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ed balls balls man posted:Luna - New Moon suffers with the generic recommendation of ASOIAF in space but it's fantastic. It actually reminds me more of Dune than ASOIAF. The Mackenzies are basically just the Harkonnens, for example. And some basic setting elements, like a libertarian society on the Moon, come from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It also has a lot of weird sex stuff, as you would expect from the fusion of Martin, Herbert, and Heinlein. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I'm surprised goons don't obsessively complain about it the way they usually do about weird sex stuff in genre fiction.
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Oct 20, 2019 21:08
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General Battuta posted:The difference between the way you expect people to react and the way they actually react is how you learn the way their society and psychology differs from yours. "Show don't tell" is, in fact, a meaningful criticism, especially when applied to the characterization of major characters (as applied to certain kinds of plot and setting elements it's more a matter of taste, I suppose). "Forced diversity" is almost always a dogwhistle, but that still doesn't make it meaningless - at the very least, it usually (unintentionally) tells us something about the critic. Hieronymous Alloy posted:I see where you're coming from and the term is overblown and overused but I think it has some remaining merit if used intelligently. I half-agree with this. It's complicated by the way that the extent to which a character should face consequences is dependent, not even on genre in the usual sense, but on the tone of a book. To take an extreme example, Bertie Wooster is stupid and lazy, but Jeeves and/or luck always eventually saves him from any real consequences for the dumb stuff he does. But I don't think that makes Bertie Wooster a Mary Sue! It just shows that he exists in the context of lighthearted, comedic stories. But a main character who's immune to consequences in a story where horrible stuff happens to secondary characters is a Mary Sue, or at least an example of bad writing. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 03:18
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General Battuta posted:I’ve definitely done that despite rounds of beta readers and professional copy edits. Stupid brains. I noticed Ian MacDonald doing it in the Luna books a few times. Partly a side effect of making Vidhya Rao's pronouns too close to feminine pronouns, I suppose; if MacDonald had used singular they instead he would probably have avoided a couple of those errors.
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Nov 23, 2019 02:33
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By the way, I both agree and disagree with the criticism that Luna: Moon Rising's ending is insufficiently final. The really evil characters (aside from the nameless LMA bureaucrats) are all dead, Ariel becomes slightly less of a self-absorbed rear end in a top hat libertarian and starts reforming the lunar political system (beginning with abolishing fees for breathing air and the like), Lucasinho's brain damage is presumably mostly fixed, and the other remaining Cortas/Mackenzies/Suns apparently decide to chill out and stop killing people over their grudges and ambitions. There's obviously one very big conflict remaining, though (everybody vs. the LMA, basically), and I can't remember what exactly happened with the Vorontsovs in the end. So there's obviously room for future books - but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. All of the setting's conflicts being resolved at once would have felt too pat.
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Nov 23, 2019 02:59
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Cythereal posted:I'm enough of a historian to feel a sense of instinctive rage and contempt whenever England comes up in a historical context, and yeah Skystone is really, really Hollywood Roman with all the good guys conveniently having modern attitudes and beliefs. Arthurian fantasy should embrace the anachronisms, IMO. Basically all the romances by Chretian de Troyes, etc. projected the customs of the High Middle Ages back into the Dark Ages. TH White’s The Once and Future King has some sort of jokey quasi-alternate history going on where Uther seems to have replaced William the Conqueror, in addition to Merlin being from the future. When people aim for “historical” takes they often end up with a bunch of unintentional anachronisms anyway, while removing interesting elements. Like the 2004 movie. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Dec 12, 2019 |
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Dec 12, 2019 15:12
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shrike82 posted:I was reading the blurb for William Gibson’s new book that’s coming out in a couple weeks’ time - it’s a follow-up to the Peripheral. That’s cool but the present day narrative takes place in an alternative timeline where Hillary Clinton won. Gibson has been exhibiting terminal centrism for sometime now on Twitter so I hope he doesn’t bring it into the book The thing about Trump is that he has a way of making national and world affairs revolve around him. Maybe Gibson wanted to follow his already planned plot idea for a Peripheral sequel and didn’t want Trump getting in the way.
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Jan 12, 2020 01:04
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quantumfoam posted:Thinking back about Isaac Asimov, and his #MeToo gropiness: guess that's why Asimov wrote so many robot/3 laws of robotics stories. Robots can't speak out or fight back when they get groped or worse. That's a stretch. Especially since the human main character in I, Robot is female and the robots are almost all male.
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Jan 15, 2020 04:01
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Just, uh, read those ones, not the other Dying Earth ones. They do have plenty of wizards, yes, and are very good, but Mazirian the Magician, the first Dying Earth story, introduces the “Vancian magic” system made famous by D&D and is memorably weird, if also a bit silly in some ways (it’s a classic example of what Vance himself called “gadget stories,” like some of the campier Bond movies where Bond encounters situations where he needs to use each of Q’s gadgets in turn). Though regarding “torture or sexual violence,” the villain is strongly implied to be a sophisticated sexual sadist (though nothing graphic happens on-page).
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Jan 21, 2020 18:34
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MockingQuantum posted:Cugel is an rear end in a top hat though, and not a wizard, so Eyes of the Overworld aka Cugel the Clever might not be your speed. I haven't read Cugel's Saga (and don't know if I will) so I can't attest to its wizardlyness. It’s not really about wizards either, except at the end when Cugel confronts Iucounnu again. I was disappointed by the way Iucounnu turned out to be an outright villain, even though in Eyes of the Overworld he came across as less evil than Cugel was.
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Jan 21, 2020 19:27
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mewse posted:Just read this and really liked it, it's the first of a trilogy. Stupid tagline is "Game of thrones in space" because there's 5 industrial families on the moon competing with each other It's a mix of Game of Thrones, Dune, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I guess. As you might expect from the combination of Martin, Herbert, and Heinlein, it has a lot of weird sex stuff. 
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Mar 22, 2020 16:38
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Gato posted:Seconding the recommendations for Luna: New Moon and its sequels. They're probably not going to blow anybody's minds, but they're definitely a cut above average, even if the third book sort of runs out of plot. Obviously marketing it as Game of Thrones in Space was a no-brainer but IMO the family politics stuff was less compelling than the general worldbuilding re: hypercapitalist lunar nightmare society. I appreciated McDonald's attempts to try and think about the pop culture and fashion and spirituality of his future society rather than just have it as set dressing. I actually like Luna. The was meant to indicate that my mention of weird sex stuff wasn't meant as a serious criticism. I agree it's probably not even about the author's fetishes, so much as him exploring the bizarre possibilities of his high-tech, low-gravity, and open-minded setting.
Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Mar 23, 2020 |
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Mar 23, 2020 04:09
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I read Princess of Mars and thought the plotting and prose were OK at best, and I found it rather ideologically distasteful in the usual early-20th-century pulp ways. Unreadable does seem like an overstatement, though.
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Mar 25, 2020 20:08
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I think present tense works well in combination with first person to make it clear than it's basically a transcription of the narrator's relevant thoughts as the events happen, rather than them somehow remembering the details well enough to write it all down afterwards. But this is probably more a personal prejudice of mine than anything.
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Apr 2, 2020 04:40
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buffalo all day posted:detta walker cruisin into the thread like WHATUP HONKEY MAFAS To be fair, that whole persona is explicitly constructed by Odetta’s subconscious from stereotypes; Eddie straight up says that no one actually talks the way “Detta” does.
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Apr 9, 2020 20:37
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biracial bear for uncut posted:You mean where the main character dies repeatedly and has to try again? There's the LN version of Re: Zero. Edit: Also All You Need Is Kill. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 18:01 on May 4, 2020 |
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May 4, 2020 17:57
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genericnick posted:Did you read Planet of Adventure? The racial dynamics in the setting of Planet of Adventure/Tschai are weird, but I wouldn't call it a pro-racist story (and if anything, it's anti-eugenics). Safety Biscuits posted:Don't read Vance if you're expecting Dungeons and Dragons, that's a terrible idea. The funny thing is that the main thing D&D took from The Dying Earth - the "Vancian magic" system where wizards memorize spells and forget them upon casting them - only really comes up in the first two stories of the first book (The Dying Earth/Mazirian the Magician), and at the end of the second book (The Eyes of the Overworld/Cugel the Clever). Rhialto and his frenemies mainly play pranks on each other using magical artifacts and genie-like beings rather than memorized spells. (I love how thanks to the Vance Integral Editions, a lot of Jack Vance books and short stories have two different titles, at least one of which is poorly chosen. My favorite example is the absurdly long VIE title for Assault on a City.)
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May 11, 2020 14:56
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I suspect what gives Ccs that impression is that the Masquerade isn't much beyond 19th-century-imperialism levels of evil, at least on the surface. They're not the blowing-up-planets kind of evil a lot of SF readers expect.
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May 15, 2020 21:13
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freebooter posted:I'm tempted to read this more now, out of morbid fascination, because Gibson is a writer I genuinely admire but also somebody I eventually had to unfollow on Twitter because he was constantly tweeting and retweeting extremely tedious blue-tick Resistance and I'm With Her crap. Like, I'm fine with somebody having different politics to me, but please don't be boring about it, especially when you wrote loving Neuromancer. Twitter makes a lot of people boring, while also generating misunderstandings and grudges between them. It's a combination of the character limit, the interface, the (lack of) moderation, and being effectively mandatory for people with certain kinds of jobs. Don't follow people on Twitter unless it's specifically because you like their Twitter posts. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 19:11 on May 18, 2020 |
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May 18, 2020 19:08
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anilEhilated posted:Well, do they tell you anything about the human condition? Lovecraft doesn't exactly invite you to share his paranoia, Vance's Dying Earth hardly has a message past "people are assholes" and so on. They're just for fun. I'm pretty sure Lovecraft actually was inviting readers to share his paranoia on some level.
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May 26, 2020 00:12
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jng2058 posted:
The legend of Hamlet wasn't actually particularly obscure before Shakespeare; there seems to have been an Elizabethan play about Hamlet by someone else before Shakespeare. Derivative indeed! (Yes, some scholars think it was just an early draft of Shakespeare's Hamlet, maybe even the First Quarto version, despite the only line quoted from Ur-Hamlet not actually being in First Quarto Hamlet. But it could be a misquotation.)
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Jun 20, 2020 22:50
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freebooter posted:This is the correct take on Foundation. It's a great book if you want to listen to pompous old farts lecture people. Counterpoint: Asimov didn't write books about how fascism and incest are good, actually.
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Jul 16, 2020 18:05
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bagrada posted:Oh yeah what's the huge YA series about people turning into animals that got into heavy sci fi? I missed the boat on that one but I see it pop up on reddit with heavy nostalgia often. Animorphs? Actually, most of the later Animorphs books were ghostwritten. 
Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 05:47
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:It's also ridiculously cliche which is kind of ironic given her career as a media critic. Is that really so ironic? Roger Ebert's movie wasn't exactly well-received, after all... Huh, just looked it up, and apparently Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is considered good now. Still, how many critics have been legitimately good artists in the field they criticize? T.S. Eliot is the only one who comes to mind: a great poet who also wrote influential but terrible criticism.
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Sep 6, 2020 04:08
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Black Griffon posted:Getting way close to a derail here, but he's expressed support for Chinese government concentration camps among other things I found that rather baffling, honestly, given the vivid portrayal of the Cultural Revolution in The Three Body Problem. Does he not see the obvious parallels between what the Chinese government did then and what it's doing now, or does he just think it's OK when it's directed at religious/ethnic minorities instead of intellectuals? Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 20:43
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Patrick Spens posted:I've been reading The Three Body Problem and I can't tell if Liu Cixin's prose is this dull or if he just got screwed by his translator, but man is it a slog to read. The ideas are cool, and I want to know what happens, but the actual process of reading the sentences is just dire. The Dark Forest has a different translator and much worse prose, IMO, so I think your problem is with the author rather than the translator.
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Sep 18, 2020 04:34
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Zore posted:Wizards in Tolkien are angels that give up some of their power to walk among us and act as a check on fallen angels and their agents like Sauron. They aren't nerds who study for their abilities, everything they do is as innate to them as breathing Yep. Which makes it ironic that the inspiration for A Wizard of Earthsea was LeGuin wondering how Gandalf learned his magic. Although I suspect Gandalf's fireworks craftsmanship is learned rather than innate. Middle-Earth has a lot of unknown areas beyond the edges of the map; perhaps one of them is a China equivalent...
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Sep 20, 2020 16:17
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EdBlackadder posted:Le Guin's thoughts (I really need to read Earthsea) makes sense though. Gandalf's and the other Istari's divine nature is in the Silmarillion and letters, reading Lord of the Rings alone I can see the logic. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with the idea, it's just ironic. The next two Earthsea books, The Tombs of Atuan and The Furthest Shore, both also have an "education of a fantasy archetype" aspect to them, but despite probably being better books than Wizard on the whole, they get a bit less out of this element. In the case of The Furthest Shore this is because the education of Aragorn is a more well-trodden subject than the education of Gandalf (there's plenty of bildungsroman-type fantasy with magic-using protagonists, of course, but that's not the same as stories where the protagonist becomes a Gandalf-style semi-passive sage). In the case of The Tombs of Atuan this is because the archetype (the evil priestess who lives in a spooky underground complex full of traps) is a harder one to take seriously - though it's interesting to note that LeGuin actually wrote the novel before D&D even existed, so some of the sillier associations wouldn't have existed at the time. Edit: I just had a bit of a brainstorm about Tombs of Atuan and realized that it's even more interesting than I thought. I'll probably write a bigger post about it soon. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Sep 20, 2020 |
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Sep 20, 2020 20:14
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I'm pretty sure that theory is canon in the stories, at least insofar as some of the Amberites believe it to be true. Yeah, it's canon. There's a bit where Dworkin, believing he's speaking to Oberon, mentions "your mother the unicorn."
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Sep 30, 2020 05:27
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Ani posted:Does the Fundamental Attribution Error not replicate? I've sometimes thought about the question of when new scientific developments can "ruin" existing works of fiction. My view is that for most SF, it doesn't; some stories about canals on Mars and jungles on Venus remain readable, and the ones that now seem awful are awful for reasons other than the canals and jungles. But what happens when the changes in scientific knowledge affect the characters rather than than the setting? In particular, what about characterization based on now-outdated ideas about psychology and genetics? This is an issue outside of SF, or at least outside of what's normally thought of as SF. The most obvious example that comes to mind is Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. Are they "ruined" now?
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Sep 30, 2020 17:03
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Gnoman posted:I'm not familiar with the specific example you use, but I don't understand where you're going here. I don't really see how you can have a wholly ruined character unless that character is already unrecognizable as a human being, because even the most flawed psychology notions are based on (at least nominal) attempts to explain the observed behavior of people. The Rougon-Macquart novels aren't just concerned with how people act, but why, i.e., the hereditary basis of human psychology and how it interacts with environmental factors. I say "hereditary" rather than "genetic" because this is a pre-Mendelian understanding of heredity. Zola understood inheritance of psychological traits in terms of Proper Lucas's prepotency theory. See the explanation here, and check out the pie chart family tree! Naturally we don't have a very good understanding of the questions Zola was trying to address even today (studies linking a particular gene to a psychological trait tend to be overhyped), but we can at least be sure that it doesn't work like that, and perhaps more importantly, it's hard to imagine a modern novelist having the self-confidence to tackle the subject in fiction so directly and at such length. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Oct 1, 2020 |
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Oct 1, 2020 03:13
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Ccs posted:Alright I downloaded all these Cradle free books. I hope these are actually good. The titles would normally be a big red flag for me. I feel obliged to warn you that one of the reasons they're considered so good is because their subgenre (xianxia) sets the bar extremely low. I enjoy the Cradle books, but they're silly pulp without much aspiration to be anything else.
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Oct 7, 2020 17:55
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Jedit posted:There used to be readings of The Eye of Argon at SF cons that evolved into contests to see who could read it aloud for the longest time without laughing. Yeah, and that's the key to The Eye of Argon's appeal. It's not bad in the sense of being unreadable, it's bad in the sense of being unreadable without laughing. This sets it apart from a lot of other supposedly so-bad-it's-good writing, at least IMO; I find My Immortal unreadable, for instance. It's a basically coherent story, just with a very cliched setting, lots of purple-prose turns of phrase, and lots of use of not-quite-the-right-word. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Oct 13, 2020 |
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Oct 13, 2020 14:04
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Megasabin posted:I just finished the 3-Body-Problem. I thought it was ok. I'm not sure I understand the high praise. We learn more about the Trisolarians in The Dark Forest, and they're actually somewhat weirder than they initially seem. Remember the bit about the "formation computer," for example, and think about what sort of bodies/minds might make that worthwhile. Though there's also a sense in which they aren't really that different from humans - I do think the "You're bugs!" arrogance is meant to be somewhat comical, especially since we're told that their technological advancement has actually been slower than that of humans. (There's shades here of the John W. Campbell rule of Golden Age sci-fi, where aliens aren't allowed to be really better than humans.) I actually found the parts The Three Body Problem about the Cultural Revolution just as interesting as the high-concept sci-fi stuff. The weakest part, IMO, involves the main male character - he's not really fleshed out properly (he has a wife and child but they mostly disappear from the story, and in general his characterization amounts to "audience viewpoint character trying to figure out what's going on with the disrupted experiments/Three Body game/ETO"). The main character in The Dark Forest is more fleshed out (though he's, presumably deliberately, not very likable), and there's more weird sci-fi ideas. Unfortunately it has a different translator with a clunkier style.
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Oct 20, 2020 02:22
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buffalo all day posted:Going to preface by saying I couldn't bring myself to read Death's End but I still can't quite believe that the fantasy waifu with no personality and no agency that got conjured out of thin air in the Dark Forest didn't end up being a trap or trick or anything more complicated than just a victim who got (actually, literally) fridged. I mean, she left Luo Ji and took their child with her in order to get him to do his drat job. Does that not count as agency?
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Oct 20, 2020 14:16
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awesmoe posted:really? I thought it was garbage - I thought the characters were paper thin and bad-YA-novel level cliché, and since the setting was a retread of the first one, there wasnt any sense of mystery to keep things interesting I liked it, and I think it did manage to maintain some sense of mystery (more about the characters than the broader setting, but there were some surprises regarding the setting too). I'm not sure the autistic-savant protagonist is entirely psychologically plausible, and the basic plot structure definitely has a lot of parallels to the first book (a group of people, including both scientists and soldiers, who don't all get along very well take a road trip through a zombie-filled landscape, many of them die horribly, the youngest and most outsider-y member of the group gradually gains the respect of the adults, the protagonists learn surprising things about the zombies). But it's a plot structure that works oddly well. It helps, I suppose, that Carey gives his scientists, soldiers, and even zombies a kind of dignity that characters in other zombie-apocalypse stories often lack.
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Oct 27, 2020 05:26
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Jesus, I'm glad I bounced off of it before I hit that part. That's a bit of a...tendentious way of putting it. The white supremacists are clearly bad people from the start, and the protagonists come into conflict with them almost immediately after the Asian gang is defeated. But it is fair to say that they're portrayed as just one evil street gang among several, in a way that Wildbow probably wouldn't have done if he'd been writing post-2016.
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Oct 30, 2020 14:43
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Marshal Radisic posted:Before we get off the Wildbow digression, is Twig worth reading? It was recommended to me ages ago, but I never really tried it. Twig is good, yes. (Pact, however, is not.)
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Oct 30, 2020 17:30
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Dominoes posted:Just finished reading The Three Body Problem. I'm left with many open questions about the scifi elements, that I don't think the narrator/characters addressed: I think the basic answer to these questions is that Cixin Liu had a somewhat exaggerated sense of the difficulty of the titular three-body problem. Those suns are just that unpredictable. quote:
Presumably it's "instant" in the "common sense" sense, as a result of using quantum physics against Einsteinian physics to make things work in a manner more like Newtonian physics, or something like that. While I'm not a physicist, I suspect that's impossible even in theory, but it's at least superficially more plausible than most sci-fi means of FTL communication or travel. quote:- Why could Trisolaran civilizations recover so quickly? I don't see how dehydration could save individuals from all the chaotic events. There's a lot of time in the lifetime of a star or universe, While I don't think the specific details of these particular questions are answered in The Dark Forest, and I haven't finished Death's End, The Dark Forest does suggest a general answer: Trisolarian biology is very weird. quote:
I don't remember the details of that plot point very well. quote:Maybe I'm spoiled by authors like Sagan, Weir, and Stephenson, and am not looking at this correctly. I find it fun to get lost in the Sci-Fi world, and imagine how it could actually be. Think about how to make these techs happen. Find flaws and doubts. I couldn't here, because the holes were too large. The proton bit at the end was super cool and would be fun to imagine. But if I can't trust the science and tech we know about, how can I speculate about the science we don't? I think the nano-wires slicing the ship were the only part that hit that cool wow, what if! emotion that drives me to sci-fi. I haven't read anything by Sagan or Weir, but Stephenson has plenty of things that aren't all that scientifically plausible, or even completely consistent. For example, the way the Primer's AI works in the The Diamond Age doesn't make much sense (especially since we're told earlier in the book that AI, strictly speaking, doesn't exist). Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 04:52
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StrixNebulosa posted:Yeah uh, as I've started the Oathbreaker/blood/honor/etc series there's rape in both backstories of the main women, and I can definitely think of some older male SF authors whose work also seems to make sexual assault into a sort of recurring motif (Jack Vance, for instance). But it’s probably true that a writer like Asimov wouldn’t go there. Maybe it’s not so much a female thing as a New Wave thing.
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Dec 3, 2020 05:27
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DurianGray posted:I know I just recommended the Tensorate series recently but I definitely recommend picking this up for anyone who is into the whole "silkpunk"/xianxia-esque thing or just wants to read some good queer Southeast-Asian inspired fantasy. (It's even got dinosaurs!) I actually got the first book when Tor.com was giving it away, not realizing it was part of a series, which left me feeling pretty disappointed by the ending, lol.
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Jan 28, 2021 15:16
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