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Nothing in Scarlett Gospels is really worse than any of the edgelord work the trans writers Barker influenced (Kiernan, Brite, Califia) have put out (the book is still low effort poo poo though)
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Apr 5, 2022 11:44
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So I started reading the Harry Potter books a while ago because I finally just... had to know, I guess. I borrowed the books from a trans friend who just sort of lifted his hands and said "I know, but I can't help but like them even though JK's awful." My only experience with the books were getting a few chapters into Sorcerer's Stone when it first came out and getting bullied for having it, so I put it down and never engaged with it again, only knowing about two of the major spoilers for the last book that everyone went around screaming when it first released. But it always bothered me that I didn't know anything about the series. Meanwhile, I'll see some neoliberal think tank hosting Quidditch matches between readings of Brett Stephens op-eds on why Tehran should be carpet-bombed, so I just had to know what this pop culture phenomenon was. I'm most of the way through Goblet of Fire, and I can see how these books were so huge during their run. I'm pretty much always flipping the page, wondering what every teacher/student's motivations are. Most of the time, any non-plot happenings are just sort of cozy character moments as opposed to typical Fantasy lore dumps (though those become more common as the books go on). Even then, most quiet moments can end up having some clever foreshadowing moments, so that I don't always feel bored. The big backstory dumps in Azkaban were the first time I really felt bored with the books, and The World Cup of Quidditch arc in Goblet of Fire was especially dull (to me, at least). The House Elf themes seem kind of heavy-handed, but seems a bit more self-aware and fleshed out than a lot of racism commentary that got aimed at me when I was a kid. I'm told that she kind of doesn't go anywhere with it, bordering on just giving up in a way that feels gross. Overall, I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying the books, despite that intermittent guilt that hits me when I remember how much of a bigot JK is.
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Apr 5, 2022 16:28
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Lex Talionis posted:For her part, Cherryh somehow managed to publish 17 Foreigner books in a little less than thirty years. Individually they can't be making that much money but she's managed to stick out a midlist career long after the death of the midlist market. For most of that time I was frustrated by the fact Foreigner sequels were apparently more in demand than Alliance Union stuff and particularly a Cyteen sequel. But then we got Regenesis and, well, it's worth reading, but maybe Cyteen was a once in a lifetime moment. I think my main beef with Regenesis is that it addresses the most boring questions raised by Cyteen, like "what actually happened to Ariane Alpha that day", while leaving the more interesting ones like "is azi-dependent Union society stable long-term, or will it need to undergo some sort of dramatic reconfiguration to survive? and if so, what form will that reconfiguration take and how can it be accomplished?", i.e. the question that both Arianes have devoted their life to answering. It feels like a middle book that's tidying side plots out of the way so that the third book can focus entirely on the big idea originally presented in the first, but with no third book to follow it up it instead just seems kind of pointless. And yeah, I like the Foreigner books well enough but what I really want is more books set in the Compact, a setting she hasn't touched in 30 years and shows no intention of returning to. 
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Apr 5, 2022 16:52
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:So I started reading the Harry Potter books a while ago because I finally just... had to know, I guess. I borrowed the books from a trans friend who just sort of lifted his hands and said "I know, but I can't help but like them even though JK's awful." My only experience with the books were getting a few chapters into Sorcerer's Stone when it first came out and getting bullied for having it, so I put it down and never engaged with it again, only knowing about two of the major spoilers for the last book that everyone went around screaming when it first released. But it always bothered me that I didn't know anything about the series. Meanwhile, I'll see some neoliberal think tank hosting Quidditch matches between readings of Brett Stephens op-eds on why Tehran should be carpet-bombed, so I just had to know what this pop culture phenomenon was. I was reading them as they came out and was in the general age range at the time, and they lost me maybe halfway through book 5 though I couldn't point to a real reason why. I suppose that's when she got bigger than her editor and the books were trying to stretch beyond the tone the first three had set. I dunno, but I never re-read the 6th one and it was a struggle to finish the 7th. 4th was probably the high water mark for me at the time, the tournament structure carried the plot along nicely despite being such a doorstopper of a novel. I haven't revisited them since the last one came out, though. As kids books, the first three are fine. The hero is a plucky, fresh-faced little boy and his friends, the villain is a snake-faced monster man, you don't need much nuance there. The later ones don't handle the transition into more complex themes too well and the attempt at fleshing out the 2D archetypes that worked well from the first novels (abusive teachers, bullies, grandfatherly mentors) didn't really work out in a very satisfying way, in my opinion. And that's aside from the author being a huge bigot who didn't seem to realize that wizards being insular weirdos who literally poo poo their pants well past the advent of indoor plumbing was a slam-dunk set up for critiquing the aristocracy / wealthy and powerful at large.
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Apr 5, 2022 17:44
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:So I started reading the Harry Potter books a while ago because I finally just... had to know, I guess. . There are definitely signs in the books themselves of her future tendencies but overall I think Rowling has gotten a lot worse since writing the series. When she wrote them she was a fairly standard non rich liberal white person and the combined influences of fame, fortune, and Twitter TERFism seem to have really broken her brain.
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Apr 5, 2022 17:44
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Everyone posted:As I understand it, Clive Barker is gay and the Nazis put gay people into camps along with Jews and Romani, so figure Clive Barker is not going to be a Nazi, secret or otherwise. *Looks at people like Lindsey Graham and Peter Thiel* You'd be surprised.
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Apr 5, 2022 18:58
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The "too big for her editor" remark is a really succinct way of putting my feelings on fantasy books that I've been reading lately.
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Apr 5, 2022 19:10
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The best understanding of HP's success I've seen is this:quote:Several critics have noted the creative blend of genres that is rolled into the series. Anne Hiebert Alton has pointed to elements of pulp fiction, ghost and horror stories, gothic elements, narrative structures from the detective genre, aspects of the Bildungsroman, the Victorian boarding or public school story, the sports story, elements of fairy and folk tales, aspects of the quest fantasy but also adventure plots, and quest romance (Alton, 2009, p. 221). In Alton’s view, Rowling blends all these genres while moving towards the epic and in doing so is original. I grew up in the late 90s/early 2000s and another very influential Fantasy series, Buffy, is similar in how it blended horror, comedy, teen/paranormal romance, coming of age, and many other genre to make something with broad appeal. Whether you think Rowling handled the transition to more mature storytelling well or not, I think it was vital to the success of her books that they aged with the audience. I and a lot of other fans of the books basically grew up with Harry Potter the character. If they had stayed kids books, they'd have been shunted into that Artemis Fowl category maybe and been forgotten.
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Apr 5, 2022 19:35
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The modern far right has hit on the genuinely brilliant discovery that you don't need any coherent beliefs at all to get people to, uh write and die for you. In fact the fewer tangible beliefs your cult has the more effective it is.
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Apr 5, 2022 20:07
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Wouldn't that mean that the "thing bad" viewpoint of the terminally online would make for an excellent cult?
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Apr 5, 2022 20:09
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Everyone posted:As I understand it, Clive Barker is gay and the Nazis put gay people into camps along with Jews and Romani, so figure Clive Barker is not going to be a Nazi, secret or otherwise. Although granted you just never loving know sometimes. Let me tell you about the magical man named Ernst Rohm, the original problematic gay (no shade on Barker though)
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Apr 5, 2022 20:48
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Also that Milo whatever guy. Anyway yeah Rowling really sucks but before she went nuts she wrote some fun kids books that in some ways were progressive for the late 90s. Or at least solidly liberal. Wish she had never joined twitter, though if someone has terrible views but never airs them is that still just as bad? Probably not, cause she gives a platform to the other anti-trans people by airing all her nonsense. I got my book cover done by the Thai artist who did the Thai Harry Potter book covers. His stuff is incredible. Ironically the major inspiration for his style is JC Leyendecker, a gay artist (although maybe Rowling doesn't have a problem with gay people. A lot of them have a problem with her though.) https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JlAqVm
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Apr 5, 2022 21:25
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General Battuta posted:Let me tell you about the magical man named Ernst Rohm, the original problematic gay I Wikipedied him so no need. Interesting (and deeply hosed up) that Hitler knew the guy was gay and was pretty much fine with it but also fine shipping other gays to the camps. OTOH, Roy Cohn was also a thing so again, you never know. Sexual orientation is not a guide to moral/ethical decency. Gay people are also people and people can often be deeply, horrifically lovely.
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Apr 5, 2022 21:43
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 quote:Martha Wells reading from her book All Systems Red to the search and rescue robots at the TEES (Texas A&M University Engineering Experiment Station) Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR). 
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Apr 5, 2022 23:02
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Oh gosh they're like those little robots from Farscape.
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Apr 5, 2022 23:05
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:The World Cup of Quidditch arc in Goblet of Fire was especially dull (to me, at least). I also thought this as a kid and wonder whether it's because for English-speakers outside of Britain we just don't "get" the hype and excitement British kids have for the FIFA World Cup. Mercury Hat posted:I was reading them as they came out and was in the general age range at the time, and they lost me maybe halfway through book 5 though I couldn't point to a real reason why. I suppose that's when she got bigger than her editor and the books were trying to stretch beyond the tone the first three had set. Both those explanations are bang on, I think. The first three books (and even most of the fourth book) are good, mostly self-contained fantasy/mystery stories with a limited setting and cast. The fourth book starts introducing all these extraneous adult characters from beyond the world of Hogwarts, and acts as a bridging book into the messier 3-book arc that ends the series... it's just messier and more complex and doesn't catch lightning in a bottle the way the first three did. (Though I actually do remember 6 being not bad and almost a nice throwback after 5 was such a slog.)
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Apr 5, 2022 23:13
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:The "too big for her editor" remark is a really succinct way of putting my feelings on fantasy books that I've been reading lately. I've always called the whole author becomes massively popular = massive page count bloat. "Tom Clancy Syndrome".
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Apr 5, 2022 23:36
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Every time I've gone into a second hand shop lately there have so many copies of her latest 900 page mystery novel sitting alongside Clancy's 1000 page military thrillers in the book sections. (It's also interesting that people don't seem to throw out similarly lengthly Stephen King books in comparable numbers) High Warlord Zog fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Apr 6, 2022 |
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Apr 6, 2022 00:32
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:So I started reading the Harry Potter books a while ago because I finally just... had to know, I guess. I borrowed the books from a trans friend who just sort of lifted his hands and said "I know, but I can't help but like them even though JK's awful." My only experience with the books were getting a few chapters into Sorcerer's Stone when it first came out and getting bullied for having it, so I put it down and never engaged with it again, only knowing about two of the major spoilers for the last book that everyone went around screaming when it first released. But it always bothered me that I didn't know anything about the series. Meanwhile, I'll see some neoliberal think tank hosting Quidditch matches between readings of Brett Stephens op-eds on why Tehran should be carpet-bombed, so I just had to know what this pop culture phenomenon was.
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Apr 6, 2022 03:13
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High Warlord Zog posted:Every time I've gone into a second hand shop lately there have so many copies of her latest 900 page mystery novel sitting alongside Clancy's 1000 page military thrillers in the book sections. Interestingly, book 4 of the Dark Tower series is also when it gets incredibly thick and also not very good (in popular assessment - I actually liked Wizard and Glass and think it's the last good book before the series goes off a cliff).
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Apr 6, 2022 03:43
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Deptfordx posted:I've always called the whole author becomes massively popular = massive page count bloat. "Tom Clancy Syndrome". Yeah. I've seen it get especially bad in Fantasy. As series go on, there tend to be less chapters where characters do or say interesting things, and more chapters with characters walking around castles feeling anxious. The latter will of course always be ten times as long as the former. freebooter posted:I also thought this as a kid and wonder whether it's because for English-speakers outside of Britain we just don't "get" the hype and excitement British kids have for the FIFA World Cup. I think an issue was that most of the books had the opening beats of Harry dealing with the Dursleys, Harry getting away from the Dursleys, Harry having a quick pre-semester breather with Hagrid/Ron, then Harry going to Hogwart's. Goblet of Fire goes from the part where he stays at the Weasleys, then before he goes to Hogwart's, he goes to a sporting match that lasts just as long as all of the previous story beats combined. It also introduces a large amount of characters and ideas, so it takes twice as long to even start the school year in Goblet as in the previous three books. But, you can even see problems in Azkaban. During the requisite "Harry puts on the invisibility cloak so he can listen to adults do an exposition dump," section of the book, Harry listens in on a really, really clunky dialogue between all of the teachers where they give backstory on Sirius and the Potters. It goes on for yonks and just reads like a plot summary with quotation marks placed around it.
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Apr 6, 2022 04:14
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freebooter posted:Interestingly, book 4 of the Dark Tower series is also when it gets incredibly thick and also not very good (in popular assessment - I actually liked Wizard and Glass and think it's the last good book before the series goes off a cliff). I agree! I thought Wizard and Glass was great though I did share the popular grumpiness at the time that we'd waited so drat long and it was one huge flashback and barely advanced the story.
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Apr 6, 2022 04:21
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HopperUK posted:I agree! I thought Wizard and Glass was great though I did share the popular grumpiness at the time that we'd waited so drat long and it was one huge flashback and barely advanced the story. I really enjoyed Wizard and Glass, and didn’t realize it was unpopular. I read them after they were all out though, so no waiting component.
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Apr 6, 2022 04:43
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Yeah I think that's what it came down to, I read them in the 2000s but if I'd been waiting years for the next book in a great series and then got a very long flashback I would have been annoyed.
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Apr 6, 2022 05:03
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Wizard and Glass was a lot of fun, but I agree that the series quickly went downhill after and was not able to stick the landing. I still finished it but it felt like a slog at the end.
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Apr 6, 2022 06:36
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Been reading Tales From The Gas Station by Jack Townsend, and so far, pretty good. It's sort of a mixture of anomaly flats meets night vale where weird poo poo happens, but not to the degree in either place. It's on KU. Worth a shot. The lead has a terminal brain disorder that means he will eventually be hallucinating so you don't really know if what he's telling you is true or if he's just having an episode. You kinda hope it's an episode though. Working through the second one now.
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Apr 6, 2022 07:03
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Deptfordx posted:I've always called the whole author becomes massively popular = massive page count bloat. "Tom Clancy Syndrome". Tom Clancy presents Tom Clancy Syndrome, a Tom Clancy novel by Tom Clancy I finished A Tale For The Time Being yesterday. I don't know if it really belongs in here but there's a touch of magical realism so why not. It's jumped straight into the little cluster of my favourite books ever, and it has a really good reading by the author for those who use audible. It covers a lot of very difficult topics without shying away and yet the book has a truly compelling human warmth to it.
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Apr 6, 2022 09:00
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I think there's a credible argument to say that Rowling filled the Enid Blyton niche (boarding schools, child mystery solving gangs, unthreatening fantastical adventures) in commonwealth countries when Blyton's material had become too out of date and awareness of their problematic/racist elements too large for parents to buy the books for their children. The spread of Harry Potter to America and other countries where Blyton hadn't really penetrated left many believing that Rowling was sui generis and weren't aware of the awful mindsets hardbaked into the genres Rowling was writing with in.
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Apr 6, 2022 09:14
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As an aside, translations of Blytonesque stuff used to be a fairly big success in Norway. In fact one of the bigger things in children's fiction (including movies) back in the 1950s and 60s was an adapted translation of Anthony Buckeridge's "Jennings" series, relocated to Norway. Which has basically no boarding school tradition, they just pretended for the sake of the story. These were pretty old-fashioned by the time I was in the target age group in the 80s, and now my kids are in that age range and I don't think anyone reads that poo poo anymore. They do read Harry Potter though.
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Apr 6, 2022 09:31
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It's funny that Wizard and Glass has a character who gets addicted to a magic version of social media and destroys her life over it.
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Apr 6, 2022 13:26
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freebooter posted:Yeah I think that's what it came down to, I read them in the 2000s but if I'd been waiting years for the next book in a great series and then got a very long flashback I would have been annoyed. Allow me to assure you, as someone who bought DT III when it first came out, that "annoyed" does not cover it. I was absolutely convinced the son of a bitch was gonna die without finishing it, and then he got hit by a van.
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Apr 6, 2022 15:05
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mdemone posted:I was absolutely convinced the son of a bitch was gonna die without finishing it, and then he got hit by a van.
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Apr 6, 2022 15:43
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Good thing the accident didn’t significantly affect the last three books in any way
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Apr 6, 2022 16:16
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I feel like Harry Potter works because it's not just "fantasy." The HP books have equal measures of mystery, drama, horror, a little romance, and of course some action. They also sprinkle the worldbuilding. As opposed to the worst offenders of lore bloat, Harry Potter books will just introduce something like, say, a magical invention or candy, say what it does, show someone use it, and move on. It doesn't linger on the magical candy, telling you when it was invented, who invented it, what the inventor's whole life story was, etc. The first three books don't really waste your time all that much, which is great for kids and people who can't really get into heavier fantasy.
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Apr 6, 2022 20:45
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Opopanax posted:Good thing the accident didn’t significantly affect the last three books in any way I don't know if this is sarcasm (it probably is) but the main affect on the last four* books was that it lit kind of an "Oh poo poo, I could die!" fire under King to go ahead and get them done. * Yes, four, after book seven he went back to wrote an eighth book that basically slots in between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla called The Wind Through the Keyhole. If you weren't happy with Wizard and Glass and the mostly flashback structure, you'll probably hate Wind because you have a flashback story within a flashback story.
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Apr 6, 2022 21:19
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Everyone posted:I don't know if this is sarcasm (it probably is) but the main affect on the last four* books was that it lit kind of an "Oh poo poo, I could die!" fire under King to go ahead and get them done. That and his literal insertion into the books and making a huge part of the story about the accident
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Apr 6, 2022 21:21
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Opopanax posted:That and his literal insertion into the books and making a huge part of the story about the accident Plus "9-11 is somehow a good thing because it'll destroy the nasty rock or something." I remember playing in some weird Gunslinger RPG on RPoL where its theme was that since the nasty rock got smushed, it let all the evil out and now our world had the War on Terror and werewolves and other weird poo poo now.
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Apr 6, 2022 21:42
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The Bone Ships (Tide Child #1) by RJ Barker - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MPW3GMX/ Babel-17 by Samuel R Delany - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HE2JK4Y/
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Apr 6, 2022 22:02
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Opopanax posted:That and his literal insertion into the books and making a huge part of the story about the accident Yeah but book-King is a whiny rear end in a top hat who almost ends the universe with his stubbornness,so it owns.
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Apr 6, 2022 22:23
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The funniest part about the accident's effect on the last three books was how obsessed he became with numerology - because the accident happened on 6 June 1999 or something - and there's a scene where the characters all realise that their names have the same number of letters... if you include their heretofore unmentioned middle names. It would've been a thousand times better if the accident had never happened and King hadn't finished the series until the 2010s when he cycled around to being semi-good again. The turn of the millenium was such a low point for his writing. Strom Cuzewon posted:Yeah but book-King is a whiny rear end in a top hat who almost ends the universe with his stubbornness,so it owns. What I remember more than the self-insert is how much time they spend faffing around in the backwoods of Maine and marvelling at the quirks of the Maine accent. Get your hand off it, mate, you'll go blind.
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Apr 6, 2022 22:51
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