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Oh boy... Here it goes. We get Zedd soon, right? And the most Cunning Plan Ever by the first of many evil government officials:Banning fire. Yeah, that's a logical plot point that would fly in a pre-industrial civilization.
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Oct 1, 2014 14:33
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Grimpond posted:hahaha, wow, I never made the connection between the 'ban fire' and gun control. Is that seriously what its supposed to be about? Somehow. Which is insane, because in a pre-industrial society without electric stoves, microwaves, etc. it will mean that everyone in the town will soon be dying from eating raw meat or will be turning vegetarian. Also, most industry, from blacksmithing to tanning to canning food to mining, will have to be shut down. No light sources after dark, either, so the security of the town will plummet... It is a bad analogy written by a bad writer to showcase his bad idea. In the real world, no matter how popular, Michael would be laughed off stage for the tasteless punchline to such a moving lead-up, and his political career would be over instantly.
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Oct 2, 2014 19:44
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TheCenturion posted:The thing that really REALLY bugs the poo poo out of me, about almost any series of THIS TYPE, including SoT, or GoT, and so on, is the idea that civilization will happily hum along at a stagnant level for thousands of years. This is basically what people who don't know much about history think happened: "First there were Greece and Rome, then the medieval period, and then the industrial revolution then modern times." And since a lot of ill-thought out fantasy is set in this weird mis-mash of ~1400 years worth of "medieval" history with wildly divergent technologies and societies all existing side by side... This reminds me of an interesting anecdote about a much better writer: supposedly, the first major modern alternative history novel, The Guns of the South, was written after Harry Turtledove had a conversation with a friend of his. She was upset that on the cover of one of her books, they had drawn a fellow holding a crossbow, a weapon which wouldn't be used in the area her novel was set in for at least a hundred years after. "It would be like putting a confederate soldier with an AK-47," she said. So what went of the cover of Turtledove's book? 
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Oct 10, 2014 23:06
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You're all absolutely right. I'm using "modern" way too loosely there; "recent" would be a much better word. Guns merely kicked off the resurgence in popularity the genre has experienced, from what I understand.
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Oct 11, 2014 04:57
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TheCenturion posted:I've been reading Clancy for decades. Jack Ryan was never an MP. He was a marine who broke his back in a training accident and it never comes up other than a) he knows how to use a pistol, b) a fear of flying, and c) a well ingrained reflex for salutes. You're totally right with Clark. Ryan is definitely some authorial wish fulfillment of the other sort, though: he's basically Tom Clancy if Tom Clancy worked for the CIA, and if the CIA worked the way that Clancy thinks it does. Even though he's not a kill-dozing super-soldier, he is a multimillionaire history professor/CIA analyst, married to a brilliant eye surgeon who also manages to be a perfect mother to his two children, who gets to regularly plan and execute secret missions and boss around elite kill teams, and (spoilers for Debt of Honor and Executive Orders) ends up the president twice because the Japanese flew a plane into the Capitol building (killing off basically the entirety of the elected federal government -- most of congress, the Prez and VP, and the entire Supreme Court) and not-Ted Kennedy sucks so hard. This allows Ryan to rebuild the entire country in his image, once that nasty rapist Ed Kealty (not Ted Kennedy, totally not!) is taken care of. The books before Debt of Honor are pretty fun mil-adventure, though. It's only after that that the super political and xenophobic stuff starts to pile in, occasional weird ideas ("Why don't we get the Swiss guard to administer Israel? Both sides will totally got for this!") aside. (For those curious about the CIA's opinions on Clancy's work, there was a brutal parody of Hunt for Red October passed around the offices that has made its way online. You can read it here: http://gawker.com/read-the-cias-parody-version-of-tom-clancys-most-famo-1440143480 ) Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 13, 2014 23:57
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reignonyourparade posted:The Trees is actually amazing and hilarious because I have on multiple occasions had people listen to the lyrics and then asked them what the political message was and EVERY SINGLE TIME the answer it's a leftist song. It honestly took me years to realize that it could be taken as not pro-union. "They cut down all the rich dudes and everyone gets enough. They stop the tree mobsters and evil capitalists and everyone's equal. Seems pretty straightforward and legit to me." Not that Peart himself cares one way or another what the meaning was: Modern Drummer, April/May 1980 posted:http://www.andrewolson.com/Neil_Peart/neilpeart_firstinterview.htm
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Oct 28, 2014 16:27
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Well, The Law of Nines, his attempt at non-Sword of Truth urban fantasy, (spoilers for the end of the book) is completely tied into the Sword of Truth books anyways. Not that it wasn't the most overly telegraphed, paint by numbers, "crazy person gets put into the insane asylum run by the bad guys, because it turns out he's not crazy at all!" load of crap genre fiction I'd read in quite some time. It was seriously like Goodkind had a checklist that he was ticking off as he wrote the thing, only this time the protagonist was an even more transparent author stand in -- once you know Goodkind used to be a wildlife and landscape artist, there's a certain amusement to be had in reading the book as if it were autobiographical.
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Nov 10, 2014 05:36
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JackMann posted:Why the gently caress should I pay to have your house put out? Clearly, if you couldn't afford to pay the fire fighters yourself, you deserve to have your belongings lost. The free market will ensure that those who deserve protection will receive it. After all, it's not like fires spread, right? We mock, but it happens... Basically a guy who lives outside the city limits to avoid paying taxes didn't pay his annual firefighter's fee to the city, and they refused to put his house out when it caught on fire, because if they did it for him, no one would pay the fee (kinda like getting car insurance after an accident), they'd all just pay as soon as their houses caught on fire, defeating the purpose of the fee in the first place. They showed up to insure the fire didn't spread to the surrounding houses that had paid the fee. $75 a year is a steal for not having your house burn down completely, you'd think, but then again I live in a society and just pay taxes in exchange for a complete package of government services, so what do I know?  http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/10/04/122193/county-firefighters-subscription/ quote:Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won’t respond, then watches it burn. That’s exactly what happened to a local family tonight. A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Nov 14, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2014 17:38
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ProfessorCirno posted:That's what I was thinking reading through that. Who on earth reads that and goes "Ah, of course! Communists!" Other then the batshit insane author. Much like with the conspiracy theorist, as with so many things, the polemic author requires his enemies to be both omnipotent powerful yet utterly incompetent. Comedy answer: Because A = A. No one could possible lie about their intentions! How could a man say one thing and then do another, yet still achieve a position of power?
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Nov 17, 2014 06:46
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TheCenturion posted:Zedd raised the barriers, and while he's old, he's not ever described as having any sort of extended lifespan. This entire thing is terribly under developed: -They have utterly alien customs, yet everyone speaks the exact same language? In the real world before television, regional dialects sprung up between different cities, let alone geographically distinct regions that were magically separated from one another. Even with one or two generations of separation, Kahlan should sound very weird to Richard's ears and vice versa. -Elaborating on this, everyone on each side of the wall has the exact same name for each of the three realms? Why? -No one lost contact with relatives living on the other side of the Wall? His world isn't exactly huge, and given the sheer number of small towns that dotted the landscape (all conveniently less than 1 day's travel from one another) in the pre-automobile period... -What happened to the settlements that were located right by the Walls? Was there some sort of "Right of Way" or "Eminent Domain" established to clear out those areas first? And all of these questions I find way more interesting than bad S&M.
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Nov 26, 2014 05:52
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I Love You! posted:Tolkein really is a good DM but his idea of balance is completely and utterly hosed. Also he should have known that a 9-person party would inevitably infight and fracture before a single quest was finished. There was an ancient usenet post about this, back before DM of the Rings was a twinkling in the writer's eye, with the game starting off with 2 characters, Sam and Frodo, playing themed hobbit characters, eventually adding in two of their friends from class as Merry and Pippin, who also needed to play hobbits to keep the cohesion correct. But then the DM's girlfriend wanted to join, and they meet Aragorn, the mysterious ranger with a hidden past who's secretly a king and knows everyone and has a magical elf girlfriend, who cracks the power levels right open. The game goes right off the rails as her other theatre buddies want to join, and since the game has opened up non-hobbit characters, we get other princes and high powered dwarven warriors and such. The bit I remember best was the explanation for Boromir's death. His player wasn't staying in town for the summer, and wanted to kill his character with gusto. When he returns for the fall classes, he just brings in his character's brother, Faramir, so he doesn't need to roll someone else.
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Dec 5, 2014 22:23
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I Love You! posted:Not only are there sisters of the dark, but ALMOST EVERY SISTER WE ARE GOING TO MEET is a sister of the dark. No, I'm not exaggerating, he goes way the gently caress overboard on this thing. This could be a hilarious short story in the right hands: every single member of a "followers of light" group is secretly evil, and they don't know that there's not a single unconverted good guy left thanks to their convoluted systems of recognizing one another. None of them have pieced it together yet, so they all keep dancing through the motions of testing and tempting one another over to the "dark side".
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Dec 11, 2014 18:08
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Touché. I love that story. This thread got me thinking about the bloat of fantasy novels last night. DDP noted a couple posts back that he was only about 125 pages in, and given that we're a few more chapters, I'm guess-timating we're at perhaps 200 now? (Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair by comparing the page count of the 2nd novel in SoT to the first novels in other series, rather than an aggregate total, but the reason will soon become apparent) Let's check in where we'd be in other famous fantasy series: Lord of the Rings: By 200 pages into Fellowship, we've met Strider and we're in the council at Rivendell. We've met Tom Bombadill, heard the entire history of the hobbits, gotten the history of the War of the Ring from Gandalf, fought the Barrowwright, become elf friends, fought Nazgûl, and the series is at the point where it really gets cracking and exciting. A fellowship is being formed to carry the Ring to Mt. Doom, and poo poo is getting Real. About 60 pages left before Two Towers. Elric of Melniboné: By 200 pages, the novel is already over, and you're 9 pages into Sailor on the Seas of Fate. I won't spoil it. It's very good. Chronicles of Amber: We're well through Nine Princes in Amber, and into The Guns of Avalon. We've found a war for the multiverse, battled the gods themselves, seen multiple deaths, seen entire armies wiped off the face of the world, and questioned the nature of reality on multiple occasions. More to come, or feel free to add you own!
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Dec 11, 2014 19:00
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silvergoose posted:But this is book 2, remember. And book 1 sure is as long as fellowship! (I think) The copy of Lord of the Rings I'm working from, including Fellowship, Two Towers, Return of the King, all the appendixes and an index, is 1178 pages in total. Fake edit: Lord of the Rings is Book II of the Hobbit! Ha ha!
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Dec 11, 2014 20:08
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DARKSEID DICK PICS posted:Also I highly support "read Eye of the World and go from there", but you should know that there is definitely a middle point where the series is sloggy, which coincided with Jordan's declining health and death. (The books were finished by a hand-picked second author, and his contributions really make the finale shine, he's great.) His one downside is that his fight scenes read like someone who's never been in a fight before, and is only describing what he's seen on TV, as opposed to Vietnam veteran Robert Jordan, or WWI Veteran JRR Tolkien, or even fencer Michael Moorcock, but he's hardly the only fantasy writer that accusation could be laid on *cough Goodkind cough*, and really, it only stands out when in direct comparison, as he's literally finishing another person's work. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 20:35
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Oh, Sanderson sure has his faults. Oh, totally. I didn't mean to imply he was James Joyce or anything, but the list of "Fantasy authors good enough to make sense of my massive volume of exhaustive notes without turning them into weirdo head canon fanfiction or making a mess of all the carefully spinning plates, and actually willing to take on the task" is a pretty specific list. And craft wise, the guy knows his stuff. As much as I'd of loved to see the last three Wheel of Time books by, like, Jacqueline Carey or Michael Moorcock or someone like that, no way in hell was that happening.
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Dec 12, 2014 21:41
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