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What about non-sff by sff authors What Im saying is, please do Hogg next
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Sep 10, 2017 20:20
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Do one of those genre books that the 'literary establishment' fawned over while denying it was a genre book, like Station Eleven
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Sep 12, 2017 18:42
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heres my favquote:Station Eleven also uses some of conventions of genre — there is suspense, science fiction and elements of horrors — but this is undoubtedly a literary work. like, its a sci fi book, and its OK to like that without having to qualify it as 'literary fiction'
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Sep 12, 2017 18:54
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sometimes, when I go to the book store, Umberto Eco books are in the 'literary fiction' section and sometimes, at another bookstore, they are in the 'historical fiction' section. HELP
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Sep 12, 2017 19:04
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there is one in Oregon I went to not but a few weeks ago and this I swear on my forums platinum
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Sep 12, 2017 19:07
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Was it Portland worse....Ashland....it's a lovely little town though (just don't drink the weird gross water) serious posting: thanks for that list of lit crit reads on the last page, I am unfamiliar with all of those works except Said and I am wanting to learn more about academic lit crit, of which I know very little quote:University creative writing courses also tend to look down on fantastical elements, but there are often good reasons for that. Sure, sometimes the professor or the other students automatically associate fantastical elements with lowbrow genre fiction. But sometimes it leads to a more useful question, which one of my professors in grad school brought up: what are you doing with the fantastical element that you couldn't do without it? What purpose does it serve in terms of story, theme, and character? Does it distract from that, or does it enhance it? And the truth is, with inexperienced writers, it much more often distracts than enhances. It takes a lot of work to write a great story, and adding on magic or science fiction on top just makes that work even harder unless you really know what you're doing with it. I'm about the read Empire of the Atom which as I understand it is a
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Sep 12, 2017 21:54
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Nnedi Okorafor is pretty great and she won a Hugo for something recently iirc, I'm sure there's more but idk off the top of my head But yes obviously SFF has for a long time been a white-male dominated field, this we know. I mean it's an industry struggling with fuckin Vox Day and his ilk, any progress is better than none 
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Sep 13, 2017 00:04
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HIJK posted:I hypothesize that this ties into the desire to reduce fantasy worlds to rote encyclopedias. The types that go in for this stuff are the types who want to reduce stories and characters to something plastic. Consumerism is cheap and very, very easy to copy. It doesn't challenge you and fantasy fans for the most part don't want to be challenged which is how they get conned by a hack like Rothfuss so easily. They want it to be this way and they don't want anything that's coherent or interesting, probably because you can't reduce coherent and interesting to a trading card game very easily. Don't forget that every fantasy story has to be at least a trilogy these days! The biggest Rothfuss fan I know is a college-level English professor and this mystified me for a long time until I realized, she wants cheap hacky escapist bullshit. Maybe because she spends much of her working time in the academic/literary world, I dunno. But fantasy especially seems to excel at providing the literary equivalent of 4-chord pop music, and in droves. It's like superhero movies, they're all the same and they all suck. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be over here reading Jack Vance and pretending I'm better than those other genre fans...
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Sep 13, 2017 02:27
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Ive made it through about 100 pages of Titus Groan in about a year, intentionally. Its the kinda thing you wanna savooorrrrr for a long time.
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Sep 14, 2017 03:26
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I question the value of being pessimistic about a political system and reality you yourself invented All fiction is invented and any literary work thay pretends its systems and realities is otherwise is lying
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Sep 26, 2017 14:29
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Tell me I'm wrong tho
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Sep 26, 2017 14:40
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Mel Mudkiper posted:you're wrong gaahhhh What's the line, when is it ok for fiction to be pessimistic, what's the rule
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Sep 26, 2017 14:45
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Mel Mudkiper posted:For a political or moral fable to be significant it must have an authentic connection to current experience. Culture is just this, it's not like Banks came up with space anarcho communism but imperialist out of a vacuum. Are you familiar with 20th century leftist disillusionment re: the USSR. Culture is borne out of dreams of a true post-scarcity utopia and the realization that maybe that kind of magical thinking won't solve all humanity's problems. Now I'm defending the merits of a series I don't even like that much ahhh
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Sep 26, 2017 15:04
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Yes that's the part of the interest, it's not a 1:1 comparison but rather a chance to imagine familiar problems in a novel context. Fiction is very important for giving us that chance.
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Sep 26, 2017 15:13
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BotL says Culture is a failure because it's not happy enough and Mel says it's a failure because it doesn't say anything, where oh where does the truth lie Perhaps not in the spaceship books But that does not make the spaceship books void of meaning. They are especially meaningful in the context of science fiction, which I gather does not factor much into this grounded discussion.
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Sep 26, 2017 15:26
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Schwarzwald posted:Okay, then. What is their meaning? In the sci-fi context - offering a leftist-informed vision of a post-scarcity future that is neither a utopia nor dystopia, but rather a genuinely nuanced imagined society, is pretty important. There are probably precedents but I don't know any that had the impact of Culture, especially given the time it came out - the mid 1980s, when the prevailing sci-fi attitude was "hypercapitalist cyberpunk future will doom us all." Culture is not only a critique of idealism, it's a critique of both political and science-fiction pessimism (consider the state of the Western left in the Thatcherite 80s - Banks had a lot to be mad about). Banks was wise to all of this. He wrote the Culture books to be exactly what they are. He acknowledged that the Culture is *his* ideal society: quote:CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture? but understood that for him to have his ideal society, someone somewhere would have to lose out. If he didn't understand that then the Culture really would be written as a utopia, for everyone. If that's too cynical, so be it. Mel Mudkiper posted:Saying sci-fi shouldn't strive for significance because its sci-fi does more damage to the genre than any of us could ever do. Correct and I phrased it poorly (mostly spaceship books is fun to say) - I am only emphasizing it's important to consider the traditions a work came out of in that context as well as whatever baseline ur-context there may also be. Culture wouldn't exist without decades of space opera precedent, but it wouldn't exist without decades of real-world precedent either. It has something to say about both.
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Sep 26, 2017 16:23
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the old ceremony posted:i'm hopelessly enmeshed in gormenghast and it's the best thing that's happened to me in a long time, i love it, i love botl hope you have a version with peake's illustrations 
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Oct 6, 2017 04:15
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Jack Vance did magic the best in the Dying Earth stories the only rule is that a person can remember no more than 4 spells at once beyond that who cares, you know if a dude memorizes some spells he'll use em in the story later to get out of some jam then in his magician stories he just said gently caress it and gave em all godmode because all-powerful petty wizards rule
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Oct 7, 2017 15:11
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Cugel stories are really great on a re-read because you realize, this guy's a dumbass and also a really bad dude. Rapist, murderer, thief, trickster, etc. But he's so likable!
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Oct 12, 2017 19:47
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:On a re-read? I think I was really high the first time I read Eyes of the Overworld ok also I went right into it after finishing the short stories and was expecting more Guyal of Sfere and less Liane the Wayfarer - the Dying Earth short stories alone are good evidence that Vance wrote some nicely varied protagonists my bony fealty fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Oct 12, 2017 |
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Oct 12, 2017 22:11
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I think Vance is the only SF author I've read who can get away with footnoting his created worlds, and indeed use them in a legitimate, additive way. Works well with his balance of absurdity and formality. That's a great post BotL!
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Feb 24, 2018 18:10
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Reading The Hunger Games is a revolutionary act
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May 29, 2018 04:24
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Stuporstar posted:Or empathize. I've heard of more than one midlist genre author who was told by an editor to make their protagonist not gay or less black because they thought it would alienate readers, as if being asked to peer into the life of someone too different from Standard was too big of an ask.  MY STORY! It's true, though - readers often want comfort and not to be challenged by scary concepts like "reading about a brown person." Picture a million nerds getting upset because they made Thor black or whatever is "controversial" these days.
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May 30, 2018 02:14
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YA book is easier read for children than Camus book - a shocking controversial statement in this, The Book Barn
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Jun 1, 2018 05:12
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The Belgian posted:but camus is YA I think we had to read The Stranger in 10th grade so you are right, poo poo!!
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Jun 1, 2018 22:23
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Petitioning now to make The Chocolate War the July BOTM
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Jun 7, 2018 00:29
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Oh do an 'urban fantasy' novel I've never read any so no suggestions, what do goons like??
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Jul 6, 2018 22:55
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I like genre fiction and also literary fiction and especially Baudolino but what I really like is BotL analyses, gimme more
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Jul 16, 2018 21:27
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Who reads author bios lmao Read the story they wrote instead
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Jul 17, 2018 00:54
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Ccs posted:It boils down to them accusing Wolfe of treating his books as a puzzle, and "subordinates thematic and conceptual integrity to the mere challenge of these games." Yeah I call this "being too stupid to understand symbolism" - Wolfe's stories aren't puzzle boxes, they just frequently use symbols and allusions to convey info. Combined with important plot beats and characterization being mentioned casually, just once, in a place in the narrative you wouldn't expect it to be. If you wanna call that a puzzle then I guess that's fine. A good example is the scuffle at the gate at the end of Shadow of the Torturer - we are told straight-up what to expect there and then what actually happens there later, but people miss that and think it must be some crazy puzzle with plot significance. My fav puzzle box story is Pale Fire what's yours??
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Jul 18, 2018 14:19
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Are you ever not huffing your own farts? It's a crucial part of this forum and thread To me Wolfe is dense and opaque and highly allusive but I don't consider that a "puzzle." Like hes not sitting there writing whilst cackling "ha ha these pathetic readers will never figure out my grand design!!" The "x is the y of z" is especially funny within the pure genre context e.g. "the American Tolkien" or "the expanse is the game of thrones of sci-fi"
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Jul 18, 2018 18:13
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Somehow I think Kim Stanley Robinson has read non SF books The first paragraph of that article acknowledges that the concept has been around for a while and cites Robert Frost and John Milton, noted SF authors C'mon Mel
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Jul 18, 2018 22:38
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Alright let's edit in some more examples to make it not just a few and then it will be valid
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Jul 18, 2018 22:48
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Who the gently caress reads Pale Fire and thinks Shade is a better writer than Kinbote Realtalk. Who cares about a dumb poem about an even dumber bird I love the first two lines tho David Auerbach is an idiot, every one of the questions he has in the Waggish piece are answered pretty thoroughly if you actually read the book! Imagine that!
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Jul 19, 2018 19:40
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It's funny because reactionary regressive types usually like Wolfe
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Jul 20, 2018 03:07
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The most exhaustive and comprehensive book of Wolfe criticism is published by an actual neofascist press There's now published sensical readings of him too at least
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Jul 20, 2018 05:47
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CestMoi posted:I will critically review any sci fi, fantasy, or alternate genre book for the purposes of this thread. Any? Good luck Mel hope you find something to like
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Jul 20, 2018 22:39
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Prose good so what
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Jul 21, 2018 01:29
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Silver2195 posted:Only if you make the oppressed group the one with the superpowers. The alternative cliche of aristocratic rear end in a top hat wizards comes up sometimes too. Although there's the risk of a related trap where the author or reader implicitly identifies with the rear end in a top hat wizards on some level. Jack Vance wrote some very fun rear end in a top hat wizard stories and I freely admit to wanting to chill with Rhialto He wrote some very personable, emotional wizards too tho. Shimrod my man.
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Aug 1, 2018 05:11
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Welcome back BotL Is there any Marxist genre fiction that has a powerful praxis
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Aug 16, 2018 19:04
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