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The_White_Crane posted:I think there's a difference between "military capabilities" and "children can accidentally level a city if they lose their temper" which undermines the metaphor. I don't know if you got to book 3 but is also reveals: A: They had already used their powers countless times to stop global extinction events. B: The entire situation with multi-apocalypses every few hundred/thousand years was set off by normal people's plans and slavery of earth wizzzards. I mean yes the idea of people with vast powers you don't have is scary, but that doesn't mean you start cheering for the guy building sentinels in X-Men and it is also a thing we have already called Capitalism.
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Nov 14, 2019 17:40
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Oh hey, so everyone should put their trust into the Benevolent Master Race. Much better.
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Nov 14, 2019 17:47
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team overhead smash posted:I don't know if you got to book 3 but is also reveals: I didn't get to book 3, actually, but I'm not sure the spoilers you quote make things look much better. Like, now the metaphor has gone from "you shouldn't oppress minorities just because they can commit mass murder by mistake" into "you shouldn't oppress minorities because what if they can save the world", which has the troubling implication that the principal motivation for a lack of oppression is enlightened self-interest. (Also I think most of us regard capitalism as manifested in the form of people with vast powers we don't have as... kinda evil?)
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Nov 14, 2019 17:54
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So just to be clear, oppressing minorities is bad but oppressing dangerous minorities is good?
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Nov 14, 2019 18:15
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The_White_Crane posted:I think there's a difference between "military capabilities" and "children can accidentally level a city if they lose their temper" which undermines the metaphor. People with those powers are an existential threat to the state and the state would have to either (a) co-opt them, (b) kill or otherwise neutralize them, or (c) accept they aren't the state anymore.
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Nov 14, 2019 18:25
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So I ordered Gideon the ninth and steel frame based on recommendations here. Let’s see if they hold up. New books by Jackson Bennett, Reynolds, McClellan and Gibson in the next couple of months as well.
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Nov 14, 2019 18:29
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anilEhilated posted:Oh hey, so everyone should put their trust into the Benevolent Master Race. Much better. This is konda the inherent issue with Jemisin' flip: if you 1) make your fantasy novel about racism 2) make your protagonists an oppressed minority 3) have them go Galt and take over Then, nevertheless, you have 4) see #1 See Iron Dream, etc.
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Nov 14, 2019 18:31
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I've never read the Broken Earth series so all the snippiness/looming meltdowns about WarCriming and MasterRaces in it has me confused/not over-inclined to read it. Just want to chime in and say that the Lost Fleet books are perfect reading for people under heavy medication/memory problems/recovering in the hospital. Every book in the Lost Fleet series repeats the same plot beats over and over again, with cosmetic changes to the story/character names/powercell depletion levels/hamfisted romantic triangle. Next up on my reading list are Nancy Kress's Tomorrow's Kin and R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War, both randomly grabbed from the fiction section of a local library. Most recent non-fiction read was Margalit Fox's Riddle of the Labyrinth, which was about Linear Script B/Linear B and how Linear B was discovered and eventually translated. Pretty interesting read, got into mathematic probablities and databasing/gridding.
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Nov 14, 2019 18:33
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my bony fealty posted:theres no explicit rape per se but when I read Jirel of Joiry a while ago I was taken aback by the relationship of Jirel and the male antagonist. he conquers her kingdom and sexually assaults her and then knocks her out, and then on her quest to get revenge she realizes she's actually in love with him? poo poo's weird I remember Kate Elliott writing about how she had young female readers come up to tell her how relieved + surprised they were that Elliott's female protagonist was horribly abused and then did NOT fall in love with her abuser. Like it was an unusual plot twist!
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Nov 14, 2019 18:58
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pseudorandom name posted:So just to be clear, oppressing minorities is bad but oppressing dangerous minorities is good? Oppressing minorities in reality is bad, regardless of how dangerous you think they are. Trying to make a metaphor for real oppression but making your minority world-endingly powerful magical supermen is awkward and doesn't work (for me). hth
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Nov 14, 2019 19:25
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One might wonder if the point of the story was that oppressing anybody for any reason, even that reason being that they are potentially dangerous, is morally wrong.
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Nov 14, 2019 20:05
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The_White_Crane posted:I think there's a difference between "military capabilities" and "children can accidentally level a city if they lose their temper" which undermines the metaphor. You're overstating the power of the orogenes a bit--Syenite and Alabaster are specifically the most powerful orogenes in living memory and they didn't have that level of power until adulthood and also required assistance from Hoa and his kin. Most of the others are much weaker, and thus able to be overpowered by ordinary people and put into their position of enslavement. Are orogenes dangerous? Yes. But I already live in a world where random people, whom I can't necessarily spot by eye, can shoot me for cutting them off in traffic. They might face consequences for doing so, as would an orogene who abused their powers in an orderly society such as that of the minority massacred by the empire. I mean if we're objecting to some people in a fantasy novel being born with powerful magical talents...is Rand al'Thor acceptable as a hero just because he only uses his world-ending power for "good?"
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Nov 14, 2019 20:41
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pseudorandom name posted:One might wonder if the point of the story was that oppressing anybody for any reason, even that reason being that they are potentially dangerous, is morally wrong. Yes, and that's a really valuable point to make when it comes to (for example) real world discrimination against Muslims post 9/11, because in the real world what we mean by "potentially dangerous" is "some people who looked like these people did a crime once", which absolutely doesn't justify treating those people differently. The problem is that she's dialed "potentially dangerous" up so far that the metaphor falls apart. Imagine the real world contained a group of people whose most treasured cultural tradition is to carry at all times small nuclear warheads that they occasionally detonate without meaning to. Do you sincerely think that the most moral thing to do would be to just let them be? occamsnailfile posted:You're overstating the power of the orogenes a bit--Syenite and Alabaster are specifically the most powerful orogenes in living memory and they didn't have that level of power until adulthood and also required assistance from Hoa and his kin. Most of the others are much weaker, and thus able to be overpowered by ordinary people and put into their position of enslavement. Are orogenes dangerous? Yes. But I already live in a world where random people, whom I can't necessarily spot by eye, can shoot me for cutting them off in traffic. They might face consequences for doing so, as would an orogene who abused their powers in an orderly society such as that of the minority massacred by the empire. Fair, I suppose, I forgot exactly how much power the average one had. So fine, for "nuclear warheads", read "machine guns". But I mean, it's funny you make the allegory to guns, because as a Briton I don't live in a world where random people can shoot me for cutting them off in traffic, because we have a more oppressive society. And I'd argue that in the real world, the most moral solution to that minority in the U.S. who have that power is actually to oppress them and take that power away, because their moral right to have the ability to murder people with a twitch of their finger is trumped by the moral right of everyone else not to be unexpectedly murdered. The_White_Crane fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Nov 14, 2019 |
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Nov 14, 2019 20:49
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The_White_Crane posted:Yes, and that's a really valuable point to make when it comes to (for example) real world discrimination against Muslims post 9/11, because in the real world what we mean by "potentially dangerous" is "some people who looked like these people did a crime once", which absolutely doesn't justify treating those people differently. Instead of comparing it to a cultural tradition, how about something involuntary that a person can't choose to abandon? Like being a carrier for a devastating illness. And the real world does have a bad track record of stigmatizing people with treatable communicable diseases. Not sure I like that analogy too much as it implies that the magic powers are wholly negative instead of super-abilities, but I'm trying to get at something that could cause a person to harm others around them if they don't manage it.
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Nov 14, 2019 21:02
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The_White_Crane posted:Yes, and that's a really valuable point to make when it comes to (for example) real world discrimination against Muslims post 9/11, because in the real world what we mean by "potentially dangerous" is "some people who looked like these people did a crime once", which absolutely doesn't justify treating those people differently. So I don't want a gun rights derail at all but we do have societies that manage to have random people with machine guns and they...survive okay. Nuclear weapons exist and some of the people who possess them are pretty frightening indeed, but we don't find it necessary to hunt them down and enslave them. Why is it acceptable to oppress people with power just because that power is inherent to them rather than being external? Why are any fantasy heroes with fantastic magical talents acceptable?
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Nov 14, 2019 21:05
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wizzardstaff posted:Instead of comparing it to a cultural tradition, how about something involuntary that a person can't choose to abandon? Like being a carrier for a devastating illness. And the real world does have a bad track record of stigmatizing people with treatable communicable diseases. Mmm. That's a good comparison in some ways, but OTOH even if we leave aside things like the historical sanitariums for lepers and tuberculosis patients (some of which were indeed hellish) even in the modern day, we do involuntarily quarantine people with communicable diseases. Like, if it's discovered that a passenger on a plane had ebola, sometimes we'll quarantine everyone aboard against their will until we can be sure it won't spread. And I haven't heard anyone seriously arguing that's unjust. occamsnailfile posted:So I don't want a gun rights derail at all but we do have societies that manage to have random people with machine guns and they...survive okay. Nuclear weapons exist and some of the people who possess them are pretty frightening indeed, but we don't find it necessary to hunt them down and enslave them. Why is it acceptable to oppress people with power just because that power is inherent to them rather than being external? Why are any fantasy heroes with fantastic magical talents acceptable? I feel like you're sidestepping a little here. The fact that societies which have random people with machine guns "survive okay" doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a moral course of action to take those guns away. The fact that some truly awful world leaders do have nuclear weapons doesn't mean that we shouldn't try and disarm them. And I'm not arguing for or against fantasy heroes with inborn magic superpowers in the abstract, though there's definitely an interesting discussion to be had there. What I'm saying is that using such heroes as a metaphor for real world oppressed minorities in an attempt to argue that oppressing people because they are dangerous is morally wrong is awkward and doesn't -- in my opinion -- stand up as an argument, because people with those powers are fundamentally a bad stand-in for real world victims of oppression. The_White_Crane fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Nov 14, 2019 |
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Nov 14, 2019 21:06
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quantumfoam posted:I've never read the Broken Earth series so all the snippiness/looming meltdowns about WarCriming and MasterRaces in it has me confused/not over-inclined to read it. The bullshit surrounding the trilogy is incredibly unfortunate since if you just read the books without the surrounding political debate they're good novels.
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Nov 14, 2019 21:12
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The_White_Crane posted:Mmm. For a modern day comparison I was thinking of HIV. It's not something requires quarantine to prevent transmission, but it can be spread if someone has unprotected sex or a blood spill accident. Someone theoretically could do that intentionally, but it would be grossly unethical to lock HIV+ people up out of fear that they have the potential for malice.
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Nov 14, 2019 21:16
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Edit: Very true. v The_White_Crane fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Nov 14, 2019 |
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Nov 14, 2019 21:22
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This quest for a real-world analog of a possibly misdesigned fantasy analog for real-world minority groups is going in weird and icky directions. I don't think it's wise to compare HIV+ status to an innate magical ability to easily, quickly or accidentally kill people in groups.
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Nov 14, 2019 21:24
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Sarern posted:This quest for a real-world analog of a possibly misdesigned fantasy analog for real-world minority groups is going in weird and icky directions. I don't think it's wise to compare HIV+ status to an innate magical ability to easily, quickly or accidentally kill people in groups. Yes, sorry for starting that tangent. I'm not super comfortable with it myself and should probably have let it fade away before posting.
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Nov 14, 2019 21:32
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quantumfoam posted:I've never read the Broken Earth series so all the snippiness/looming meltdowns about WarCriming and MasterRaces in it has me confused/not over-inclined to read it. I am confused where they are getting some of these takes from and I wouldn’t let it color your opinion of the books. There’s a reason every book in the trilogy won the Hugo for best novel and IMO you’d be missing out if you don’t read it.
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Nov 14, 2019 22:31
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quantumfoam posted:Next up on my reading list are Nancy Kress's Tomorrow's Kin and R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War, both randomly grabbed from the fiction section of a local library. Most recent non-fiction read was Margalit Fox's Riddle of the Labyrinth, which was about Linear Script B/Linear B and how Linear B was discovered and eventually translated. Pretty interesting read, got into mathematic probablities and databasing/gridding. 😬 Please post your thoughts on that book once you've read it, it's a book I always want to read more discussion about.
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Nov 15, 2019 00:25
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I've finished reading the last Analog of the year. I will probably be going over all six issues again to be prepared for the AnLab awards, so I might do a little write-up at some point if people are interested.
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Nov 15, 2019 01:49
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Please do!
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Nov 15, 2019 01:59
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professor metis posted:😬 Will do. About to crack open Poppy War. I have zero expectations besides expecting a variant of Opium War going down in the book, given the book title. tildes posted:This is not really a spoiler but I just finished Planetfall and my semi spoiler recommendation is to only read the first 50% of the book and then stop. Don’t read anymore. Just continue to imagine it could end any way you want. This is Emma Newman's 2015 story Planetfall you're talking about, correct? If so, I had the opposite reaction. The book pacing was fine, and the slow reveal of the main character being mentally unwell and a illicit hoarder really added to the story (hadn't seen that as a major character trait in scifi/fantasy stories before, honestly). Rushed ending in Planetfall worked for me too. Only read one of the Planetfall series sequels, After Atlas, and until googling, wasn't aware there was 2 more books in the series. Nice. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 05:04
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professor metis posted:😬 I missed this post earlier. I'd be happy to talk more about it, I have the second volume on the way from the library.
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Nov 15, 2019 05:06
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quantumfoam posted:This is Emma Newman's 2015 story Planetfall you're talking about, correct? I've enjoyed all of the Planetfall series (such as it is) except for the most recent, which I really hated. I think it had interesting ideas, but executed them in the worst way possible. But the other ones are all really good! Kangxi posted:I missed this post earlier. I'd be happy to talk more about it, I have the second volume on the way from the library. Oh I'm curious how the second one is! Entirely possible that Kuang grows into her writing a lot over time, but I found the first one to be very clumsy in its use of historical inspiration. Events are lifted straight from very different eras and forced into occurring at the same time, and I felt that using a fictionalised Nanjing Massacre as motivation for a fictional character to commit a ficitonal genocide is.... Well, perhaps it could be done well, but it felt almost cheap to me.
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Nov 15, 2019 05:24
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tildes posted:I am confused where they are getting some of these takes from and I wouldn’t let it color your opinion of the books. Hugo’s aren’t really a mark of quality. Out of the three, the first one is great, second good and third kinda tedious.
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Nov 15, 2019 06:28
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All the barely consensual sex and child abuse in the first Broken Earth book made it pretty hard for me to get through, to be honest. But I'm glad I stuck with the series, it was a fantastic read overall. Does make it a little difficult to recommend, sometimes! Spoilers for the series: I called the three main characters all being the same person pretty early, that made me feel smart. Or smug, anyway! A satisfying feeling. If you're looking for something fresh, Ann Leckie's new book "The Raven Tower" is an absolute joy to read. What a cool story, told in a cool way. A very interesting "magic" system, the nature of Godhood, self-identity... great stuff!
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Nov 15, 2019 06:34
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A long shot here but are there any fantasy books with much in common with the setting for King of Dragon Pass and Runequest, ie Glorantha? I'm not even going to try to explain it to those not familiar with it because it's too hard to do so without writing a thousand words.
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Nov 15, 2019 07:09
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Doctor Reynolds posted:All the barely consensual sex and child abuse in the first Broken Earth book made it pretty hard for me to get through, to be honest. But I'm glad I stuck with the series, it was a fantastic read overall. Does make it a little difficult to recommend, sometimes! Spoilers for the series: I called the three main characters all being the same person pretty early, that made me feel smart. Or smug, anyway! A satisfying feeling. The poster who posted this is banned.
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Nov 15, 2019 07:54
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Neurosis posted:A long shot here but are there any fantasy books with much in common with the setting for King of Dragon Pass and Runequest, ie Glorantha? I'm not even going to try to explain it to those not familiar with it because it's too hard to do so without writing a thousand words. Greg wrote a novel, "Prince of Sartar", about Argrath. Otherwise, what aspect of Glorantha?
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Nov 15, 2019 09:45
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The Andromeda Evolution is actually pretty good so far. I'm kinda surprised. Still kinda stumped by why it has Michael Crichton's name on it, since he's been dead for a decade or so. He may have literally ghost written it, I guess. 
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Nov 15, 2019 09:54
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Safety Biscuits posted:Greg wrote a novel, "Prince of Sartar", about Argrath. Otherwise, what aspect of Glorantha? Will check that out - funny since recent stuff iirc says Argrath was actually a bunch of different people who were aggregated into one in the histories. It's tough to say exactly what since I like a lot of different parts of the setting - Westerners are as interesting as Orlanthi who are as interesting as Dara Happa. I guess it's the mix of a good anthropological understanding of both belief systems and the practical realities of primitive cultures (although the more sophisticated cultures are cool too so it's not quite that) and the strange cosmology where myth and reality are so intertwined (well I've heard Jeff say the myths are literally the rules of reality in the same way physical laws are for us so I might say where myth is reality to a large extent). But there are so many quirky and abnormal parts of the setting that I find unusual and interesting (eg the really strange take on the dwarves as super-Prussians/Hegelians - I suppose they're a variant of the myth/reality interplay) that it's really hard for me to explain so as to give points of reference for recommendations.
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Nov 15, 2019 10:11
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professor metis posted:I've enjoyed all of the Planetfall series (such as it is) except for the most recent, which I really hated. I think it had interesting ideas, but executed them in the worst way possible. But the other ones are all really good! I've enjoyed all of them including the latest. They all have horribly broken people in them, but they're broken in different ways.
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Nov 15, 2019 10:47
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Big news.Neurosis posted:Will check that out - funny since recent stuff iirc says Argrath was actually a bunch of different people who were aggregated into one in the histories. So would it be fair to say "really weird and imaginative secondary-world fantasy, preferably with lots of magic and well-thought-out cultures"?
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Nov 15, 2019 14:48
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professor metis posted:felt that using a fictionalised Nanjing Massacre as motivation for a fictional character to commit a ficitonal genocide is.... Well, perhaps it could be done well, but it felt almost cheap to me. Haven't read the book but in this world 9/11 was enough motivation for real people to want to commit real genocides and actually get a start on same
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Nov 15, 2019 15:04
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It broke a lot of people's brains. RIP Dan Simmons, Orson Scott Card, tons of others
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Nov 15, 2019 15:34
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This is great news. If you haven't come across John "Mike" Ford, give him a look. He posted some absolute gems as throwaway comments on the internet here and there, like a offhanded villanelle, or this instant sonnet: The worm drives helically through the wood And does not know the dust left in the bore Once made the table integral and good; And suddenly the crystal hits the floor. Electrons find their paths in subtle ways, A massless eddy in a trail of smoke; The names of lovers, light of other days Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke. The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made. But memory is everything to lose; Although some of the colors have to fade, Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose. Regret, by definition, comes too late; Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate. Some other "occasional works", both serious and silly, are collected on this page at Making Light, in his correspondence with Neil Gaiman, and probably a bunch of other places I'm forgetting at the moment.
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Nov 15, 2019 16:08
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