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Currently reading Steel Frame and it's entertaining and weird, but I was kinda sad at the introduction of I GUESS BIG OL PLOT SPOILERS space robot zombies. Went from being maybe weird sci-fi to weird sci-fi and maybe horror, and that's rarely done well in books. Keeping my fingers crossed though.
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Oct 29, 2019 20:54
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Philthy posted:Picked up the first two Murderbot books. Holy moly. Both look to be about 100 pages, if that. One was softbound for $15, and the other hardcover for $16. Quality over quantity.
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Oct 29, 2019 21:00
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StrixNebulosa posted:What does chick book mean? I'm confused here, like... it features women? It features emotions? What? Like a chick flick, it's of interest largely to women and assumes a certain psychological viewpoint. Yes, the emotional stuff was the biggest turn off. I was flabbergasted by the motivations of the mastermind and appalled by the reactions of the protagonist. I couldn't even imagine a "normal" person (which I belatedly realized meant male viewpoint) behaving in such a fashion, but could just about stretch my imagination to cover some of my more vapid girlfriends doing that.
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Oct 29, 2019 21:00
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:Like a chick flick, it's of interest largely to women and assumes a certain psychological viewpoint. Yes, the emotional stuff was the biggest turn off. I was flabbergasted by the motivations of the mastermind and appalled by the reactions of the protagonist. I couldn't even imagine a "normal" person (which I belatedly realized meant male viewpoint) behaving in such a fashion, but could just about stretch my imagination to cover some of my more vapid girlfriends doing that. you wanna rethink this post maybe
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Oct 29, 2019 21:06
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To be fair the book makes it pretty clear they are both horribly broken people. Nothing to do with gender.
anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 21:13
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:Like a chick flick, it's of interest largely to women and assumes a certain psychological viewpoint. Yes, the emotional stuff was the biggest turn off. I was flabbergasted by the motivations of the mastermind and appalled by the reactions of the protagonist. I couldn't even imagine a "normal" person (which I belatedly realized meant male viewpoint) behaving in such a fashion, but could just about stretch my imagination to cover some of my more vapid girlfriends doing that. Can you dial down the sexism here a bit? Please?
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Oct 29, 2019 21:22
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The Luminous Dead is Gone Girl in a Cave, but with all female characters and a higher body count.
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Oct 29, 2019 21:28
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XBenedict posted:Quality over quantity. This was the general feeling I was getting, so I bit my lip and just bought them.
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Oct 29, 2019 22:47
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:Luminous Dead is very much a chick book, for both good and ill. Not my kind of thing. I don't think there's any such thing. e: Apparatchik Magnet posted:Like a chick flick, it's of interest largely to women and assumes a certain psychological viewpoint. Yes, the emotional stuff was the biggest turn off. I was flabbergasted by the motivations of the mastermind and appalled by the reactions of the protagonist. I couldn't even imagine a "normal" person (which I belatedly realized meant male viewpoint) behaving in such a fashion, but could just about stretch my imagination to cover some of my more vapid girlfriends doing that. 
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Oct 29, 2019 22:48
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I consider romance (or porn books) as chick books, but that's just me. Edit - Not saying that dude's can't read em, just saying the audience for something like 50 shades is gonna be a lot more female oriented than the audience for something like space opera. Stupid_Sexy_Flander fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 22:54
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I consider romance (or porn books) as chick books, but that's just me. Yeah, that's what made this very slightly interesting, branching out into a an overemotional individual sacrificing the lives of several people via lies and manipulation on a quixotic quest to erase her childhood mommy issues via a bizarre goal's whose symbolic value was questionable even as its practical value was nil. With a better awareness by the author of how batshit the premise is and a realistic reaction from the protagonist, rather than becoming an after the fact coconspirator due to her own codependence issues, it might have had some payoff. Instead it just becomes two emotionally crippled people with bizarre motivations chained to unlikely domain competence do a thing. Apparatchik Magnet fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 23:09
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Labelling any specific genre as being for [GENDER] is incredibly reductive and bad.
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Oct 29, 2019 23:15
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Queer Salutations posted:Labelling any specific genre as being for [GENDER] is incredibly reductive and bad. Do you think the romance publishers are leaving any money on the table by not marketing to men?
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Oct 29, 2019 23:19
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:Yeah, that's what made this very slightly interesting, branching out into a an overemotional individual sacrificing the lives of several people via lies and manipulation on a quixotic quest to erase her childhood mommy issues via a bizarre goal's whose symbolic value was questionable even as its practical value was nil. With a better awareness by the author of how batshit the premise is and a realistic reaction from the protagonist, rather than becoming an after the fact coconspirator due to her own codependence issues, it might have had some payoff. Instead it just becomes two emotionally crippled people with bizarre motivations chained to unlikely domain competence do a thing. An "overemotional individual" .... That's one hell of a thing to say after your earlier comments. How is this descent into the cave any less logical than famed mountain climbers ascending "because it's there"? What's batshit about the premise in that context? Humans are emotion, and attach emotions to goals that don't make sense.
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Oct 29, 2019 23:29
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StrixNebulosa posted:An "overemotional individual" .... That's one hell of a thing to say after your earlier comments. How is this descent into the cave any less logical than famed mountain climbers ascending "because it's there"? What's batshit about the premise in that context? Humans are emotion, and attach emotions to goals that don't make sense. If your parents died a decade ago in a cave, you think it would be psychologically healthy to send seven or eight successive individuals, most of whom died, under false premises on a mission that is actually insanely more dangerous than they think and whose actual purpose is just to find some bodies to give a spoiled rich kid some closure? She should be in jail after her psychiatric treatment is done. This is the rich girl managerial equivalent to a serial killer. Hell, since those guys get marriage proposals in prison I guess I shouldn't be surprised others write positive reviews of this book.
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Oct 29, 2019 23:32
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:If your parents died a decade ago in a cave, you think it would be psychologically healthy to send seven or eight successive individuals, most of whom died, under false premises on a mission that is actually insanely more dangerous than they think and whose actual purpose is just to find some bodies to give a spoiled rich kid some closure? She should be in jail after her psychiatric treatment is done. ... It's clearly psychologically unhealthy. And she should be in jail. But it's very human, it makes sense as a motivation for someone.
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Oct 29, 2019 23:34
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Lmao bad people being in books doesn’t make the books bad. Christ.
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Oct 29, 2019 23:46
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But clearly an over emotional woman author must think her characters are good people who only act reasonably. After all, books are only about people behaving reasonably.
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Oct 29, 2019 23:49
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:Do you think the romance publishers are leaving any money on the table by not marketing to men? Yes. Romance is marketed to women because society has deemed romance a woman's genre. Just like Science Fiction has been deemed a man's genre. Patriarchal notions of emotions bad, strength good have made these boxes. Men like romance, woman like sci-fi. Stop gendering things that have no reason to be gendered.
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Oct 29, 2019 23:50
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Yeesh, I gotta read this book now.
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Oct 29, 2019 23:54
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Authors must approve of all their character’s behavior because people can only write things they think are Correct. Beep boop.
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Oct 29, 2019 23:58
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General Battuta posted:Authors must approve of all their character’s behavior because people can only write things they think are Correct. Beep boop. Huh? I don't care if the author thinks the characters' actions are Correct, I care that she erroneously thinks they are Interesting and Believable. Use of Weapons, great book. Zakalwe, great character. Very male, incidentally.
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Oct 30, 2019 00:11
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[sets down book of the new sun] what the hell... the main character is a torturer? i cant read this lovely backwards book, theres no hero
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Oct 30, 2019 00:20
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Larry Parrish posted:[sets down book of the new sun] what the hell... the main character is a torturer? i cant read this lovely backwards book, theres no hero This is literally what critics were saying about Joker recently
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Oct 30, 2019 00:28
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This insecure Scot murdered his king? I can't keep going with this. No true Scot would do such a thing. What amateurish writing.
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Oct 30, 2019 00:29
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Larry Parrish posted:[sets down book of the new sun] what the hell... the main character is a torturer? i cant read this lovely backwards book, theres no hero you joke but it's pretty funny how many readers identify with noted piece of poo poo Severian Wolfe is good at making you like bad people, its neat
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Oct 30, 2019 00:36
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Book of the New Sun is so good. It is indeed very good at making you like Severian, which is great because in universe he wrote it for more or less that reason
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Oct 30, 2019 00:41
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BlackIronHeart posted:Yeesh, I gotta read this book now. I had already gone looking for it and realized I bought it back in July and it's just stuck in my backlog.
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Oct 30, 2019 00:42
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I've heard of Modesitt's Recluce novels, but never read one until now. I saw The Magic Engineer on the shelf at my local library and checked it out, and finished it tonight. On the whole, I liked it. Most of the characters felt kind of flat, Modesitt's writing style felt very "this happened then that happened then this happened," and Dorrin could do no wrong, but all the same I found the story basically interesting and the characters likeable. What I found really interesting were the philosophical sections of the book as the protagonist approached magic as a science, with logic and reasoning as he tried to explain his world. My biggest disappointment, I think, was the big cop-out regarding Dorrin's inventions: the back of the book blurb billed the book as "Leonardo da Vinci is born into a world of magic" but Dorrin is not an inventor or an engineer. He just knows how to make a steam engine and so builds one, and uses magic to cheat his way through the technological and scientific hurdles. I'm an absolute sucker for the idea of a scientist or inventor in a world of magic, but this is not that. So, disappointing but still basically enjoyable. That fits the other Modesitt book I've read, a sci-fi book called The Eternity Artifact, and I'm not sure if I want to read more Recluce stuff after this. Anyone familiar with the series who can tell me whether this book was representative of the series?
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Oct 30, 2019 02:53
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Cythereal posted:I've heard of Modesitt's Recluce novels, but never read one until now. I saw The Magic Engineer on the shelf at my local library and checked it out, and finished it tonight. I've only read the first one, "The Magic of Recluce" and I'll save you a lot of time: don't. The best chunk of the book is 200 pages into it when our stupid teenage protagonist settles down in a village to do carpentry for like a year, and it's sweet slice of life carpentry with little to no magic. The rest of the book is about this teenager being a stubborn idiot, being exiled from home, having the world's most boring adventures in this different continent, and when he left the carpentry slice of life I couldn't bring myself to care anymore. So uh, it's good to hear he gets better, but please don't do anything but skim the first one. If you read the rest, let me know so I can skip ahead to the fun ones!
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Oct 30, 2019 03:08
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I read a few Modesitt books and mostly I remember he talked a lot about food and whatever craft the characters were working on and kept hypothesizing about law/chaos/good/evil being basically a zero sum game with physical properties affecting the world. One time the World Fantasy Convention was held in my city so I went, and I went to a panel that happened right after his, and he apparently A) devoted the entire panel timeslot to a reading, no questions or anything and B) ran ten minutes over and was really fussy when informed he needed to wrap it up.
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Oct 30, 2019 03:21
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Thinking about it a little more, while the parts of Magic Engineer where Dorrin was contemplating how exactly magic works, I'm still baffled as to what magic in this setting can do. The big divide seems to be between order and chaos. Fair enough. Chaos magic can throw fireballs, cause volcanic eruptions, scry on distant events, and create illusions. Order magic can heal injuries and sickness, manipulate the weather, enchant objects (especially iron), mind control people, turn you invisible, help grow plants, and defeat Chaos magic. Erm, what? The ruminations on the mechanics of the magic were interesting, but both forms of magic seem to be rather odd grab bags of various stuff that didn't seem at all connected by ideas of order or chaos.
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Oct 30, 2019 03:24
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Queer Salutations posted:Yes. Romance is marketed to women because society has deemed romance a woman's genre. Just like Science Fiction has been deemed a man's genre. Patriarchal notions of emotions bad, strength good have made these boxes. Men like romance, woman like sci-fi. Stop gendering things that have no reason to be gendered. It's going a bit off topic, but other factors also play into how this happens outside of sociological concepts. Testosterone for one. This is beyond the control of gendering.
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Oct 30, 2019 03:38
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Cythereal posted:So, disappointing but still basically enjoyable. That fits the other Modesitt book I've read, a sci-fi book called The Eternity Artifact, and I'm not sure if I want to read more Recluce stuff after this. Anyone familiar with the series who can tell me whether this book was representative of the series? Not just representative of the series but most of Modesitt. A typical Modesitt plot involves a man/boy working at some sort of craft while being reluctantly forced into making the hard choices no one else will to do the hard deeds no one else will and avoid greater disaster. The Recluce books all use the same type of magic with the same tech level, more or less, which is about all that separates them from his other fantasy and his science fiction. Cythereal posted:The big divide seems to be between order and chaos. Fair enough. Many things can be done with either order or chaos (and most wizards can manipulate both, whether they realize it or not). But to go through your list: Chaos: throw fireballs (conjure chaos in fireball form), cause volcanic eruptions (tap into chaos below the surface of the earth and bring it to the surface), scry on distant events (frankly I can't remember how or if this one is justified as chaos only, but that seems more plot required), and create illusions (inverse of scrying, which is bringing images to you). Order: healing injuries and sickness (strengthening the natural order in the human body to allow it to return to baseline normal, as well as canceling out chaos from infections or similar. Note that you will also see some forms of chaos healing where wizards are destroying infections or the like), manipulate the weather (manipulating the patterns of order which are the butterflies of the weather), enchant objects (this isn't enchantment, this is just imbuement with order, which typically strengthens the objects; a wizard could also imbue objects with chaos but this would be a really bad idea), mind control people (I think you see chaos wizards doing this too, but I don't think the details are explained; I assume pattern control again), help you grow plants (imbuing order again), and defeating chaos magic (pitting order against chaos is more or less a test of will and strength against each other; a powerful chaos magician can overpower a weaker order magician).
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Oct 30, 2019 03:44
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Having finished the Bob books I had wondered if the author intentionally made Bob an arrogant idiot with terrible skills and judgement. The reason I had for realising it was unintentional was that trite ending. I was really hoping the damaged transport stopped communicating and started heading towards the others system, after all the humans were onboard. The shear god drat arrogance of it, but ofc it wasn't it was his brilliance in shepherding the forever stupid humans who would just kill themselves without him. If I were a human in this universe I would be 100% behind the extermination of all Bobs everywhere before the got us all killed. This was somehow worse than RP1 with its pop culture references.
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Oct 30, 2019 03:50
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Came to post Yet Another Recommendation for Steel Frame. Parts have felt like a slog, but that might be me internalizing how beat up and worn down Rook gets or maybe the detailed descriptions of the different kinds of rust and muck and grease that a centuries-old dreadnought the size of (several?) cities apparently builds up.
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Oct 30, 2019 04:01
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Collateral posted:Having finished the Bob books I had wondered if the author intentionally made Bob an arrogant idiot with terrible skills and judgement. The reason I had for realising it was unintentional was that trite ending. I was really hoping the damaged transport stopped communicating and started heading towards the others system, after all the humans were onboard. The shear god drat arrogance of it, but ofc it wasn't it was his brilliance in shepherding the forever stupid humans who would just kill themselves without him. This is one of those book series I only read because I didnt have anything better to read and man it sucked. Hundreds of pages of basically the same two or three 'jokes' repeated, basically no interesting or fresh ideas presented, and just generally written somewhat shittily.
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Oct 30, 2019 05:02
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Philthy posted:It's going a bit off topic Let's all please stay on topic, that topic being books, and in this thread specifically, books with wizards and/or spaceships and/or the marketing thereof. A  chat is just going to fill up this thread with reports and piss everyone off, so let's not do that any more. Thanks everyone!
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Oct 30, 2019 12:33
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Is posting that I just opened Imgur and the "most viral" image was a screenshot of a General Battuta tweet off topic?
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Oct 30, 2019 12:39
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ulmont posted:Not just representative of the series but most of Modesitt. A typical Modesitt plot involves a man/boy working at some sort of craft while being reluctantly forced into making the hard choices no one else will to do the hard deeds no one else will and avoid greater disaster. The Recluce books all use the same type of magic with the same tech level, more or less, which is about all that separates them from his other fantasy and his science fiction. That's unfortunate. Oh well. At least The Magic Engineer didn't have his habit in The Eternity Artifact of constantly stopping to talk at length about how Islam hates freedom, science, and women.
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Oct 30, 2019 12:41
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