Read Some Real Literature: Anyway hail satantango

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Read Some Real Literature: Anyway hail satantango

«‹›683 »

Eugene V. Dubstep: Oct 4, 2013; Can't post for 8 years!

smug n stuff posted:

http://www.vulture.com/2018/05/junot-daz-accused-of-sexual-misconduct-and-verbal-abuse.html

It was obvious after his sleazeball essay in the New Yorker that this was coming down the pipes.

# ? May 4, 2018 19:15

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Jun 5, 2024 00:21

Nanomashoes: Aug 18, 2012

I'm confused, this guy wrote an article? Is that literature?

# ? May 4, 2018 22:17

pospysyl: Nov 10, 2012

Nanomashoes posted:

I'm confused, this guy wrote an article? Is that literature?

He's a middlebrow author, although I suppose towards the higher end of the pool. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won a Pulitzer, which should give you some idea of where he's at. Woke people liked him because he's Dominican American and includes Spanish words in his books, but I've never been impressed by it. I guess that sounds smug, but it's the truth.

# ? May 4, 2018 22:54

Stuporstar: May 5, 2008; Where do fists come from?

Yeah, I finally got around to reading The Sad Life of a Dominican Incel and was not impressed. But I've been not impressed by most Pulitzer-winning novels I've read.

# ? May 4, 2018 23:10

Carthag Tuek: Oct 15, 2005; Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
sl�gt skal f�lge sl�gters gang

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

It was obvious after his sleazeball essay in the New Yorker that this was coming down the pipes.

Yeah from reading the linked article, the New Yorker essay (which I havent read) sounds like a way to come out in front of the allegations and be like "well I was abused so it's not my fault"

He might have been abused I don't know, but the timing is pretty convenient & it doesn't excuse those things anyway. :shrug:

# ? May 4, 2018 23:45

Nanomashoes: Aug 18, 2012

pospysyl posted:

He's a middlebrow author, although I suppose towards the higher end of the pool. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won a Pulitzer, which should give you some idea of where he's at. Woke people liked him because he's Dominican American and includes Spanish words in his books, but I've never been impressed by it. I guess that sounds smug, but it's the truth.

More evidence that the Pulitzer is a very good award.

# ? May 5, 2018 01:07

The Belgian: Oct 28, 2008

Been reading Ada or Ardor. It's real good, like all Nabokov.

I really liked this description of a wardrobe

quote:

We all know those old wardrobes in old hotels in the Old World subalpine zone. At first one opens them with the utmost care, very slowly, in the vain hope of hushing the excruciating creak, the growing groan that the door emits midway. Before long one discovers, however, that if it is opened or closed with celerity, in one resolute sweep, the hellish hinge is taken by surprise, and triumphant silence achieved. Van and Ada, for all the exquisite and powerful bliss that engulfed and repleted them (and we do not mean here the rose sore of Eros alone), knew that certain memories had to be left closed, lest they wrench every nerve of the soul with their monstrous moan. But if the operation is performed swiftly, if indelible evils are mentioned between two quick quips, there is a chance that the anesthetic of life itself may allay unforgettable agony in the process of swinging its door.

# ? May 5, 2018 02:41

Carthag Tuek: Oct 15, 2005; Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
sl�gt skal f�lge sl�gters gang

Yeah I like that. Added to reading list!

Also idk how many noticed, but there is a prose thread now:
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3854507

# ? May 5, 2018 03:19

Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

Middlebrow is the laziest kind of critique, I swear

# ? May 5, 2018 05:28

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Can brow level be raised or lowered by context? Is it possible for a middlebrow French novel to become highbrow when translated for Anglophones? If a middlebrow author sells enough copies of his new book to the right demographic, does he become lowbrow, or would it be just the one book? Obviously, the starting brow level relative to the average for its region of elevation would be a substantial factor here, but let's give the idea the benefit of the doubt.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 05:44 on May 5, 2018

# ? May 5, 2018 05:41

Eugene V. Dubstep: Oct 4, 2013; Can't post for 8 years!

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Middlebrow is the laziest kind of critique, I swear

still waiting for your critical paean to babyfucker

# ? May 5, 2018 05:42

Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

still waiting for your critical paean to babyfucker

A bunch of people said they didn't care and then it turned out I am the only person to have actually read it

# ? May 5, 2018 05:43

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I will not support the loving of babies. :colbert:

# ? May 5, 2018 05:45

VileLL: Oct 3, 2015

it's an alright book

# ? May 5, 2018 10:59

Carthag Tuek: Oct 15, 2005; Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
sl�gt skal f�lge sl�gters gang

mel i read babyfucker last year and im interested in hearing what you think

my dumbass interpretation is that the windows are eyes and the whole house is basically his head and the narrator is his own id and the babies are his thoughts, or something. its hella grade school but it made sense as i was reading it

# ? May 5, 2018 13:10

CestMoi: Sep 16, 2011

Mel Mudkiper posted:

A bunch of people said they didn't care and then it turned out I am the only person to have actually read it

Huge if true

# ? May 7, 2018 00:41

Solitair: Feb 18, 2014; TODAY'S GONNA BE A GOOD MOTHERFUCKIN' DAY!!!

smug n stuff posted:

http://www.vulture.com/2018/05/junot-daz-accused-of-sexual-misconduct-and-verbal-abuse.html

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Well, color me loving surprised.

I mostly liked The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao when I first read it, but the ending makes me uncomfortable for reasons I'm not sure the author intended, and now I'm even more sure it's unintentional. IIRC, Oscar dies because he has sex with a gangster's girlfriend after repeated warnings to stay away from her or else, and then at the very end the girlfriend says the sex was the best she ever had (sure it was), which I guess is an invitation to consider this a happy or bittersweet ending? No thanks. His death was a straight-up tragedy with no silver lining.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Middlebrow is the laziest kind of critique, I swear

I don't even get why middlebrow is supposed to be an insult. :shrug:

# ? May 7, 2018 01:03

Cephas: May 11, 2009; Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

I thought Oscar Wao was a good book, and Junot Diaz's interview about it on Bookworm really resonated with me, but Diaz being involved in sex scandals is really not very surprising. I also don't mind the way he uses Spanish in his novels, but maybe that's because I grew up in a city with a lot of Hispanic people, so my day-to-day life involved just not being able to understand people mid-sentence sometimes.

# ? May 7, 2018 05:31

mdemone: Mar 14, 2001

Mel Mudkiper posted:

A bunch of people said they didn't care and then it turned out I am the only person to have actually read it

I care, and I wanna read it. I just can't seem to remember to order it.

Edit: finally just did it. Will update soon.

mdemone fucked around with this message at 14:48 on May 7, 2018

# ? May 7, 2018 14:40

Franchescanado: Feb 23, 2013; If it wasn't for disappointment
I wouldn't have any appointment; Grimey Drawer

Babyfucker is $5 on kindle right now, and if I didn't share my kindle library with people in my book club, I'd have read it by now.

# ? May 7, 2018 14:54

mdemone: Mar 14, 2001

Thanks for making sure "Babyfucker" wasn't the "1 other item" in the subject line, Amazon.

# ? May 7, 2018 17:10

Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

mdemone posted:

Thanks for making sure "Babyfucker" wasn't the "1 other item" in the subject line, Amazon.

The other item is a baby

# ? May 7, 2018 17:22

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Ok you people the BotM this month is like specifically tailored to make you happy so please participate

# ? May 7, 2018 17:29

Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Ok you people the BotM this month is like specifically tailored to make you happy so please participate

It's not babyfucker so your premise is invalid

# ? May 7, 2018 17:31

Guy A. Person: May 23, 2003

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Ok you people the BotM this month is like specifically tailored to make you happy so please participate

I need time for library holds to transfer! It's already the seventh!]

(with luck I'll have it in a week or so)

# ? May 7, 2018 17:43

Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

If I wanted to read a book of lectures about literature I would get a literature degree which I already have so no thanks

# ? May 7, 2018 17:45

Gorn Myson: Aug 8, 2007

We shall read it if you free Botl

# ? May 7, 2018 17:47

Cloks: Feb 1, 2013; by Azathoth

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Ok you people the BotM this month is like specifically tailored to make you happy so please participate

Oh cool, it's the David Simon book.

# ? May 7, 2018 17:55

Ras Het: May 23, 2007; when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child - but now I am a man.

I feel like this LRB article from five years ago I just read is quite relevant to ye olde what makes a genre a genre why do you think you're better than me debate so I'll c/p it from behind the paywall:

quote:

It wasn�t a dream
Ned Beauman
The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
Gollancz, 432 pp, �12.99, June 2013, ISBN 978 0 575 10536 2
Two days after the announcement of the shortlist for last year�s Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, Christopher Priest wrote on his blog that part of the award�s purpose is to prove to �the larger world� that science fiction �is a progressive, modern literature, with diversity and ambition and ability, and not the pool of generic rehashing that the many outside detractors of science fiction are so quick to assume it is�. But the shortlist, he argued, did exactly the opposite. Greg Bear�s Hull Zero Three, for instance,

keeps alive the great tradition of the SF of the 1940s and 1950s where people get in spaceships to go somewhere to do something. In this case, the unlikely story begins as the interstellar spaceship arrives somewhere. The paragraphs are short, to suit the expected attention span of the reader. The important words are in italics. Have we lived and fought in vain?

Priest concluded that the judges should be sacked, the ceremony cancelled and the prize suspended for a year.

The essay was a polemic by a writer with a stake in the debate. Predictably, it didn�t go down well with the tiny fraction of online readers who comment on this sort of thing. After all, it wasn�t only a transgression against the pervasive politeness of book culture; it was also a wholesale attack on the current state of the genre. Priest�s charge was that contemporary science fiction sets its own low standards, meets them, reaffirms them with awards, and then wonders why mainstream respectability eludes it. The winner of this year�s Clarke Award was Chris Beckett�s Dark Eden, a novel about the descendants of two marooned astronauts, reduced by inbreeding and privation to, in the words of the back cover blurb, �an infantile stew of half-remembered fact and devolved ritual that stifles innovation and punishes independent thought�. It�s a convenient metaphor for Priest since it makes it clear that Dark Eden is yet another retread of one of science fiction�s most timeworn premises. An analogous complaint is often made about the insularity of the Booker Prize, which ignores both science fiction and experimental fiction. But partisans of these genres complain because they feel excluded. Priest, who�s been nominated three times for the Clarke Award and won it once, complains for the opposite reason: he feels included to the point of immurement. He sees the Clarke Award as a distress flare which must be kept in working order if the colony is to have any hope of rescue by �the larger world�. Until then, he�s stranded.

It wasn�t always so. In 1983, at the age of 39, Priest was included in Granta�s first �Best of Young British Novelists� anthology alongside Amis, McEwan, Rushdie and Ishiguro. That he had already published novels called Inverted World (1974) and The Space Machine (1976) wasn�t then considered the literary equivalent of a criminal record. But it wasn�t the shape of things to come, either for the Granta list � no author known mostly for science fiction has appeared on it since � or for Priest himself. By 2002 the Observer was asking: �Whatever happened to Christopher Priest?� In fact, he�d published eight more novels, and since then he�s published another two; a film adaptation of The Prestige (1995) by Christopher Nolan, director of the recent Batman trilogy, grossed $100 million in 2006. Priest remains, however, the model of a cult author.

This surely has a lot to do with his sentences, which are so workmanlike that you have the urge to offer them a few cups of strong tea as they go about their heavy business. In general Priest�s prose is just dull, but sometimes it reaches new frontiers of dull. Most of his new book, The Adjacent, is set during wartime, so his characters get a lot of bad news. After the destruction of most of west London by an experimental bomb: ��What were the casualties?� he said, aghast at this appalling news.� After the sinking of a hospital ship: �I was shocked by the news, the stark reminder yet again that we were involved in a desperate war. �I can�t imagine it. What a disaster that would be, if it were true.�� After the crash of a bomber plane: �I stared ahead at the rough surface of the road, thinking of war�s futility and the death of young men.� It�s also hard to take seriously Priest�s depiction of courtship, which is primarily frictional: �Sometimes they brushed against each other�; �His fingers brushed against� her �implant again�; �Her nipple brushed against his arm�; �As he walked close beside her they sometimes brushed against each other�; �the light brushing of her strands of dark hair against the side of his face�; �For a fraction of a second their fingertips brushed against each other.� And the dialogue is no better. One character is described as �speaking slowly and pedantically, like a radio announcer conveying an important piece of public information� � a simile that counts as a rare flight of lyricism for Priest � but it�s impossible to tell from the prose because everyone in this book thinks and speaks that way all the time.

Priest is sometimes compared to Philip K. Dick, who was no great stylist himself, but Dick�s fiction barrels along at such a speed that it never matters, whereas Priest catalogues every landscape and circumstance and emotional state in paragraph after paragraph of porridgey detail. Dick had jokes, and Priest has almost none. That�s why his most successful novel in terms of matching style to content is The Islanders (2011), which is written in the form of a guidebook, and therefore justifies its pedestrian language. It could be argued that people read science fiction for the ideas, not the prose, and indeed Priest has plenty of fans who declare his prose satisfactory, even elegant. So perhaps when we compare the two cultures, we should adopt a sort of relativism, and acknowledge the fetishisation of beautiful sentences as subjective. But that�s the sort of special pleading Priest would reject.

Because Priest has serious limitations as a writer, we need to look for pleasure elsewhere in his work. From his plots, there is the abstract satisfaction of watching all the pieces falling into place, or rather meticulously failing to fall into place. And that develops sometimes into the sort of thrill you get from Kafka, Lovecraft, Borges, Ballard, Dick: when a story of the inexplicable in a contemporary setting infects the real world with a fever of the uncanny. It�s one of the most difficult literary effects to achieve, and Priest�s hit rate is patchy. He�s obsessed with doppelg�ngers (there can�t be many writers who�ve published two novels in which a woman has sex with her husband�s twin) and in The Adjacent, along with much of his earlier work, we often return to the Vertigo scenario: a character sees someone who looks exactly like a person they once knew but who can�t be that person (or perhaps, later on, can be). Why Priest thinks this still has any juice after its eighth, ninth, tenth repetition I have no idea. But when he finds more inventive ways of muddling a book�s internal logic, as he sometimes does, he achieves a pitch of metaphysical anxiety that�s just about unique in British fiction.

The Adjacent revisits themes, characters and settings from many of his previous books: music-hall conjuring from The Prestige; Tealby Moor, a Second World War airfield, from The Separation (2002); and an imaginary land called the Dream Archipelago from The Affirmation (1981) and The Islanders, as well as a 1999 short-story collection called The Dream Archipelago. The main plot follows Tibor Tarent, a photographer who lives in the Islamic Republic of Great Britain in the 2040s. (Priest never does anything to develop or explain the provocative setting, though you keep expecting him to, which may be the point.) As the book begins, Tarent has just returned from a humanitarian expedition to Anatolia, during which his wife was killed by terrorists. Because the bomb used seems to have employed a mysterious new concept in quantum physics called �adjacency�, he is held for questioning at a military base. Interspersed with Tarent�s ordeal are three subplots in different periods and perhaps different realities. The first, set during the First World War, follows a stage magician called Tommy Trent as he travels to the trenches in France to suggest improvements to aerial camouflage. The second, set during the Second World War, follows a bomber plane technician called Mike �Floody� Torrance, who attempts to seduce a female Polish pilot who�s in love with her fianc�, Tomasz. The third, set during one of the Dream Archipelago�s many wars, follows another photographer, Tomak Tallant, and then another stage magician, Thom the Thaumaturge, who bears a strange resemblance to Tomak. By the end of the book, the different realities have begun to seep into one another, and we understand that Tarent, Trent, Torrance, Tomasz, Tallant and Thom are all aspects of the same protagonist, restaging time after time a story about someone separated from and then reunited with his lover.

So The Adjacent is a sort of homage to J.G. Ballard�s The Atrocity Exhibition, in which a man called Travis, Talbot, Traven, Tallis, Trabert, Talbert or Travers, who is in flight from �the very facts of time and space�, watches his wife die over and over again (and at one point transforms into a bomber pilot). Priest has written repeatedly about his admiration for Ballard, and the two are sometimes categorised as members of the �new wave� of British science fiction. But it�s in the differences between The Adjacent and The Atrocity Exhibition that we can best understand Priest�s uneasy suspension between science fiction and the speculative avant-garde.

Priest�s best book is still Inverted World, deservedly reissued a few years ago by New York Review Classics. It�s set on a planet which isn�t a sphere but an infinite hyperboloid where time moves faster towards the rim than towards the asymptote. The narrator lives in a city called Earth which must be winched along on train tracks to stay as close as possible to the �Optimum�. The opening line reads: �I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.� As Priest works methodically through the implications of his deviant physics, we get a sense of a writer who wants to shoulder forward the possibilities of storytelling, and the book comes to seem not only a piece of science fiction but a British attempt at a nouveau roman. Then, at the last minute, Priest ruins it: a physicist appears from nowhere with a technobabble explanation for everything you�ve just read. Imagine if at the end of The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard had revealed that his characters were all patients at a psychotherapeutic role-playing retreat. That�s the sense of deflation, or banalisation, that you get in the last few pages of Inverted World. As Priest writes in The Prestige: �The wonderful effects created on stage are often the result of a secret so absurd that the magician would be embarrassed to admit that that was how it was done.� If the editors of the reprint had cut out the twist, they would have been bringing out something much closer to a masterpiece.

The suggestion isn�t fanciful. Adolfo Bioy Casares�s novel, The Invention of Morel (1940), has a similarly silly ending, but when Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet took a similar story as the basis for Last Year at Marienbad they excised the futuristic gadgetry, presenting the same events with no mundane underpinning. Even memory can make such changes. When I was a child I watched an episode of The Outer Limits called �Refuge�. I�ve recalled it ever since as a sinister hybrid of The Atrocity Exhibition and Last Year at Marienbad. But watching it again I discovered that it ends with the main character waking up in a laboratory to find he has been in cryonic suspension all along. My misremembered version has gnawed at me for years in a way the real episode never could have. The laws of genre mean that on the whole we can tell whether we�re reading a science fiction novel that will be rationalised at the end or an avant-garde novel that won�t. But a few wander in the borderlands, and it�s here that Priest, at his best, likes to set up camp.

In The Adjacent, the early signs aren�t too promising. Professor Thijs Rietveld discovers that �using what quantum physicists sometimes call annihilation operators, an adjacency field could be created to divert physical matter into a different, or adjacent, realm.� The abuse of the adjacency technology is central to Tarent�s storyline and is echoed in all the rest. As soon as you see the word �quantum� in a work of fiction you know the author is going to attempt something tricky and is hoping you won�t ask too many questions. In this case you begin to fear that all the book�s mysteries will be tidied away as side effects of Rietveld�s invention. But by the end an awful lot of things have happened that the adjacency technology can�t possibly be intended to explain. One of the clich�s of the �it was all a dream� ending is that the hero wakes up, like Dorothy, to find some physical souvenir in the bed, so forced paradox doesn�t in itself guarantee any thrill of ambiguity. Often, however, The Adjacent�s jagged edges don�t work to complicate the scientific explanation but rather seem entirely irrelevant to it. At one point, we get a weird hint that Tarent may have entered the kind of virtual reality that Priest wrote about in The Extremes, but the hint isn�t foreshadowed or resolved, which makes it more unsettling than just about anything else in the book. The rupture isn�t in the space-time continuum: it�s in the artwork, and in the mind.

That Priest feints towards scientific explanation and then so cheerfully marginalises it is more interesting than it would be if he had never brought it up at all, because it�s as if we are spectators at the combat between the Atrocity/Marienbad approach and the Inverted World/Morel/�Refuge� approach, or perhaps between the science fiction Priest sees on the Clarke shortlist and the science fiction he would prefer. Set aside the question of whether his own work, with its grey sentences and grey characters, would really do a better job of luring �the larger world� into the enclave. Instead, recognise that his essay about the award shortlist wasn�t a diversion from the project of his fiction, but a synopsis. Everything really good in his books comes from the sound of Priest banging on the walls of his genre.

# ? May 7, 2018 20:19

Mrenda: Mar 14, 2012

Ras Het posted:

I feel like this LRB article from five years ago I just read is quite relevant to ye olde what makes a genre a genre why do you think you're better than me debate so I'll c/p it from behind the paywall:

That brings up a recent pet peeve of mine in a lot of short stories I've read: the helpful encapsulation of the story's meaning in the final line. The helpful pointer, the final announcement, the finishing "aha!" It pisses me off no end and means I drive through some journals, reading short story after short story, hoping for something to chew on.

Unlike a novel, where my thoughts and debate with the story twist and turn through my reading, with a short story I'm near the finish line as soon as I begin. With these short stories I'm given a lot of nice twisting and turning, often nothing at all to grasp on to, and at the very end told exactly what to think of it. It all comes clear and the author smiles at me as if asking, "Wasn't that wonderful?" I don't want to think the author can wrap a present, I want to unwrap the present. If I'm so near the end once I've started surely I deserve a single question brought from myself? And I don't mean leave the story unfinished. The whole thing can be about a feeling, or a mood, or circumstance. All those I experience with a novel, many times over like a quilt making up a final image, with the short story I want a weave of threads that gives me one solid image but allows me to dwell on its purpose. Too often short stories are like a magician pulling a tablecloth out from under your dinner, leaving all the plates, cutlery, glasses intact and waiting for applause for them. Really I just want something to eat.

# ? May 7, 2018 20:41

Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

quote:

Priest�s charge was that contemporary science fiction sets its own low standards, meets them, reaffirms them with awards, and then wonders why mainstream respectability eludes it.

Thats some good poo poo

# ? May 7, 2018 20:45

ulvir: Jan 2, 2005

I don't really have the time to read nonfiction or theory for recreation these days

# ? May 7, 2018 20:49

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Didn't finish because it started describing The Inverted World, which I recently purchased and have not yet read.

# ? May 7, 2018 21:00

A human heart: Oct 10, 2012

quote:

This surely has a lot to do with his sentences, which are so workmanlike that you have the urge to offer them a few cups of strong tea as they go about their heavy business.

Great burn

# ? May 8, 2018 01:22

derp: Jan 21, 2010; when i get up all i want to do is go to bed again; Lipstick Apathy

I really enjoyed the prestige and the affirmation but that was a long time ago and also I'm me so who knows

# ? May 8, 2018 02:45

Ras Het: May 23, 2007; when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child - but now I am a man.

I liked the observation that getting hung up on explaining things with technobabble is sabotaging scifi writing, that the necessity for things to "add up" is one of the key differences between genre and capital L lit

# ? May 8, 2018 10:54

mdemone: Mar 14, 2001

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Didn't finish because it started describing The Inverted World, which I recently purchased and have not yet read.

It's quite good; don't read or otherwise concern yourself with that portion of the review.

Although the reviewer is basically correct.

# ? May 8, 2018 12:44

Shibawanko: Feb 13, 2013

Ras Het posted:

I liked the observation that getting hung up on explaining things with technobabble is sabotaging scifi writing, that the necessity for things to "add up" is one of the key differences between genre and capital L lit

Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians is basically a fantasy world but the difference is that it doesn't try to be consistent or flesh out every irrelevant detail. It's just there to serve a purpose and make the setting feel like nowhere in particular. Nerds always want to fill in every gap and don't tolerate inconsistencies.

# ? May 8, 2018 13:25

Ras Het: May 23, 2007; when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child - but now I am a man.

mdemone posted:

It's quite good; don't read or otherwise concern yourself with that portion of the review.

Although the reviewer is basically correct.

I mean he said that its Priest's best book and says things like "he achieves a pitch of metaphysical anxiety that�s just about unique in British fiction" so it's not exactly a hit piece

# ? May 8, 2018 13:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Jun 5, 2024 00:21

mdemone: Mar 14, 2001

Ras Het posted:

I mean he said that its Priest's best book and says things like "he achieves a pitch of metaphysical anxiety that�s just about unique in British fiction" so it's not exactly a hit piece

Yeah I was a bit unclear. I agree with the reviewer's overall notes on Priest, as well as their assessment of IW. I was encouraging Sham not to read the spoilery part because it didn't contain anything that should turn one off from reading the book.

# ? May 8, 2018 15:25

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Read Some Real Literature: Anyway hail satantango

«‹›683 »