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eke out
Feb 24, 2013



quantumfoam posted:

Going to laugh hard if the CryPilot author turns out to be Ernest Cline or Wesley Chu.

that interview has a picture so it doesn't seem like it's someone trying THAT hard to hide their identity

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quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

George RR Martin started weighing on the SLIDERS tv-series vs his pitched and never picked up DOORWAYS tv-series pilot in SFL Archives Vol 21a.

The really funny thing 20+ yrs later is how people keep saying George RR Martin has a amazing work ethic and always meet deadlines in the half dozen tv-series he'd worked on up to that point.

Kestral
Nov 24, 2000

Forum Veteran
What are the standout books in the Xeelee Sequence? Or is it a Dune-like case of, "once you get to here, stop, it's all downhill" ?

On a lark I read Raft because I'd read a random Xeelee Seqeuence spoiler about humanity being enslaved by sentient convection cells and craved that sort of big-ideas fiction. Raft wasn't super impressive, but it worked enough to get me to move on to Timelike Infinity and that's been fascinating so far. Prose is mediocre at best, but boy are those big ideas, and I'm up for more of them, especially if they involve extremely weird aliens. But this series seems huge, and if it drops off at some point I'd rather address other parts of my backlog.

On a related note, at what point can you read the short story collections? I've heard a lot of praise for Vacuum Diagrams in particular.

DACK FAYDEN
Feb 25, 2013

Bear Witness

Kestral posted:

On a related note, at what point can you read the short story collections? I've heard a lot of praise for Vacuum Diagrams in particular.
IMO that is thestandout book and you can read it whenever, it was actually my first.

Happiness Commando
Feb 1, 2002
$$ joy at gunpoint $$

Kestral posted:

What are the standout books in the Xeelee Sequence? Or is it a Dune-like case of, "once you get to here, stop, it's all downhill" ?

Timelike Infinity and Vacuum Diagrams are the best, the rest are meh. I read all of them, and I wouldn't retroactively unread them if I could, but there's not necessarily a good reason to read the others if you haven't yet.

pradmer
Mar 31, 2009

Follow me for more books on special!
The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DHJT92Q/

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FO6NPIO/

Groke
Jul 27, 2007
New Adventures In Mom Strength

quantumfoam posted:

George RR Martin started weighing on the SLIDERS tv-series vs his pitched and never picked up DOORWAYS tv-series pilot in SFL Archives Vol 21a.

The really funny thing 20+ yrs later is how people keep saying George RR Martin has a amazing work ethic and always meet deadlines in the half dozen tv-series he'd worked on up to that point.

The other amusing thing about him is that his main claim to fame used to be these really sharp and to-the-point short SF stories. Sandkings, etc.

Ani
Jun 15, 2001
illum non populi fasces, non purpura regum / flexit et infidos agitans discordia fratres

Kestral posted:

On a related note, at what point can you read the short story collections? I've heard a lot of praise for Vacuum Diagrams in particular.
You can read it any time and it’s by far the best one. If you like the cool ideas, Vacuum Diagrams gives that to you without having to read a whole novel set in each cool idea universe.

branedotorg
Jun 19, 2009

a foolish pianist posted:

Wait, he did it again?

I only read the first one, and that had plenty of boot camp for me.

They're all the same, I read them all and the setting changes slightly but the arc and the vibe are interchangeable

branedotorg
Jun 19, 2009

pradmer posted:

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DHJT92Q/

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FO6NPIO/

Has anyone read the Goblin Emperor sequel yet? It's out in some places I think

AARD VARKMAN
May 17, 1993

branedotorg posted:

Has anyone read the Goblin Emperor sequel yet? It's out in some places I think

theres a sequel out ???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKRVugb1eao

Ccs
Feb 25, 2011



Available June 22nd apparently

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41302953

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

MockingQuantum posted:

Bradbury also famously despised the whole concept of video games, and felt he didn't ever need a computer since he already had a typewriter, he was a very weird sort of paradoxical luddite that wanted an imaginative sci-fi future, but only one that ensconced and perpetuated a very specific slice of zeitgeist from his childhood.

This really shines through in Farenheit 451 in particular. Quite a good hatchet job review of it discussing Brabdury's Luddism:

https://doinginthewizard.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/weep-for-the-billboards-fahrenheit-451/

Ccs
Feb 25, 2011


freebooter posted:

This really shines through in Farenheit 451 in particular. Quite a good hatchet job review of it discussing Brabdury's Luddism:

https://doinginthewizard.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/weep-for-the-billboards-fahrenheit-451/

I found this funny though the link in the last paragraph to Requires Only That You Hate’s now defunct blog was an unpleasant reminder that certain hatchet job bloggers are incredibly dangerous people.

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

Ccs posted:

I found this funny though the link in the last paragraph to Requires Only That You Hate’s now defunct blog was an unpleasant reminder that certain hatchet job bloggers are incredibly dangerous people.

The archived Requires Hate post, if you're curious: https://web.archive.org/web/2012041...essarily-worth/

Requires Hate sounds a bit like BravestOfTheLamps here, heh.

And yeah, there's a definite streak of old-man-yells-at-cloud in some of Bradbury's writing. Not all of it is totally wrong, mind you (he has a point in some of the passages from Fahrenheit 451 that Doing in the Wizard quotes about car culture, for example, even if teenagers being completely casual about their friends being killed by cars is a bit hyperbolic).

I think it's a pity that while Doing in the Wizard claims to "have a lot of suspicions about why this extremely clumsy piece of writing has come down as a 'classic'" but doesn't elaborate. I think part of it is prestige by association with other dystopian fiction, and part of it is that a lot of the old-man-yells-at-cloud stuff appeals to, e.g., K-12 English teachers.

DurianGray
Dec 23, 2010

King of Fruits

Ccs posted:

I found this funny though the link in the last paragraph to Requires Only That You Hate’s now defunct blog was an unpleasant reminder that certain hatchet job bloggers are incredibly dangerous people.

Yeah I read a short sci fi book by an author I wasn't previously familiar with in the last year and enjoyed it! So I looked up the author to see what else they'd written and it turned out to be by Requires Only That You Hate. It did not take much research to decide that I did not want to pick up any more books by her!

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

Silver2195 posted:

The archived Requires Hate post, if you're curious: https://web.archive.org/web/2012041...essarily-worth/

Requires Hate sounds a bit like BravestOfTheLamps here, heh.

And yeah, there's a definite streak of old-man-yells-at-cloud in some of Bradbury's writing. Not all of it is totally wrong, mind you (he has a point in some of the passages from Fahrenheit 451 that Doing in the Wizard quotes about car culture, for example, even if teenagers being completely casual about their friends being killed by cars is a bit hyperbolic).

I think it's a pity that while Doing in the Wizard claims to "have a lot of suspicions about why this extremely clumsy piece of writing has come down as a 'classic'" but doesn't elaborate. I think part of it is prestige by association with other dystopian fiction, and part of it is that a lot of the old-man-yells-at-cloud stuff appeals to, e.g., K-12 English teachers.

I should also add that the are genuinely lyrical passages in Fahrenheit 451 (and in other Bradbury books) alongside the clumsy parts. It's not a straightforward case of the emperor having no clothes.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Ccs posted:

I found this funny though the link in the last paragraph to Requires Only That You Hate’s now defunct blog was an unpleasant reminder that certain hatchet job bloggers are incredibly dangerous people.

Huh - had never heard of her before.

Silver2195 posted:

I should also add that the are genuinely lyrical passages in Fahrenheit 451 (and in other Bradbury books) alongside the clumsy parts. It's not a straightforward case of the emperor having no clothes.

Agreed, he has some truly great descriptive passages alongside his bad opinions. Which I think is particularly relevant in the context of talking about older sci-fi authors - the Big Three all have a very dull, workmanlike prose style. Bradbury and Bester were leagues ahead of them.

Spite
Jul 27, 2001

Small chance of that...

eke out posted:

that interview has a picture so it doesn't seem like it's someone trying THAT hard to hide their identity

maybe I'm cynical but I'd guess it's someone that wrote 20 episodes of various direct-to-netflix things no one actually watched.

packetmantis
Feb 26, 2013

DurianGray posted:

Yeah I read a short sci fi book by an author I wasn't previously familiar with in the last year and enjoyed it! So I looked up the author to see what else they'd written and it turned out to be by Requires Only That You Hate. It did not take much research to decide that I did not want to pick up any more books by her!

Same. :negative: I mean, I hated the book I bought and didn't get very far in it, but I was horrified to have accidentally given her money nonetheless.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander
Mar 14, 2007

Is a man not entitled to the haw of his maw?
Grimey Drawer
For those of us who don't know who this person is, why is she bad?

uber_stoat
Jan 21, 2001



Pillbug

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

For those of us who don't know who this person is, why is she bad?

buckle up

https://web.archive.org/web/20151215154810/http://laurajmixon.com/2014/11/a-report-on-damage-done-by-one-individual-under-several-names/

Ccs
Feb 25, 2011


Yeah, tldr she was a rage blogger who was secretly also a professional author using her blog as a way of attacking her direct competitors. “ A large majority of BS/RH’s targets have been women, at between 73 and 81% of the targeted population.” “ Between 37 and 40% of her targets, or nearly two-fifths, were people of color. Given that the field has been, and still is, predominantly white, this is disproportionately high. In other words, POC are much more likely to be a target of her attacks than whites.”

Ironically for all her talk of standing up for the underprivileged it was later revealed she’s an heiress of one of the richest and most politically connected families in Thailand.

C.M. Kruger
Oct 28, 2013

quantumfoam posted:

Going to laugh hard if the CryPilot author turns out to be Ernest Cline or Wesley Chu.

Christopher Paolini.

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

C.M. Kruger posted:

Christopher Paolini.

Even the initials are the same.

Regarding Bradbury's Luddism: the thing people tend to like most about him is that his stories are people-centric. Technology is used as a backdrop, not a crutch. There's a quote from him that, to paraphrase, runs roughly as "People keep asking me how the rockets in my Mars stories work when all that is important is that they do work."

HopperUK
Apr 29, 2007

Why would an ambulance be leaving the hospital?
Last time I was reading Bradbury I felt there was a certain warmth in his work that's missing from say, Asimov or Clarke.

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

HopperUK posted:

Last time I was reading Bradbury I felt there was a certain warmth in his work that's missing from say, Asimov or Clarke.

I'm not sure if it's as much warmth as comfort, and it comes down to him drawing on Midwest America for everything. His stories about the Elliott clan as collected in From the Dust Returned show a typical loving family - in the Midwest, of course - who also happen to be vampires. The Mars stories reach furthest beyond, but are still fundamentally "what if pioneer/Midwest America, but in space?"

Shwoo
Jul 21, 2011

Kestral posted:

What are the standout books in the Xeelee Sequence? Or is it a Dune-like case of, "once you get to here, stop, it's all downhill" ?

On a lark I read Raft because I'd read a random Xeelee Seqeuence spoiler about humanity being enslaved by sentient convection cells and craved that sort of big-ideas fiction. Raft wasn't super impressive, but it worked enough to get me to move on to Timelike Infinity and that's been fascinating so far. Prose is mediocre at best, but boy are those big ideas, and I'm up for more of them, especially if they involve extremely weird aliens. But this series seems huge, and if it drops off at some point I'd rather address other parts of my backlog.

On a related note, at what point can you read the short story collections? I've heard a lot of praise for Vacuum Diagrams in particular.
Vacuum Diagrams was published after Ring, so that's probably the best time to read it. Some of the stories in Vacuum Diagrams, especially Secret History, lay out the cosmology pretty plainly, in a way that I assume was more drip-fed in Ring. Other than maybe Exultant, the later novels don't really tie into what happens in the short story collections.

I haven't actually read the novels, but I've read the short stories collections a few times. I like the Xeelee Sequence and its weirdness a lot, but Baxter's characters are all horrible people, and I'd rather not spend an entire novel with them.

I do want to know why the Xeelee went back in time to try to kill Michael Poole in Vengeance, though. I don't think he had anything to do with the direction humans eventually went in.

unattended spaghetti
May 10, 2013

This was fantastic. Thank you for sharing it. She’s the very epitome of the cancerous rhetoric that has grown out of hyperpartisanship and a perfect example of the rock-bottom standards folks seem to have for discourse these days. I don’t want to drag poo poo too far off topic, but this is the kind of person we (progressive-minded people that care about inclusiveness), invite in when we allow inflammatory dialectical strategy to become the go-to. Symptom, more than cause. Once you permit this stuff in the normal day-to-day, sociopathic narcissists like her flock to the banner in order to pull a power play. I think this happens, in small ways, all the time and nobody wants to acknowledge it. Fascinating stuff.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

BurningBeard posted:

This was fantastic. Thank you for sharing it. She’s the very epitome of the cancerous rhetoric that has grown out of hyperpartisanship and a perfect example of the rock-bottom standards folks seem to have for discourse these days. I don’t want to drag poo poo too far off topic, but this is the kind of person we (progressive-minded people that care about inclusiveness), invite in when we allow inflammatory dialectical strategy to become the go-to. Symptom, more than cause. Once you permit this stuff in the normal day-to-day, sociopathic narcissists like her flock to the banner in order to pull a power play. I think this happens, in small ways, all the time and nobody wants to acknowledge it. Fascinating stuff.

What circles are you hanging out in that have this problem?

Danhenge
Dec 16, 2005

StrixNebulosa posted:

What circles are you hanging out in that have this problem?

I mean, YA twitter is pretty infamous for aggressive toxicity, isn't it?

Ccs
Feb 25, 2011


Danhenge posted:

I mean, YA twitter is pretty infamous for aggressive toxicity, isn't it?

Also just twitter in general haha.

uber_stoat
Jan 21, 2001



Pillbug
the person who wrote that essay won a Hugo for it and i don't know how you keep getting published after someone wins a Hugo for writing a long article about how you're a sociopathic piece of poo poo but there you go. i suppose it helps if you are the trust fund child of a billionaire oligarch.

unattended spaghetti
May 10, 2013
Publishers aren't immune from bad decisions I'm just surprised I'd never heard of her before. Seems unreal to me. Granted I don't generally pay a lot of attention to the industry beyond the books themselves.

unattended spaghetti fucked around with this message at 18:17 on May 14, 2021

Ccs
Feb 25, 2011


So the second season of Love Death Robots is out on Netflix, and since nearly all the shorts are based on short stories from sci fi authors, it might be relevant here.

I haven't read any of the original shorts but it seemed to me like the first season really took advantage of how they could stuff a bunch of sex and violence on the screen. The showrunners are also both male and 16 out of the 18 shorts were based on stories writen by men. Some shorts had really cool style (The Witness, Good Hunting, Zima Blue) but aside from that last one I felt they all relied on style over substance, and lots of titillation.

But aside from a couple reviewers online, everyone seems to disagree with me on that and apparently thought the first season was amazing!

Also Jennifer Yuh Nelson joined the season 2 crew so at least they've got one different perspective on how they could handle things. I hear the second season has been toned down, though that might alienate some of their audience who liked that stuff in the first season.

uber_stoat
Jan 21, 2001



Pillbug

Ccs posted:

So the second season of Love Death Robots is out on Netflix, and since nearly all the shorts are based on short stories from sci fi authors, it might be relevant here.

I haven't read any of the original shorts but it seemed to me like the first season really took advantage of how they could stuff a bunch of sex and violence on the screen. The showrunners are also both male and 16 out of the 18 shorts were based on stories writen by men. Some shorts had really cool style (The Witness, Good Hunting, Zima Blue) but aside from that last one I felt they all relied on style over substance, and lots of titillation.

But aside from a couple reviewers online, everyone seems to disagree with me on that and apparently thought the first season was amazing!

Also Jennifer Yuh Nelson joined the season 2 crew so at least they've got one different perspective on how they could handle things. I hear the second season has been toned down, though that might alienate some of their audience who liked that stuff in the first season.

huh, they adapted a Ballard story for this season. have to check it out just for that one.

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012

Huh, "Life Hutch"? That's an unusual choice -- IIRC, it was Harlan Ellison's first published story, and not particularly good.

Fart of Presto
Feb 9, 2001
Clapping Larry
Neal Asher did a blog post about his story "Snow in the Desert", which is a part of the new LDR season, a few weeks ago:
http://theskinner.blogspot.com/2021/04/snow-in-desert-on-netflix.html

And there is a new short story collection from Alastair Reynolds coming soon-ish (October)
http://approachingpavonis.blogspot.com/2021/05/new-collection-from-subterranean-press.html

Ccs
Feb 25, 2011


Fart of Presto posted:

Neal Asher did a blog post about his story "Snow in the Desert", which is a part of the new LDR season, a few weeks ago:
http://theskinner.blogspot.com/2021/04/snow-in-desert-on-netflix.html

And there is a new short story collection from Alastair Reynolds coming soon-ish (October)
http://approachingpavonis.blogspot.com/2021/05/new-collection-from-subterranean-press.html

Lol wow Joe Abercrombie was an advisor on that newest Terminator movie? I watched it and while it's ten times better than Genysis, its got the feeling of a movie with five million creative inputs coming from all directions and making the final product into a convoluted mess.

It must feel weird for authors to have their work adapted and have no say over anything other than the story. The visuals are such a huge component of how the story comes across, and to have no say over style... oof. Like Zima Blue was a fun little story, but it was elevated 1000% by the visuals, whereas these photorealistic adaptions that will age like milk make the stories that are being told feel like tawdry cinematics.

Of course this is my own bias toward stylized animation coming through.

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pradmer
Mar 31, 2009

Follow me for more books on special!
Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions by Neil Gaiman - $3.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC13UE/

Promise of Blood (Powder Mage #1) by Brian McClellan - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0092XHPIG/

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin - $1.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087X6Z1GS/

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