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Safety Biscuits posted:He was also Sun Yat-sen's godson, and iirc his dinner party trick was downing glasses of hydrochloric acid (he had digestive trouble). Yeah, its a Jane Austen novel where the landed gentry are all constantly worrying about their inheritance. Except the landed gentry are dragons and the inheritance is the privilege of devouring their parent's corpse, which is the only way a dragon can grow in size.
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May 19, 2020 17:50
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My primary problem with Tooth and Claw, as remembered from when I read it in high school, was that it had too much Victorian social drama bullshit and not enough dragons being awesome and doing dragon-y things. I should try reading it again, now that I'm older and wiser.
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May 19, 2020 18:37
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Elysium Fire (The Prefect Dreyfus Emergency #2) by Alistair Reynolds - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073P43TMS/
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May 19, 2020 23:01
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M John Harrison's Centauri Device: can someone who is more versed in the sci-fi scene of the era explain to me what is meant by these lines in these reviews of the novel? https://www.sfsite.com/04a/cd125.htm quote:It is quite possible this is a book that had to be written; as a slap in the face to the genre, as an act of protest. In this, The Centauri Device arguably raised the bar for future SF but it raised our expectations with it. https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2014/06/21/book-review-the-centauri-device-m-john-harrison-1974/ quote:While M. John Harrison himself might proclaim that “I find it deeply ironic—but absolutely predictable—that my best books are out of print while the crappiest thing I ever wrote—The Centauri Device––tootles along under the rubric ‘masterwork,'” I found the novel a heady subversion of a lot of the tropes that we associate with space opera. It is even more ironic that The Centauri Device, “that reads like hate mail directed at space opera clichés” (Ken Macleod quoting Patrick Hudson) despite its satirical purposes was influential in revitalizing and inspiring new authors of the subgenre. The anti-space opera pastiche that eventually became passé? The book itself - I'm 114 pages in - is a wild, dark tour of a future I don't want with lurid prose. It stands on its own feet, but I want to know what the wider context was, and I'm not sure how to go about finding that out.
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May 20, 2020 02:13
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Kefahuchi_son!!! posted:Talking about cool writers being extremely shady people.This is very informative and explains a lot, i was dimly aware of his professional career, but such proclivities are often left out of summarized biographies (shame!!). There are multiple out of print Cordwainer Smith collections, not all of them contain the same stories which is annoying if you want a definitive collection to fully experience the madness of his stories. Found that "origin" story in the paperback Instrumentality of Mankind Cordwainer Smith collection. Try ebay or abebooks for it. "Golden the Ship was...." remains my favorite Cordwainer Smith story.
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May 20, 2020 02:16
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The instrumentality is such a kicking name for a space Empire
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May 20, 2020 06:35
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StrixNebulosa posted:My primary problem with Tooth and Claw, as remembered from when I read it in high school, was that it had too much Victorian social drama bullshit and not enough dragons being awesome and doing dragon-y things. I should try reading it again, now that I'm older and wiser. I read it relatively recently and that was also my beef with it; it felt like Walton really wanted to write a Trollope homage but then applied an incredibly thin veneer of dragons to it because ???. I legitimately forgot at several points that I was ostensibly reading about dragons. Compare to e.g. Rachel Aaron or Bard Bloom; their books are less technically clever but you never forget that these characters are giant scaly magic-making GBS threads assholes, even when they're wearing a form that doesn't have the scales.
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May 20, 2020 13:13
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I had to look up which of his books the Centauri device actually was and the wiki synopsis starts with:""The Centauri Device - Wikipedia" posted:Harrison has said that the book breaks what were then the central tenets of space opera, namely that the protagonist plays an active role in driving the plot forward, that the universe is comprehensible to humans and that the universe is anthropocentric.[1] These preconceptions were still common in the more literary space operas of the time, such as Samuel R. Delany's Nova (which Harrison described as "highly readable but finally unsatisfying") and, in terms of tone, Harrison's novel more closely hews to the unconventional genre-bending of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination and The Paradox Men by Charles L. Harness, with the bleak cosmic outlook being influenced by Barrington J. Bayley's The Star Virus.[2] Edit: I might not actually have read it. Nothing here rings a bell, except it sounds like stuff he would write. genericnick fucked around with this message at 14:34 on May 20, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 14:22
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quantumfoam posted:There are multiple out of print Cordwainer Smith collections, not all of them contain the same stories which is annoying if you want a definitive collection to fully experience the madness of his stories. Found that "origin" story in the paperback Instrumentality of Mankind Cordwainer Smith collection. Try ebay or abebooks for it. "Golden the Ship was...." remains my favorite Cordwainer Smith story. Scanners Live in Vain was a great story. The Dead Lady of Clown Town is a retelling of Joan of Arc and a big part of the Rise of the Underpeople arc. The Lady Who Sailed The Soul is a classic 'things go wrong between the stars' voyage epic. The Day the People Fell is about the PRC's colonization of Venus, and interesting in light of his professional career. Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons is a heist story gone badly wrong. https://web.archive.org/web/20041027085849/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/smith/smith1.html And of course, The Game of Rat and Dragon, the big one about the cats. Not that a lot of them aren't, all of C'Mell's arc is in that vein. It's online, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29614 Gutenberg also has his non-fiction
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May 20, 2020 14:48
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Honestly the more I read the Centauri Device the more I want to set fire to it. Such a gross, nasty universe. Great prose though. It kind of reminds me of Perdido Street Station (a book I never finished) in that it's willing to be gross - in the literal sense of the word. The religious cult is all about putting windows in their flesh so you can see their digestive process at work. They do this to the main character nonconsensually. It's willing to describe the varicose veins in the general's legs. It's willing to be upfront and visceral in its descriptions of how decrepit humans are. And then it does the same to politics and religion and it's just crude and brutal. It makes this interview question response by Harrison make so much more sense: https://www.sfsite.com/12b/mjh142.htm quote:So, are you doing anything to get Climbers and The Course of the Heart back into print? It's been a while, and I think there's a new audience for the books waiting, especially now that readers have matured somewhat.
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May 20, 2020 15:02
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I think the only complete collection of Cordwainer Smith's stories is the NESFA Press edition from 1993 (?).StrixNebulosa posted:M John Harrison's Centauri Device: can someone who is more versed in the sci-fi scene of the era explain to me what is meant by these lines in these reviews of the novel? It's a grotesque and callous parody of/attack on likeable, humanistic, optimistic space opera, which was itself influential on later sf. (Check out the list of ship names at the end of the second blogpost, for instance.) Is this what you're asking?
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May 20, 2020 16:58
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Safety Biscuits posted:I think the only complete collection of Cordwainer Smith's stories is the NESFA Press edition from 1993 (?). I think so. Thank you. There's one problem: I'm not cultured enough to recognize any of the significance of the ship names. quote:And for the curious, the complete list of spaceship names: Driftwood of Decadence. New English Art Club. Liverpool Medici. Gold Scab. Whistler. Seventeenth Susan. Solomon. Nasser. Strange Great Sins. Maupin. Trilby. Green Carnation. Les Fleurs du Mal. Madame Bovary. Imagination Portraits. Syringa. White Jonquil. Forsaken Garden. Let Us Go Hence. Melancholia that Transcends All Wit. My Ella Speed. Fastidious. La Vie de Bohème. Atalanta in Calydon.
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May 20, 2020 17:06
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As a group, they look a bit like the ironic, whimsical, and/or allusive names of ships in the Culture series; that's all. E: If you want an example of the stuff Harrison was reacting to, read something like Babel-17 by Delany and then compare its strangeness, charm, and beauty to the disgusting world of The Centauri Device, and its emphasis on the characters' development to Harrison's ideological emptiness. Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 17:31 on May 20, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 17:24
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Safety Biscuits posted:As a group, they look a bit like the ironic, whimsical, and/or allusive names of ships in the Culture series; that's all. Huh, I thought those kind of ship names originated from Banks. Was it a trope even before '74/The Centauri Device?
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May 20, 2020 17:33
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TheAardvark posted:Huh, I thought those kind of ship names originated from Banks. Was it a trope even before '74/The Centauri Device? Yes. Ships and boats in real life get all sorts of asinine vaguely clever names, so why not spaceships too? Iain Banks focused on exclusively on clever names for his Culture Ships & Brains, Harrison used the kind of dipshit ship names you'd see on actual fishing and cargo boats in harbours.
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May 20, 2020 17:44
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Safety Biscuits posted:As a group, they look a bit like the ironic, whimsical, and/or allusive names of ships in the Culture series; that's all. Ironically the one book I kept comparing Centauri to while reading it was Babel-17, because they share almost the same space. Short 200~ page book with vivid sci-fi settings and a focus on the characters with excellent prose. Bizarre. Well, with Centauri done I'm returning my focus to Five-Twelfths of Heaven by Melissa Scott and I'm fascinated at how this one plays everything straight. The prose isn't as vivid as either Delany or Harrison but it's enjoyable and I'm enjoying space opera from the perspective of someone with so-far even less influence or significance than Captain Truck. (so far?)
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May 20, 2020 17:50
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I never made the connection between fishing boat names and dumb spaceship names  I think it's just because the Culture is the only series I've read that used them for spaceships, and I've read a hell of a lot of space opera.
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May 20, 2020 17:51
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TheAardvark posted:I never made the connection between fishing boat names and dumb spaceship names Scalzi's Interdepency series has some funny (for "sensible chuckle" values of funny) spaceship name references.
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May 20, 2020 17:58
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I always suspected the ship names really descend from something most writers do, which is keep interesting phrases around in a notebook and look for opportunities to use them. Harrison’s are mostly (all?) other book titles though judging by that snippet. Just realised Harrison wrote Nova Swing, which really read like he’d seen Dhalgren, Babel-17 and Roadside Picnic and decided to write a really boring version to point out how crap it would all be in real life. There’s even a character very similar to one in Babel-17, the kind of genetically altered lion fighter dude, except in this book he dies and gets flushed down a drain early on, which may be a direct gently caress you to Babel-17, I don’t know
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May 20, 2020 18:02
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StrixNebulosa posted:I think so. Thank you. There's one problem: I'm not cultured enough to recognize any of the significance of the ship names. Several of them seem to be references to the decadent literature movement in the late 19th century -- Les Fleurs du Mal is Baudelaire, Strange Great Sins and Atalanta in Calydon are from Swinburne, Trilby is from George du Maurier's novel, and Oscar Wilde frequently wore a green carnation as his personal symbol.
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May 20, 2020 18:07
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Harrison is fantastic in general. If you're at all interested in him writing (sort of...) fantasy, check out the Viriconium omnibus; it's one of the few fantasy books I keep coming back to.
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May 20, 2020 18:17
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Cordwainer Smith wrote about a planet where an immortality drug is harvested from the bodies of giant mutated sheep. naturally such a place would be a fine target for invasion, so it is protected by an army of insane psychic minks which destroy any would be invaders with a telepathic death ray. weird dude.
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May 20, 2020 18:27
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:I always suspected the ship names really descend from something most writers do, which is keep interesting phrases around in a notebook and look for opportunities to use them. Harrison’s are mostly (all?) other book titles though judging by that snippet. Man, putting it all this way makes it seem like Harrison didn't have a grudge against sci-fi, he had a grudge against Delany. Chill, dude. anilEhilated posted:Harrison is fantastic in general. If you're at all interested in him writing (sort of...) fantasy, check out the Viriconium omnibus; it's one of the few fantasy books I keep coming back to. I enjoyed Centauri enough to purchase Light, the first of his Kefahuchi Tract sequence. When I'm next in a fantasy mood I'll pick up Viriconium - if I remember rightly, it helped inspire the Caves of Qud roguelike, which is an amazing goon-made game.
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May 20, 2020 18:42
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StrixNebulosa posted:I enjoyed Centauri enough to purchase Light, the first of his Kefahuchi Tract sequence. When I'm next in a fantasy mood I'll pick up Viriconium - if I remember rightly, it helped inspire the Caves of Qud roguelike, which is an amazing goon-made game.
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May 20, 2020 19:28
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Seven Blades in Black (Grave of Empires #1) by Sam Sykes - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079RCCRM6/ The Seventh Sword Series (Reluctant Swordsman, Coming Wisdom, Destiny of the Sword, Death of Nnanji) by Dave Duncan - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0732L5MND/
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May 20, 2020 23:55
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pradmer posted:The Seventh Sword Series (Reluctant Swordsman, Coming Wisdom, Destiny of the Sword, Death of Nnanji) by Dave Duncan - $3.99 Yikes: quote:In this complete collection of the high fantasy Seventh Sword series by Aurora Award–winning author Dave Duncan, Wallie Smith must face a new destiny and save an unfamiliar world from evil forces.
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May 21, 2020 00:23
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uber_stoat posted:Cordwainer Smith wrote about a planet where an immortality drug is harvested from the bodies of giant mutated sheep. naturally such a place would be a fine target for invasion, so it is protected by an army of insane psychic minks which destroy any would be invaders with a telepathic death ray. I genuinely can’t tell if minks is a typo here or not given the context
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May 21, 2020 01:50
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tildes posted:I genuinely can’t tell if minks is a typo here or not given the context haha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Hitton%27s_Littul_Kittons Smith predicted SEO decades before it happened.
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May 21, 2020 02:41
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uber_stoat posted:Cordwainer Smith wrote about a planet where an immortality drug is harvested from the bodies of giant mutated sheep. naturally such a place would be a fine target for invasion, so it is protected by an army of insane psychic minks which destroy any would be invaders with a telepathic death ray. Yeah, it's a weird idea. On the other hand, "super secret psychic deathtrap" is a pretty good idea for one element in a heavily layered defense. In the story, mundane secret agents could have stopped the whole thing while following up on the murder, but they decided to gently caress over his whole planet for generations to come. I'll bet they leak that part of the story. One child killed, a planet bankrupt for generations. That kind of rep is hard to come by and would deter far more thieves than "it's really a psychic death ray". And yes, it's actual mink. The animal.  These guys.
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May 21, 2020 03:12
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General Battuta posted:Baru 2 is on sale on the evil website for who knows how long, just $2.99 So I went to get it on this sale and it turns out in some comatose moment I already purchased this book I assume when I got the first one for free from Tor. Oh well, maybe I got it on sale, maybe not. I don't feel bothered.
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May 21, 2020 04:18
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StrixNebulosa posted:Ironically the one book I kept comparing Centauri to while reading it was Babel-17, because they share almost the same space. Short 200~ page book with vivid sci-fi settings and a focus on the characters with excellent prose. Bizarre. I only picked Babel-17 because I've just read it. (Incidentally, the ship in that is Harrisonishly called Rimbaud.) Prism Mirror Lens posted:Just realised Harrison wrote Nova Swing, which really read like he’d seen Dhalgren, Babel-17 and Roadside Picnic and decided to write a really boring version to point out how crap it would all be in real life. There’s even a character very similar to one in Babel-17, the kind of genetically altered lion fighter dude, except in this book he dies and gets flushed down a drain early on, which may be a direct gently caress you to Babel-17, I don’t know The kite fight at the beginning of China Mountain Zhang has always struck me as a bit of a tribute to the wrestling scene in Babel-17. tildes posted:I genuinely can’t tell if minks is a typo here or not given the context Do you think an army of insane psychic sinks would make more sense?
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May 21, 2020 06:43
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Safety Biscuits posted:
I was thinking monks, but now that I’ve seen where he went with minks honestly maybe sinks could have worked too uber_stoat posted:haha This is wild, I might pick this up
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May 21, 2020 07:14
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I finally got around to Nevernight and almost immediately noped out of it. I absolutely loved The Monster of Elendhaven, I gently caress with Joe Abercrombie sometimes, but I bounced off Nevernight hard and it's making me start to question what Dark Fantasy's whole deal is. It felt smug, pretentious and overwritten, but it's also massively popular and I'm starting to wonder whether I'm not just out of touch with the zeitgeist. Did anybody have a different experience with it?
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May 21, 2020 09:42
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I finally got around to Nevernight and almost immediately noped out of it. I absolutely loved The Monster of Elendhaven, I gently caress with Joe Abercrombie sometimes, but I bounced off Nevernight hard and it's making me start to question what Dark Fantasy's whole deal is. It felt smug, pretentious and overwritten, but it's also massively popular and I'm starting to wonder whether I'm not just out of touch with the zeitgeist. I haven't read it but I did read the author's other YA series, the steampunk fantasy Japan one, and found it to be hilariously overwrought and edgelordy, so I think that's just what he writes, and what teenagers think is cool.
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May 21, 2020 11:00
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The mail brings more gifts to me: Aristoi - Easily the most fascinating of Walter Jon Williams' works, with split-page narratives and a utopian future. Evolution's Shore / Chaga - Ian McDonald vs alien infection from space touching down in Tanzania Santa Olivia - mutant werewolf boxer lesbian vs living in the dead border zone between the US and Mexico (and its sequel, which I hear is kind of fanfiction-y in that it's more of the same in a happy kind of way, not a true sequel) 9Tail Fox - man gets murdered, wakes up in the body of someone else, has to investigate his own murder Black Oxen - I do not understand what this one is about Daylight - man goes caving, finds the body of a vampire (maybe), weirdness ensues
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May 21, 2020 19:14
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The Dragon's Path (The Dagger and the Coin #1) by Daniel Abraham - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0047Y16LC/ Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000TO0TDK/ The Warded Man (Demon Cycle #1) by Peter V Brett - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001NLL6QW/ Might actually be bad.
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May 21, 2020 23:03
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pradmer posted:The Warded Man (Demon Cycle #1) by Peter V Brett - $1.99 It's been a few years, but my memory of Warded Man is it has some interesting world-building that's never fleshed out as much as it should be, a serviceable but not great story, and the sequel is absolutely awful.
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May 21, 2020 23:31
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Rabidbunnylover posted:It's been a few years, but my memory of Warded Man is it has some interesting world-building that's never fleshed out as much as it should be, a serviceable but not great story, and the sequel is absolutely awful. The world building is kind of interesting and there are some narrative jumps early on to justify how the author wants the world to be, but mostly I was disappointed with the direction the series took / the series ending. At two bucks I've read worse, but it's hard to recommend the series.
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May 21, 2020 23:36
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pradmer posted:Seven Blades in Black (Grave of Empires #1) by Sam Sykes - $2.99 I liked this book a lot -- kind of has a Red Dead Redemption feel to it. I'm also a total sucker for a good revenge story.
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May 22, 2020 20:27
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Dude's got a hell of a twitter feed as well. Probably the only person I know of who shitpost a movie into being made. New Caverns and Creatures book is out! Gallons of Sea Men by Robert Bevan, available on KU or for purchase!
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May 23, 2020 14:58
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