedia (just checked the edit history)......for years apparently. The one paragraph series summary I quoted was directly from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky So......why the hell was the Apt/Inapt thing given such prominence in that one paragraph series setting summary if it's mostly a non-factor and not the driving conflict of the books? Going to answer my own question and guess: to distinguish it from dozens and dozens of existing fantasy series. Given how shaky-terrible Tchaikovsky's Children of Time was for me(11th published novel), I really really feel cool not reading more Tchaikovsky stories.
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Sep 22, 2019 16:15
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Despite what David Weber would tell you, there are often competent and intelligent people on the other side too. And whenever Weber shows you a competent bad guy, you know they're going to make a heel-face turn within the next couple books. Like clockwork.
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Sep 22, 2019 18:12
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:So......why the hell was the Apt/Inapt thing given such prominence in that one paragraph series setting summary if it's mostly a non-factor and not the driving conflict of the books? It's not a "non-factor", in that several of the protagonists are Inapt -- one of them formerly an Apt scholar who lost her Aptitude due to some sort of magical bullshit I no longer remember the details of -- and people keep tripping over semi-functional magical artifacts from the days when Inapt wizard-kings ruled most of the world before the invention of the firearm made them obsolete.¹ So the Apt/Inapt divide does come up a lot, just on a personal level, not a national one. That said, quote:Going to answer my own question and guess: to distinguish it from dozens and dozens of existing fantasy series. Given how shaky-terrible Tchaikovsky's Children of Time was for me(11th published novel), I really really feel cool not reading more Tchaikovsky stories. this is probably also a factor; "magic and machine are mutually exclusive" isn't exactly an unexplored theme in fantasy, but it's not super common either. And without that and the bug-people theme, there's not much to distinguish this from any other "I turned my long-running fantasy GURPs game into a series of fantasy novels" series like Malazan. Also, I really enjoyed Children of Time and Spiderlight and I still only made it a few books into Shadows of the Apt before losing interest. So if you don't even like his later books, skipping those is probably a good call. ¹ So I guess there is a big Apt/Inapt conflict, now that I think about it, it just happened generations before the books start, and in the books themselves mostly manifests as the Ragtag Band of Heroes™ going "huh, a half-finished superweapon from when the wizard-kings were trying to stop the Apt rebellions from machine-gunning them to death" and the occasional elderly moth- or mantis-kinden whining about how they're meant to be ruling the world, you know. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Sep 22, 2019 |
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Sep 22, 2019 18:30
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:That is a 100% better summary of the Shadows of the Apt series than what has been up on wikipedia (just checked the edit history)......for years apparently. The one paragraph series summary I quoted was directly from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky 1. the paragraph you quoted is titled "setting" and it's describing ... the setting. 2. wikipedia is a user-edited encyclopedia, I don't understand what your point is with these quotes. some guy on the internet made a summary you don't like? how is that relevant? if you want to say that some guy made a bad wiki article, OK, but then why not say it in the appropriate thread, there must be some place where you can bitch about wiki articles.
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Sep 22, 2019 19:50
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Doctor Jeep posted:1. the paragraph you quoted is titled "setting" and it's describing ... the setting. You win, this poo poo really isn't worth arguing over honestly. Tchaikovsky's Shadows of Apt series was used as a comparison to another long running book series (Aubrey–Maturin) series. ToxicFrog was kind enough to explain things out for re: that series. Things make sense now, personal desire to read anything else of Tchaikovsky's remains the same. btw...ToxicFrog...thank you for the detailed breakdown of the Shadows of the Apt series. Personal desire for French, Prussian, Italian, Spanish, Swiss, or god forbid Russian viewpoint Napoleonic Wars fiction remains strong however.
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Sep 22, 2019 20:24
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:You might want to edit the Adrian Tchaikovsky wikipedia page then, to make the Shadows of the Apt series premise clearer. My favorite part is when he attempts to tackle the gender pay gap using lady spiders eating male spiders. It is exactly as stupid as it sounds.
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Sep 22, 2019 20:42
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What's the thread's opinion of the Temeraire series? Had recalled it due to the recent turn toward Napoleonic Wars fiction.
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Sep 22, 2019 20:44
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:My favorite part is when he attempts to tackle the gender pay gap using lady spiders eating male spiders. you'll have to elaborate on this because i don't remember anything about gender pay gaps in the book Aerdan posted:What's the thread's opinion of the Temeraire series? Had recalled it due to the recent turn toward Napoleonic Wars fiction. readable, but not my cup of tea
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Sep 22, 2019 21:07
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Larry Parrish posted:tbf, the Aubrey Marturin books are about two english nobles, and from their perspective. So of course they basically dismiss everyone unless they're ordered to play nice. anyway the French were the official good guys in the napoleonic wars and we need more books about how ftw killing aristocrats is. steven is a catholic half spanish, half irish man and a former radical rebel in hiding. was also a part of the early french revolution before returning to ireland.
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Sep 23, 2019 01:41
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Despite what David Weber would tell you, there are often competent and intelligent people on the other side too. No only strawmen.
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Sep 23, 2019 02:11
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branedotorg posted:steven is a catholic half spanish, half irish man and a former radical rebel in hiding. was also a part of the early french revolution before returning to ireland. yeah but he was a FREE IRISH radical, not a jacobin. hes less stuffy than jack but hes still an aristocrat
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Sep 23, 2019 04:16
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Larry Parrish posted:yeah but he was a FREE IRISH radical, not a jacobin. hes less stuffy than jack but hes still an aristocrat There were Jacobins who came from aristocratic families. Mirabeau, Antonelle, Barère, Barnave, Saint-Just, Fouquier-Tinville.
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Sep 23, 2019 05:10
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Epicurius posted:There were Jacobins who came from aristocratic families. Mirabeau, Antonelle, Barère, Barnave, Saint-Just, Fouquier-Tinville. Some of them became aristocratic because of their Jacobin support. I have, lurking in my family tree like some kind of monstrous spider, Antoine Walsh. Noted slave trader and pirate who was made a French count.
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Sep 23, 2019 08:07
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Patrat posted:Some of them became aristocratic because of their Jacobin support. I have, lurking in my family tree like some kind of monstrous spider, Antoine Walsh. Noted slave trader and pirate who was made a French count. Walsh was a Jacobite (somebody who thought that somebody from the Scottish House of Stuart should be on the English/British throne) vs a Jacobin (one of the more radical factions of the French Revolution, who, after they came to power, were responsible for "the Terror", a bunch of political executions of people for treason or "insufficient revolutionary zeal", which in practice often meant disagreeing with the Jacobins)
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Sep 23, 2019 11:35
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Epicurius posted:Walsh was a Jacobite (somebody who thought that somebody from the Scottish House of Stuart should be on the English/British throne) vs a Jacobin (one of the more radical factions of the French Revolution, who, after they came to power, were responsible for "the Terror", a bunch of political executions of people for treason or "insufficient revolutionary zeal", which in practice I forget which is which constantly, between this and learning that at least one of them had giant spiders just a whole lot of learning today
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Sep 23, 2019 21:04
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Larry Parrish posted:tbf, the Aubrey Marturin books are about two english nobles, and from their perspective. So of course they basically dismiss everyone unless they're ordered to play nice. anyway the French were the official good guys in the napoleonic wars and we need more books about how ftw killing aristocrats is. By the time we get to the Napoleonic wars, y'know with the French EMPEROR, France has decided aristocracy is cool and good again just with different people as the aristocrats. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Sep 23, 2019 |
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Sep 23, 2019 21:24
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I still love that David Weber made the French civil war about welfare. And not like, the revolutionaries wanting welfare because they were starving in the street. But the revolutionaries are mad that too many people are on welfare. Kchama fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Sep 26, 2019 |
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Sep 24, 2019 16:49
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it's what happens when you've never had any problems in your life besides your bad decisions so you look at people who desperately need help and go 'yep that's 100% on you'. they literally dont understand what external pressure is because they've never faced it. I'm not saying I'm some kind of incredibly oppressed martyr but I went very hungry as a kid for a year or two and it certainly changes your world view
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Sep 26, 2019 01:26
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Doctor Jeep posted:you'll have to elaborate on this because i don't remember anything about gender pay gaps in the book There was a lot of poo poo in the sequel of how the dude spiders were nominal equal but discriminated against professionally. It was very dumb.
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Sep 26, 2019 02:47
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:There was a lot of poo poo in the sequel of how the dude spiders were nominal equal but discriminated against professionally. is it stupid because you think intelligent spiders wouldn't discriminate or because you think discrimination doesn't exist, or something else
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Sep 26, 2019 07:43
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Doctor Jeep posted:is it stupid because you think intelligent spiders wouldn't discriminate or because you think discrimination doesn't exist, or something else Definitely living up to your "I hate to be a pedant but" post that kicked off page 27 of this thread. Tchaikovsky's writing isn't for everyone. It's cool though, everyone in this thread has a hill they are willing to die on. Kchama's hill is David Weber, PupsOfWar's hill is John Ringo, my hill is the OP "Schrödinger's WarCriminal" definition, while your hill appears to be Adrian Tchaikovsky. Gave it some serious thought and the main issues I had with Children of Time was that CoT was essentially a bargain basement knock-off of Vernor Vinge's Deepness in the Sky with exponentially weaker writing in every area. The human narrative(s) in CoT had characters I gave less and less a gently caress about each time they re-appeared, while the intelligent Spider narrative in CoT had the the illusion of continuity via re-using the same 3 spider names over and over again but was really a series of vignettes about a spider-insectile themed Civ5 playthrough. There is a lot of overt similarities between Vinge's 1999 A Deepness in the Sky novel versus Tchaikovsky's 2015 Children of Time and the best way to find them all is reading both books and making the connections yourself.
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Sep 26, 2019 15:01
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Personally I thought it had more in common with Brunner's The Crucible of Time. Similar "series of vignettes about an alien civilization going from basic astronomy to space habitats, with continuity of characters across vignettes implied but not actually present" structure. Granted Crucible didn't have the human parts.
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Sep 26, 2019 15:45
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Doctor Jeep posted:is it stupid because you think intelligent spiders wouldn't discriminate or because you think discrimination doesn't exist, or something else I think that intelligent spiders don't map onto human discrimination very well (men don't really kill and eat women - violence, yes, but cannibalism is rare) and that if you want to write about human societal problems you write about...actual humans. It's like how Richard Wright's works are more convincing and horrifying than NK Jemison's weird magic racism shitshow, because one is something faced by real people and the other is an elaborate power fantasy of how people don't like superpowered individuals who can and do unconsciously mass murder.
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Sep 26, 2019 23:12
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:NK Jemison's weird magic racism shitshow Which of hers is that ? I've read How Long Til Black Future Month, the Inheritance Trilogy, and Emergency Skin. Emergency Skin is a fun polemic against the 1%. The Inheritance Trilogy grew on me book by book. How Long was packed with great ideas executed with talent and craft; it's my new favorite single-author anthology. So yeah, I'm interested in a weird magic racism shitshow from her.
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Sep 27, 2019 03:07
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I think that intelligent spiders don't map onto human discrimination very well (men don't really kill and eat women - violence, yes, but cannibalism is rare) and that if you want to write about human societal problems you write about...actual humans. It's like how Richard Wright's works are more convincing and horrifying than NK Jemison's weird magic racism shitshow, because one is something faced by real people and the other is an elaborate power fantasy of how people don't like superpowered individuals who can and do unconsciously mass murder. There were quite a number of people who either categorically dismissed Wright as a writer or stated he was a liar because it couldn’t possibly be that bad. Some of those people would listen when Ralph Ellison subsequently repeated the same points in white voice. SF and fantasy have been used for a long time to communicate ideas about human societies in metaphor. War of the Worlds was about Brit colonial arrogance and people understood this perfectly well. No, male humans don’t usually cannibalize women, but they certainly deny them legal rights and recognition, even to the point of giving male mates the right to kill wives and children in some (Roman, for instance) cases. I’m sorry that an author trying to think about human social problems through a semi-alien lens upsets you so much but I thought it was one of the few cases where reversed discrimination was done fairly well, and sometimes a metaphorical representation can get through to someone who has decided to completely dismiss the direct words of those they dismiss as “other.”
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Sep 27, 2019 03:19
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mllaneza posted:Which of hers is that ? I've read How Long Til Black Future Month, the Inheritance Trilogy, and Emergency Skin. Emergency Skin is a fun polemic against the 1%. The Inheritance Trilogy grew on me book by book. How Long was packed with great ideas executed with talent and craft; it's my new favorite single-author anthology. Sounds like the Broken Earth trilogy. I liked that one.
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Sep 27, 2019 07:12
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I think that intelligent spiders don't map onto human discrimination very well (men don't really kill and eat women - violence, yes, but cannibalism is rare) and that if you want to write about human societal problems you write about...actual humans. It's like how Richard Wright's works are more convincing and horrifying than NK Jemison's weird magic racism shitshow, because one is something faced by real people and the other is an elaborate power fantasy of how people don't like superpowered individuals who can and do unconsciously mass murder. yeah I can see your point and agree with it in the instances you mention quantumfoam posted:Definitely living up to your "I hate to be a pedant but" post that kicked off page 27 of this thread. I'm carefully not defending his actual writing, since I don't know poo poo about writing in general
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Sep 27, 2019 08:28
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occamsnailfile posted:There were quite a number of people who either categorically dismissed Wright as a writer or stated he was a liar because it couldn’t possibly be that bad. Some of those people would listen when Ralph Ellison subsequently repeated the same points in white voice. SF and fantasy have been used for a long time to communicate ideas about human societies in metaphor. War of the Worlds was about Brit colonial arrogance and people understood this perfectly well. I get what he's trying to do, he's doing the Puddenhead Wilson thing where the white kid getting whipped is supposed to shock white audiences because white kid looks like them. The same goes for your War of the Worlds analogy where the horror is being visited on English people instead of whatever place the Brits decided to invade that day. I am not sure who is expecting me to sympathize with an alien space spider just because it is male. Hell, the human characters in the book had to be mind controlled into empathizing with the spiders, but more damningly the spiders aren't characters. Watership Down is about rabbits, but it works because the rabbits are surprisingly human. They suffer and struggle as we do, they face disaster as we do, and so on. When Tchaikovsky fills the book with legions of interchangeable Portias and Fabios, I can't bring myself to care. When one of the myriad Portias is almost lost in space Tchaikovsky prioritizes describing her anatomy over how she's feeling or anything that would help us relate to her. Ultimately my problem isn't that he uses sci fi to try to address real world gender issues, it's that he has done the bare minimum of going "sexism is bad" while then wandering off into the weeds describing the ant computers. Then again, I nearly yeeted the book out the window after the Avrana Kern prologue, so that might have left a sour taste in my mouth. Space Butler posted:Sounds like the Broken Earth trilogy. I liked that one. Yea, it's broken earth.
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Sep 27, 2019 08:31
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shovelbum posted:I forget which is which constantly, between this and learning that at least one of them had giant spiders just a whole lot of learning today sadly, the Jacobin spider cavalry all died in Napoleon's invasion of Russia
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Sep 27, 2019 11:42
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Larry Parrish posted:I read so many Aubrey Marturin novels but the formula gets stale after like 6 books; the titular characters dont really grow out of their codependent bromance thing, and the scale of the stories are about one ship and its crew (but mostly just the command staff). And peacetime navies are very boring, so there always has to be a crisis for the guys to get thrown into. They're good books but they wore on me eventually. They're way loving better than the mil scifi knockoffs, though funnily enough theres a few times where the author has a whole book about something he thought was cool, like the prototype missile cruiser Polycrest. Turns out the late 18th/early 19th century just didnt have the technology for naval rocketry Post Captain is hardly about Polycrest, like yeah the ship's in there but the book is really about two dudes going after a woman. Kchama posted:I still love that David Weber made the French civil war about welfare. God, was that it? I remember the justification for space warfare being a thing in the setting being "well this welfare state is just so totally burdened by all these proles who just refuse to work that the only way they could sustain themselves was to start plundering and enslaving their neighbors!!", and I remember there being a coup but I thought that was more like "those elitist fuckers keep telling us there's no more money, well we know they're just hoarding it for themselves, off with their heads!!" and "hell yeah, we toppled the unaccountable police state, now it's our turn to run the unaccountable police state!!"
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Sep 27, 2019 22:33
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:God, was that it? I remember the justification for space warfare being a thing in the setting being "well this welfare state is just so totally burdened by all these proles who just refuse to work that the only way they could sustain themselves was to start plundering and enslaving their neighbors!!", and I remember there being a coup but I thought that was more like "those elitist fuckers keep telling us there's no more money, well we know they're just hoarding it for themselves, off with their heads!!" and "hell yeah, we toppled the unaccountable police state, now it's our turn to run the unaccountable police state!!" Not quite. At some point before the series started, the leadership of the Republic of Haven introduced a system where the common people had no need to work due to a permanent dole, but in exchange they gave up all political power and turned the existing government offices into hereditary positions that were held for life. Over time, this extended into "do not give the proles any real education - they can't use it for anything good, and educating them will make them dangerous to us", and the economy gradually collapsed because the labor force is extremely small. The ruling class decided to solve this via conquest - take over systems with healthy economies to boost their own, always with the eventual goal of reforming the system into something that works. The problem is that they never manage to steal enough - most of the economies that the conquer are too small, and are often in shaky condition already. The series starts off when they decide that the protagonist nation is a threat to any further expansion, so they decide to conquer it to secure that flank. A fair number of lesser persons in the government decide that the current government is so corrupt and incompetent that they'll never manage to fix the problems, and use the incredibly bad results of the opening engagements of the war as an excuse. The war is then used to justify currency reforms and convincing the people on the dole to actively work in order to bring the economy into balance. By the time this government is overthrown, the reforms are working, and it is outright stated that the only reason the third government survives is because much of the repair work is already done. Even under the third government, there is no mention that the welfare system is eliminated (which, if the moral of the story really was "welfare is evil" would be stated). A one-scene character takes pride in getting off the dole and buying his own aircar (shortly before he drives said aircar drunk and accidentally kills the Evil Chancellor that's actively sabotaging the government), which suggests that the system is still in place.
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Sep 27, 2019 22:59
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Gnoman posted:Not quite. At some point before the series started, the leadership of the Republic of Haven introduced a system where the common people had no need to work due to a permanent dole, but in exchange they gave up all political power and turned the existing government offices into hereditary positions that were held for life. Over time, this extended into "do not give the proles any real education - they can't use it for anything good, and educating them will make them dangerous to us", and the economy gradually collapsed because the labor force is extremely small. It's funny but if you sum it all up that actually does equal to "They were mad too many people were on welfare". Also man I forgot a lot about how loving dumb the whole Haven revolution everything was.
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Sep 29, 2019 16:09
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Kchama posted:It's funny but if you sum it all up that actually does equal to "They were mad too many people were on welfare". A government overspending in order to keep the same quality of life/constantly improving lifestyle and running itself into hilarious amounts of debt isn't unheard of at all. Plus their way to make that debt solvent was to invade/expand much like Rome did, which only made their problems worse and kicked the can down the road, which is another thing governments love to do.
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Oct 1, 2019 17:48
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I sort of want Ed Greenwood's Elminster and Weber's Honor Harrington to face off somehow. One of them is the pureform mary-sue of military science-fiction , while the other is the pureform gary stu of fantasy fiction. Hoping for a matter/anti-matter reaction that wipes out all records + memories of both characters for everyone, especially Ed Greenwood and David Weber.
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Oct 2, 2019 03:17
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quantumfoam posted:I sort of want Ed Greenwood's Elminster and Weber's Honor Harrington to face off somehow. One of them is the pureform mary-sue of military science-fiction , while the other is the pureform gary stu of fantasy fiction. David Weber already has a Gary Sue fantasy series and I'm ashamed I know this. IIRC the wizard has magic orbital nukes.
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Oct 2, 2019 06:14
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