muscles like this! posted:https://twitter.com/marthawells1/status/1345008789527941121 https://twitter.com/RoanParrish/status/1330949555895103493 Amazon will even take down legit copies of a book if a pirate makes them available for free.
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Jan 6, 2021 08:42
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For ages now I've said that the only things I trust Amazon enough to buy are books, although I still try not to. Then that became only hardcopies and exclusive ebooks. I still have to double-check it's not a pirated ebook or the very occasional bit of piracy using Amazon's POD. Setting aside all the other horrible poo poo they do, they're just not a trustworthy store.
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Jan 6, 2021 09:39
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90% of the ebooks I buy are either linked directly from the author, or I go to the author's page on Amazon and go from there. Been doing it for years, it's just old hat now. Interesting book in the "people also read"? Click it, then head to the author's page and click from there. Sadly, the only way to make sure.
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Jan 6, 2021 10:33
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Alright, I've now finished The Broken Eye (#3) and The Blood Mirror (#4) in Brent Weeks' Lightbringer series. #3 was an improvement on #2 and #1 with much less "breasting boobily over with nipples" going on, but I feel like it's a function of the scenes/characters shown, rather than any actual improvement in the author. The plot payoffs were good and solidly foreshadowed. #4 is better written than all of the previous books in terms of prose and pacing, does some heavy world building expansion and has the mother of all payoffs for unreliable narrators - though I'm still working through my reaction on that one, mostly because I feel like he's either right on or crossed the line for the number of plot twists. The worst part of it is the horribly cringey subplot with Kip/Tisis (I had serial actual  moments) because I fail to see any good reason whatsoever to have this be a key part of the story he was trying to tell. Seriously Weeks, what the actual gently caress. Yes it's a real condition but why are YOU an appropriate person to tell stories about it?Going into #5 with the expectation that Dazen better be drafting some white luxin and sacrificing his life for the entire world to save everyone and I will be pretty pissed if that doesn't happen. And when I finish these books, I do not think I will be inclined to read anything else by Brent Weeks again. I enjoy the world building and the plot generally but it's not worth the misogynistic slog through the cringefest of sex related scenes/plots. 
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Jan 6, 2021 13:38
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Almost midway through Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. I'm enjoying seeing all these science fiction ideas written at such an early time, I don't know of an earlier story of rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse. The authors opinions on Jews were very eye-rolling to put it lightly, so it's good that the book escaped from having any connection to current society at the point I'm reading. He also makes lynching black people a hallowed religious rite worldwide, pretty WTF.
FPyat fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Jan 6, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2021 16:01
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Next, check out Star Maker, where Stapledon spends the first chapter giving a quick summary of that book, and then stops dawdling around with the small stuff. Not much written with that kind of scope.
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Jan 6, 2021 17:18
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:90% of the ebooks I buy are either linked directly from the author, or I go to the author's page on Amazon and go from there. Been doing it for years, it's just old hat now. Interesting book in the "people also read"? Click it, then head to the author's page and click from there. Sadly, the only way to make sure. It's worth noting, pirated ebooks do frequently make it onto the author's Amazon page as well. My understanding is those pages really aren't under the direct control of the author. Wells mentions that Element of Fire pirate copies were featured on her page right next to the real one, and I'm aware of it happening to at least one other self-pub author.
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Jan 6, 2021 18:30
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Finished SFL Archives 1991 on Sunday. Immediately dove into SFL Archives 1992. Isaac Asimov died, a few alt-right SFLer's tried claiming that Corwin in the Roger Zelazny AMBER series is a Nazi*, and the proto-incel SFLers that had been drooling over Yancy Butler in MANN & MACHINE s hit a new low with this: tomo@kpc.com (Tom O'Connell) writes: >When the plump bimbo in Aliens grits her teeth and presses the button on >the grenade with the other weak character (not just weak in the movie) do >I care? No, it's just another Rambo character with a hormone problem >giving the special effects people a chance to blow something up. *because Corwin remembered marching towards Moscow....with Napoleon's army.
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Jan 6, 2021 21:18
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quantumfoam posted:Finished SFL Archives 1991 on Sunday. Immediately dove into SFL Archives 1992. That was originally from the "Heroes in Hell" shared universe which I am 'pleased' to report is still going. Here's a description of one of the stories in the most recent anthology (2018) from a review: quote:
(more here : https://www.blackgate.com/romance-in-the-afterlife-part-1-a-look-at-the-latest-volume-in-the-heroes-in-hell-shared-universe-lovers-in-hell/)
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Jan 6, 2021 22:40
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Man it really pisses me off that Marina and Sergey Dyachenko are not more widely translated. I’m rereading The Scar and it’s so good, and is part of a quartet of books that started their career, but it didn’t sell widely enough for the others to get the same treatment. Their latest books like Vita Nostra are also great, completely engrossing and hard to put down, but not quite as competently translated. It sucks that some of the best fantasy in the world is hidden behind a language barrier.
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Jan 7, 2021 00:34
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quantumfoam posted:>When the plump bimbo in Aliens grits her teeth and presses the button on who in the almighty gently caress watched Aliens and their takeways is that Vasquez was "plump"
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Jan 7, 2021 02:13
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fritz posted:That was originally from the "Heroes in Hell" shared universe which I am 'pleased' to report is still going. Here's a description of one of the stories in the most recent anthology (2018) from a review: Here's the first 3 paragraphs of Harry Harrison parodying the "Heroes in Hell" shared universe. (It goes on for another 3.5 pages) ~~~ HERETICS IN HADES "Gilganosh Meets Two Pulp Fiction Writers" by Robot Goldilocks "War Is Hell" Popular Military Expression If Gilganosh was truly born with dead lo! so many centuries ago, then now he truly was /bored/ of the dead. With his mighty thewed limbs he ran ahunting amongst the wild Outhouses, wantonly skewering hell-beasties with his bow and his sharp arrows, conversing with famous Casears of Rome and Kings of Africa and other dead folk condemned to the perditious gray lands of Hades, and flexing his biceps for the New Tourists and their new-fangled electronic Nikons and Leicas, their Sony videocams. See how the Great King of Uruk prances about half-naked for these strange people in their Bermuda shorts and their Hawaiian shirts and their dark sunglasses. Oh mighty King of cities that are now dust! Oh hairy, wild King! Thy head is as a lion's with a glorious mane; thy feet are like the tanks of the neo-Nazi who would defeat the mighty Pluto himself; thy droppings are as great as logs. Socrates! Plato! Augustus Casear! Agamemnon! Sumeria! Babylonia! Greece! Now that the historical name-dropping fit is quit from these rapid keyboarding fingers to show off the erudition and sophistication of yours truly, I, the author, Robot Goldilocks, not wasting a drop of research from my historical novel, I, GILGANOSH, nor from one of my early non-fictional efforts, A GUIDE TO EARLY SOFT-CORE PORN MYTHS, I shall plunge forward on the tides of my beautiful, facile prose and segue most expertly (like a ballerina pirouetting to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake? Like Joseph Conrad, or Philip Roth or, better yet, those fabulous writers of yore, Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore!) into just why Gilganosh was bored. ~~~ Thinking back, Harry Harrison always had a weird hate-boner going versus Robert Silverberg. On a unrelated note, did anyone read the M John Harrison novel, Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again? Or know exactly what stories are in the MJH short story collection that came out in August 2020? The pre-release marketing blurb for Sunken Land seemed like MJH was mining/regurgitating his semi-autobiography novel CLIMBERS into pure fiction.
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Jan 7, 2021 02:37
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:90% of the ebooks I buy are either linked directly from the author, or I go to the author's page on Amazon and go from there. Been doing it for years, it's just old hat now. Interesting book in the "people also read"? Click it, then head to the author's page and click from there. Sadly, the only way to make sure. Those pages are automatically generated by Amazon and will include pirate copies, so that's no guarantee at all.
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Jan 7, 2021 04:03
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MockingQuantum posted:by all accounts this happens a lot to self-pub authors on Amazon, though it looks like she might have been able to make enough noise about it that Amazon acted on the reports. At least for me, the only one I see on Amazon is the one she links in the Twitter thread. There are websites that automatically scrape Amazon and re-publish anything on their own (probably malware-riddled) sites - it happened to me a day after I self-published my first book with a completely unknown pen name - but this is the first I've heard of them cropping up on Amazon itself.
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Jan 7, 2021 09:37
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freebooter posted:There are websites that automatically scrape Amazon and re-publish anything on their own (probably malware-riddled) sites - it happened to me a day after I self-published my first book with a completely unknown pen name - but this is the first I've heard of them cropping up on Amazon itself. I've seen (and almost bought) a pirated ebook from a link on an author's Amazon page, though literally only once. I only caught it because on the item page, there was a "Customers also viewed" thing with the same book, same author, slightly different cover where the colors looked more normal. That was the only time I'd seen it myself, though. I know of at least three self-pub writers who have had to report pirated copies of their ebooks on Amazon, and said similar things to Wells-- basically that Amazon is pretty slow to do anything about it. Beyond those four instances (and Wells's experience) I guess it gets more anecdotal, but I'd say it's still something worth looking out for if you're buying ebooks from self-pub authors.
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Jan 7, 2021 19:47
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Leng posted:Going into #5 with the expectation that Dazen better be drafting some white luxin and sacrificing his life for the entire world to save everyone and I will be pretty pissed if that doesn't happen. Have now finished #5 The Burning White and while Dazen did do what I expect it was all undermined by Orholam actually appearing and being part of the action in getting Dazen back to the Chromeria and then also arbitrarily reversing all of the consequences of the decisions that were made. It was an absolute "God did it" thing - like why does Dazen get to be healed of everything, Kip gets resurrected but Cruxer gets to stay dead? - that was completely unsatisfying. The plot twists and unreliable narrator stuff was taken to the extreme where Book 5 has massive infodumps that the characters don't figure out for themselves. It wasn't wholly unsatisfying, because there was foreshadowing in place so I as a reader caught them, but it then meant that having it all fully explained on the page from one character to another meant that I was annoyed at the repetition and also at the characters being told instead of making the discovery for themselves. All in all, I think the series could definitely have been a trilogy instead of five books. There's so much fat in the scenes, the storylines, some of the characters that it could have been trimmed down significantly. Yeah I don't think I'll be going out of my way to recommend Weeks to people, and particularly not his earlier work if this is the quality of his later stuff (by most accounts, the Night Angel trilogy has the same weird sexist stuff in it too and is more poorly written).
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Jan 8, 2021 06:58
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Encountered a really bizarre screed + a followup screed from David Brin about the movie COOL WORLD in the SFL Archives 1992 that I am just going to repost in full so everyone can soak in the WTF factor. e: It would be highly amusing slash educational to see how David Brin reacts if someone on Twitter were to post Brin's 1992 views on Censorship at him. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 7 Jul 92 21:27:57 GMT From: steinly@topaz.ucsc.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson) Reply-to: sf-lovers-movies@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Cool World I forward the following without comment: xxxxxx@xxxx.xxxxxx.xxx Tue Jul 7 14:23:00 1992 (please keep address confidential) *Message Date _July 14.92_ * Added feature... here a momentary act of diatribe. Care to pass it on the the appropriate interest groups? DO NOT PAY TO SEE RALPH BAKSHI'S "COOL WORLD" Recent publicity indicates that a new film - a raunchy rip-off of cartoon-live action techniques developed for "Roger Rabbit" - has been directed by the infamous Ralph Bakshi. This film, entitled "Cool World," is being widely touted by Paramount. Disclaimer: I NOT urging people to boycott, or even not to see this film, if they so choose. I am only suggesting that people who do so be _thrifty_ about it. Ralph Bakshi is renowned in Hollywood for business practices which would make Simon Gekko blush. The pantheon of artists who claim to have been ripped off by him is legendary. But Bakshi's true claim to glory is as arg one of the greatest propagandists for pure evil working in Hollywood today. This is a garish statement, but one that's not difficult to back up. His earlier "Lord of the Rings" was vicious, ugly. His "Fritz the Cat" was vile and sexist, even to the open-minded. But it is his more popular "Wizards" that confirms Bakshi's dedication to the Dark Side. That film writhes through every scene persuading the viewer to root on the side of injustice and oppression, sanctioning the hateful genocide of pathetic minority groups, the maintenance of ghettoes, fear and loathing of technology and, above all, cheating. It is an even finer example of dark-side, big lie agitprop than Nazi wartime films produced by Joseph Goebbels. (An irony, since Nazi films provide a prop, in "Wizards.") Fortunately, word has gone out, and Wizards is no longer part of the Con Film Program circuit in most places. I urge people to see it only as an example of the art of propaganda... to see how easily their own emotions can be manipulated to cheer for vile traits in human beings, and sneer against charity and justice. Ideally, however, one should find a way to view the film while passing a MINIMUM of royalties on to its maker. (There are legal ways of doing so.) This may seem strange for a writer, who lives by royalities, to prescribe. However, I consider matters of good and evil to be important, as well. (Not in the religious sense, but in the sense of decency, kindness, and honor.) In the case of a film in which every scene appeals to the worst aspects of human nature, I see little alternative. Which brings us to what should be done about "Cool World." No, I have not yet seen the film. But Bakshi's reputation and past works make me feel free to express an opinion in general terms. I have no specific recommendations, and certainly refuse censorship. Making a major public deal out of this will only lead to MORE people flocking to the film, out of curiosity. If intensely curious, by all means deputize a friend (one noted for hard-nosed criticism) to go see it and report back. Better yet, be patient! (I intend to be, biding my time until I finally give in to the inevitable curiosity.) Wait for it to hit the cheap houses. Or better yet, hold a video party with lots of friends to minimize the per capita royalties. Discuss the film... then cleanse your palates with something honorable... like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit!" With regards. David Brin ------------------------------ Date: 13 Jul 92 16:18:44 GMT From: steinly@topaz.ucsc.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson) Reply-to: sf-lovers-movies@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Cool World and Bakshi: Brin reply Text below is forwarded from David Brin, it is opinion. Begin forwarded file BRIN'S REPLY REGARDING BAKSHI'S "COOL WORLD" and "CENSORSHIP"? Despite the fact that my novel, "Earth", deals with the Net in 50 years, I have kept off most net groups for several reasons. First, while the one-on-one communication is terrific, interest group discussions can be a monumental time sink, depriving creative adults of useful lifespan. (What could _you_ be doing with the X hours/day you spend hooked up?) Second, one has to deal with people best described as "Net-Tourettes" - a word coined jointly by Bruce Sterling and me at a recent conference. It alludes to certain psych patients suffering from Tourette's Syndrome, who have the unfortunate tendency, in the course of normal conversation, to suddenly break out cursing, howling and frothing obscenities. (See "Earth" page 325 of the paperback edition for a futuristic solution.) It seems this early, primitive version of the medium allows people to ignore countless little survival cues we inherit from neolithic days, or even the playground, which normally restrain our behavior. ("Hmmm. If I start screeching at people, they may leave me, next time the tribe migrates." or "If I'm rude, that fellow may punch me.") Oh, the attractions to livid flaming are clear. Biochemists find that endorphins released into a human brain during fits of self-righteous rage are almost as potent as those triggered by pain and injury, and are many times as addictive. Multiply this by a culture which extols individual ego above all else, and you have a recipe for the kind of spasmodic behavior most flamers exhibit. (Of course, they rationalize this self-induced drug high with moral indignation about this or that. But let's recognize the self-secreted equivalent to PCP when we see it.) Another flaw in the medium is that people tend to _skim_ the missives they receive, looking for distilled BULLETS to accept or reject instantaneously. We complain about this in politics and the news, then we do it ourselves! (Many responses to my "Cool World" blip showed clearly that the senders had not read it carefully, before reacting.) I don't know what to do about this. It's fine to preach that one should never to answer without reading carefully, preferably twice, and then counting to ten. But who has the TIME? Hence a reason to stay off most groups. I could go on about this. It's a fascinating subject. (And yes, _I_ have been seen to rant self-righteously, in public, so we're talking shades of gray, here.) Suffice it for now to say that a mature adult should always TRY to compensate for human nature, and for the flaws in a medium of communication. Pausing before leaping to conclusions. Assuming the other person might be intelligent, rather than an idiot. Giving people the benefit of the doubt, and asking for explanations. Aren't these rather old fashioned behaviors we were taught that "good" people engaged in? The Net liberates... but do we _want_ to be liberated from courtesy? "We live as free citizens, not only in our public life but in our attitude toward one another in the affairs of daily life. We are not angry at our neighbor if he behaves as he pleases, nor cast sour looks at him, which, if they do no harm, still cause pain." - Pericles Hence, obviously, I have nothing to say to RJ Rauser or Greg Bole. They are welcome to behave as they wish. One advantage of the Net is that flying spittle is seldom contagious. That lengthy apologia aside, two major philosophical issues came up in regards my blip on "Cool World." (1) re: Censorship and (2) re: "good and evil". May I have a moment to comment on both, before finishing off with Bakshi? (1) The damning word, "Censorship" is all too often used as invective against anyone who suggests that all data is not equal. This is not only stupid, but non-semantic. We must be choosy about what we see, hear, do, for reasons of simple survival and limited time. Since the time of Benjamin Franklin, no living human could read all of the great works being published, let alone wade through mountains of crap to find the good stuff. Not without the help of friends, experts, (even critics (shudder!), and especially... the marketplace. Yes, the marketplace of ideas, in which better ones supposedly rise, and trash eventually meets well-deserved oblivion. Anyone who tells you that Freedom of Speech is _sacred_ is anthropologically illiterate, since NO other culture ever practiced it, and it flies in the face of human nature. (People with big mouths, or big sticks, _always_try to keep others from talking, especially when they disagree.) Freedom of Speech is a bold experiment in _pragmatism_. We have found that open criticism is the only way societies avoid error... and no one ever knows in advance which ideas are going to prove right or erroneous. So even boors and assholes must be suffered a soapbox, protected AS IF it were sacred. Because if you allow _any_ exceptions to free speech, the whole grand experiment will come tumbling down. People who say all ideas are equal are simply fools. Somewhere out there is a Net-Tourette Flamer _who happens to be right_. Most of his fellow Flamers are irritating loonies with keyboards, who would have been left to the hyenas back in the old days, but we're wise enough to put up with them, because the one with the right idea will (hopefully) eventually prove him/herself right, and maybe save us all. That's worth suffering a whole lot of irritation. So, I am as dedicated to fight censorship as anybody. I am also a full fledged participant in the _marketplace_ of ideas! Which means I can shout out mine, and one of mine is that the works of Ralph Bakshi are perverted, evil crap. I am free to suggest to my peers that paying money to Bakshi is as ill-advised as donating to the Mafia or KKK or any other institution inimical to human decency. If certain persons think that has _anything_ in common with censorship, well, I'm not responsible for the wretched way uneducated people interpret the English Language. (2) Cultural Relativism is the new cult which contends that "good" and "evil" are meaningless terms. As a cult, CR then uses _other_ words to fill the same slots. And proceeds to demonize its opponents with a will. Good and Evil are basic human archetypes, and it is useless to say they don't exist. Now _what_ you call evil is open to argument. I personally don't care for the fundamentalist POV, which constrains human freedom of thought and persecutes victimless pursuits. I intend to continue to deny their "evil." But would you exclude Hitler? Where do you draw your lines? I believe some things we were taught on the playground are valid. It is good to be patient with others and share. It is good to help those worse off than you. It is good to tell truths. It is good to feel sympathy for the oppressed. It is good to develop your professional skills, and deliver quality goods or services for your pay. Some may wax sarcastic and simper at this... but I'll bet they like seeing these traits in their neighbors and tradesmen, and mutter when they run into their opposites. To those out there who sneer at my "preachiness" in the preceding paragraph... can you name another topic MORE appropriate for open discussion? Plato asked, "What is the Good?" It is still the most critical question facing human beings. Finally, Bakshi. My intention, in blipping "Don't pay to see Cool World," was primarily to let out the word THAT the film was by Ralph Bakshi.... That fact, alone, will keep many from seeing it. For some others, however, I failed to justify my brief suggestion. Fair enough, let's try again. I am not online to transcribe a litany of accusers against Bakshi, for past crimes and misdemeanors. It's not my job, nor do I want to break the privacy of friends who have confided their tales. I thank Chuq for bringing up the brilliant Vaughn Bode, whom a certain director did such heinous dirt that Bode's subsequent demise is not unreasonably attributed to him by some. Otherwise, either take my word for it or not... or tap your own Hollywood contacts. The basis for my arguments against Bakshi's films is not that he's a bastard. There are bastards out there who nevertheless do good work. Bakshi is not one of them. Leaving aside Lord of the Rings and Fritz the Cat, let's concentrate on "Wizards." First off, I must ask Ray Randolph and Andrew Plotkin what they thought I meant, when I said the movie works to get you to cheer for the bad guys. From your text, I get the impression you missed my point... The so-called heroes of the film _are_ the bad guys! I often play this game at cons... "who is the bad guy in the movie, E.T.?" One in a hundred gets it right, yet most later agree that Spielberg had them on, throughout the film. The essence of the art of propaganda is to twist the viewer's arm into giving over his/her human sympathies to one side or another. Try watching Werfenstahl's Nazi wartime films, and you _can't help_ feeling the tweak of emotion she wants from you, when the brave young Aryan hero shows up to slaughter the slathering Poles. Today, most American propaganda pushes themes like suspicion of authority and individual egotism, which sure beats the old stuff, but still merits critical analysis, from time to time. Look for these themes in the movies you see! (Also count the _tolerance_ messages you see/hear in any given day. They pervade the media... a campaign of which I approve, though not the means.) Paul Griffiths says "Most of us can see right through the lies." Pah! Human beings LOVE lies! All myths, politics, science fiction stories, are lies. The secret is to pick and choose among the lies, and to know which are the nasty ones. (Stanley Friesen and several others, go ahead and skip the following. You know how to tell when you're being peddled garbage.) In "Wizards," Bakshi depicts two brothers who feuded and separated in youth. One of them goes off to help the mutants, who have been kept quarantined in a tiny, sunless canyon for a thousand years. The other cavorts with pretty pixies on the outside...those doing the quarantining. The movie goes out of its way to show that Bakshi's world is filled with vast, open countryside, and that the poor mutants are much too timorous to ever be a threat, and yet the art of the propagandist actually persuades us that they "should" be squashed in a ghetto for eternity. The status quo must be protected at all costs! Now tell me, what traits ought a human male to have? Make up any list of attributes you would desire in your son, your son-in-law, or a neighbor if you ever needed help. In this film, one brother is a lazy, shiftless lech, who doesn't give a drat about anything but boozing and bimbos, has let his skills rot, is a coward, and avidly lends his aid to oppressors. The other brother works hard, loves a wife and child, develops his craft, and dedicates himself to helping the oppressed. Who should you root for? Recall that this is a story told by the victors (the pixies) so the wizard helping the mutants is depicted as a skeleton creature. His desperation that his child should not grow up in the poverty and slavery of mutanthood is a bit twisted, but understandable in context. Hey, he freaks out a little. That doesn't change the essentials one bit. Now the McGuffin is that the mutant-helper uses a movie projector as a magical device. His clients are so pathetic, they'll only fight if shown... get the irony here... Nazi war films! This technophobic symbolism deserves its own masters thesis, but suffice it to say that - if that's what it would take to get some cowardly victims to fight back, when hordes or pretty, fascist pixies are laying seige in preparation for genocide - I would gladly use the same means. In the end, while the viewers delight in the mutant-slaughter taking place outside the castle, the twins meet inside for the dramatic climax. Having let his professional skills go to hell, the anti-technology "wizard" cleverly pulls out a _lugar_ and shoots his brother, screaming: "you son of a bitch!" (Get the clever irony? He says this to his _brother_...? Get it? Har har.) Natch, the audience cheers its head off. Conclusion number One... try noticing the deeper message of movies and books, especially those which pander to sickness in us. Conclusion Two. There IS evil in the world. It is whatever suppresses human potential and yanks us backward into darkness and ignorance. It is what panders to herd poison, causing the IQ of a mob to be that of its stupidest member... divided by the number of people in the mob. It is what allows a civilized, educated people, like Germany, to choose vileness enthusiastically, and not see their victims as fellow human beings. Cultural relativists may sneer at such words, but "good" remains something the rest of us aspire to, and want in our commonwealth. 'Evil" is what happens when we forget that the purpose of free speech is partly the discovery of great new ideas (even if they, at first, offend)... and partly to expose bad ideas, and let them sink into the cesspool where they belong. I don't have to see every film of R. Bakshi to suggest to my friends that life is too short to go wading in swill. Go see what you want to see, by all means. But my advice is, flush it and move on. Sincerely - David Brin P.S. 1. Paul Griffiths says - "My renting doesn't support the movie, but rather the video store..which does all the buying/dishing out per capita royalties without my influence..." Untrue, and naive, Paul. By renting, you vote what kind of movie the store will buy next time, or keep on stock. It is by such micro-voting that we determine what comes on TV, what stores offer for sale and whether they trust their customers not to shoplift, and whether or not people smile at each other on the road, or try cutting each other off. Micro-voting is at least as important as the official kind. P.S. 2. Sorry Brian Lev. Was there naughtie stuff done in making Roger Rabbit? Oops. Another illusion shattered. (Ask me sometime about what Warner Bros. has done to _The Postman_!!) (Better yet, don't ask, please.) P.S. 3. Tim Smith... do you seriously doubt that, when a thief steals and warps good stuff, it _doesn't_ turn to poo poo? P.S 4. This cost me several hours. And there's sure to be tons of response that will kill _more of my work time. Agh! Now you see why I fear (!) this addictive Net stuff? Why do intelligent adults DO this ????? D.B. ------------------------------ quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Jan 8, 2021 |
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Jan 8, 2021 09:08
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Jesus Christ I wish I had video of Jo Walton dumping her drink on his head.
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Jan 8, 2021 09:29
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The only thing of Brin's I've ever read is The Postman which had some very deeply weird ideas about women - like, above and beyond typical sci-fi author incel nerdiness - and so I'm not surprised he was also just generally a loving weirdo.
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Jan 8, 2021 09:31
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I started the Uplift omnibus once and the 'weird attitude to women' showed itself on page 3 or so and I put it aside in disgust. Glad to see I wasn't just feeling grumpy that day.
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Jan 8, 2021 12:29
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I don't know why Brin is criticising Bakshi for the sexism in Fritz the Cat. That's like criticising his Lord of the Rings for having hobbits in it.
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Jan 8, 2021 12:53
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quantumfoam posted:I often play this game at cons... "who is the bad guy in the movie, E.T.?"
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Jan 8, 2021 14:49
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HopperUK posted:I started the Uplift omnibus once and the 'weird attitude to women' showed itself on page 3 or so and I put it aside in disgust. Glad to see I wasn't just feeling grumpy that day. I dunno about anything else he wrote but in The Postman it wasn't, like, misogynistic or anything, it was just... weird. The word "worshipful" comes to mind. "Worshipful" to the point where it borders on misogyny, I guess, but really just struck me as "this dude has never had any interaction with a woman beyond staring at them across the quadrangle." And I'm sure he actually has a wife or whatever! But then... why are you writing like this!
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Jan 8, 2021 15:02
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DACK FAYDEN posted:it's the goddamn military hope that helps david brin you fascist prick Hiding a new life form with unknown pathogens and depriving the world of a chance at first contact is Good. Random schoolchildren are the most competent authority to handle this.
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Jan 8, 2021 15:03
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DACK FAYDEN posted:it's the goddamn military hope that helps david brin you fascist prick I missed this bit but, even though the thumb is on the scale and even though Brin immediately pivots to Nazi propaganda (???) it would in fact be responsible and good to immediately and aggressively quarantine an alien and anybody the alien has had contact with. Also in Aliens when Ripley wants to nuke the planet from orbit, she's wrong. I'm sorry your friends died but Bengal tigers also kill hundreds of people per year and we don't decide to render them extinct because of that, sorry not sorry!
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Jan 8, 2021 15:07
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DACK FAYDEN posted:it's the goddamn military hope that helps david brin you fascist prick I've seen Brin mention this before and according to him it's ETs parents who are the bad guys, for doing the equivalent of leaving their toddler behind at the zoo. I've never really gotten any fascist vibes from Brin
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Jan 8, 2021 16:22
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I don't think Brin understood Bakshi's work one whit. I also haven't heard of Bakshi ripping people off.
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Jan 8, 2021 16:45
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Hobnob posted:I've seen Brin mention this before and according to him it's ETs parents who are the bad guys, for doing the equivalent of leaving their toddler behind at the zoo. ET is actually a pretty old dude who comes from a race of hardcore gardening enthusiasts, if I remember the official sequel novel correctly. I think it was written by Alan Dean Foster. He grows a spaceship out of a giant onion and crews it with sentient root vegetables.
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Jan 8, 2021 16:47
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wizzardstaff posted:ET is actually a pretty old dude who comes from a race of hardcore gardening enthusiasts, if I remember the official sequel novel correctly. I think it was written by Alan Dean Foster.  This sounds ridiculous so I had to look it up. Looks like it's by William Kotzwinkle and not Foster, but most of the rest of you recollection looks like it matches this review? https://www.the-new-englander.com/2020/11/04/e-t-and-the-book-of-the-green-planet-a-review/ I am extremely tempted to read this just because of how bizarre it sounds.
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Jan 8, 2021 18:56
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DurianGray posted:
Yeah, that's definitely it. I read it when I was a child so my memory is extremely hazy, but the giant iron-skinned onion and the grumpy plants he enlists to help are fixed in my mind. I think one of them was called a "flopwobble" or something like that, and was described as resembling a neurotic bundle of socks. Another scene that stuck out to me was ET psychically donating years of his lifespan to his mentor out of gratitude, resulting in an extra ring growing around his neck.
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Jan 8, 2021 19:35
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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was extremely good. Good recommendation whoever 
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Jan 8, 2021 22:56
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freebooter posted:like, above and beyond typical sci-fi author incel nerdiness I know there are much worse, but my benchmark for this has become Peter F Hamilton when his straight white male hero visits a deliberately anachronistic pastoral planet and gets visited by the house matriarch in the middle of the night - who makes him promise he'll leave her naive sheltered daughter alone if he fucks her. Anyway he fucks her then he fucks and impregnates the daughter
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Jan 8, 2021 23:05
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I've been rereading Dave Duncan's A Man of His Word and A Few Good Men series. One of my guilty pleasures is authors who use a gimmick for their chapter titles (I love how Steven Brust mixes it up in every Taltos book), and these have an excellent one. Every chapter title is a short 2-3 word phrase adapted from a poem stanza/excerpt printed at the end of the chapter. Thus in a chapter dealing with capture and negotiation with torturing, threatening goblins is titled "Questionable Shapes" and ends with: quote:Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Or "Sacred Flame," a chapter ending with two embracing lovers consumed(?) by flame. One has seen magical visions of a white flame; the other had been told by a visiting God to trust in love so many books ago. quote:All thoughts, all passions, all delights, My favorites are the second book of the first series, Faery Lands Forlorn, which spends half its time in a land inhabited by "djinni," red skinned humans with heavy Arabian Nights/orientalism tropes, and every chapter title is taken from Fitzgerald's translation The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Our hero in "Magic Shadow Shapes," held prisoner by a powerful sorcerer, screams a warning to the other protagonist through a magic scrying glass at night: quote:We are no other than a moving row After an unlikely reprieve when death seemed certain, our hero escapes (into chains as a galley slave with little hope of continuing his quest), in Dead Yesterday: quote:Ah, fill the Cup:—what boots it to repeat The books themselves are better than I remembered, and I clearly didn't finish them, although I must have skimmed the last books of each series because I did remember how they ended, if not how they got there. The world is a lot darker and more violent than I appreciated, probably because the protagonists are cheerful, good hearted sorts and a lot of the implied threat or actual atrocities happen off screen or are background. But there are slaves who are treated horrifically, torture, and constant recurring warfare, as well as absolutely corrupted sorcerers doing awful retail things to mundanes held only partially in check from wholesale evil by a twisted system of power balancing. The second series really lays this stuff on thicker on a path to fixing the world to make it a safer and fairer place. I wonder what others who've read it and remember it think about the darker aspects of it.
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Jan 9, 2021 00:46
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A little help please. Last year I read the excellent collection Iraq+100 where all the stories were set in 2103 a hundred years after the american invasion and I've started on Palestine+100 set in 2048 a century after the Nakba. And then today by chance I found out about and ordered Lagos 2060 that follows the same pattern. I'm wondering if yall know of any other collections that riff on this theme?
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Jan 9, 2021 02:21
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coathat posted:A little help please. There’s an earlier one called Islamicates by the same editor that was available for free on their website for a while, but I can’t where I downloaded it from a few years ago. It’s just as good
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Jan 9, 2021 02:51
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That 1992 David Brin followup rant gets better when you realize Brin wasn't responding to random people, no that followup rant was a direct response to SF-LOVERS reactions of Brin's out-of-nowhere rant regarding COOL WORLD. Going to post the all the initial reactions to those two Brin rants up on the offsite blog, excluding the "who was the real bad guy in E.T.?" 1992 discussion because it kind of got mirrored here. Also Charles Stross randomly appeared in SF-LOVERS 1992 to pimp the work of another UK SF&F author.
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Jan 9, 2021 23:29
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i'd hate to get stuck in a room with David Brin. good lord.
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Jan 10, 2021 00:19
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quantumfoam posted:...also Charles Stross randomly appeared in SF-LOVERS 1992 to pimp the work of another UK SF&F author.
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Jan 10, 2021 05:22
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Marshal Radisic posted:Would that be Simon Ings by any chance? I dimly recall part of an interview with Ings in *Locus* where he mentioned that he'd collaborated/was roommates with Stross years ago but they'd had a falling out. Nope. As per Charles Stross, "...relatively obscure, although he began publishing at the same time as Pratchett, but he's actually a lot closer to the British funny-bone than TP (Terry Pratchett) who has a kind of transatlantic drawl running through his books. I refer of course to Dave Langford. Also CONTINUING TIME series followup: Daniel Keys Moran randomly appeared to give a status update to his fans and listed out every single story/novel/novella he planned on writing in the CONTINUING TIME series, which was around 13 novels & 20+ short stories/novellas. The status update also contained a very sanitized version of DKM's Famous Author perks.
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Jan 10, 2021 06:24
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I had something important to procrastinate over for the last two weeks, so I've been catching up with about 150 pages of this thread. I had intended to continue lurking, except that somebody (probably about a year ago in real time) mentioned a book that makes me really angry whenever I think about it and I can't let it go. The Second Sleep by Robert Harris does a good job of portraying a post-apocalyptic medieval-style recovering society, raising some really interesting questions about how everything could have collapsed, what happened since then, and whether, under an oppressive religious regime, it can ever again reach its pre-crash heights. The writing was good enough that I genuinely wanted to know how all those things resolved, and as the remaining pages dwindled I started to assure myself that Harris must be intending to write a series in this world. Instead, it ends as though he couldn't think of anything that wrapped up everything he had raised, or perhaps he just couldn't be bothered to try. It almost feels like he hit a word count and wanted to be done. You could argue that the way the story ends is foreshadowed, and I would agree, but it's foreshadowed about ten pages before it happens. The question around the death of the old priest is resolved, but the ending of the book makes me think Harris felt the main question he raised was about whether the pre-crash academic survived the apocalypse and who the dead people near the bunker were, both of which came across as later, minor questions to me. The question of pre-crash artefacts and whether it would be possible to find more, and work out what they did and whether they could raise society out of its medieval existence, felt like the main thrust of the novel much earlier on. I appreciate that I might have read the story differently to other people, but I'm baffled that the book was so well reviewed, and I warn anyone who reads it to stop with five pages to go and come up with their own ending. It will be better. I should probably balance my negativity by recommending some things I actually do like that I haven't seen mentioned: Paul Cornell has a series of novellas beginning with The Witches of Lychford, the first four of which I read in rapid succession a little under a year ago the last time pre-Covid that I went away for work. The fifth came out recently and I haven't read it yet, but I enjoyed them more than the first Shadow Police book. Sadly none quite hit the ideal 400 pages. Sticking with novellas, Aliette de Bodard's Xuya universe is really enjoyable. I feel like it may have come up in previous threads maybe? I have Seven of Infinities waiting in my backlog, and my favourite so far is probably The Tea Master and the Detective. I don't know if anybody uses Serial Box but I thought The Vela was really fun. Because it's serialised the pace is pretty rapid, and the writers are Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, and S.L. Huang, all of whose work I've loved. I think there's a second series now but I haven't read it. Adrift by Rob Boffard (lately of Jackson Ford fame) was a solid little story about a bunch of people stuck on a small tourist shuttle craft after an unexpected attack destroys the space station they were visiting. Doggerland by Ben Smith is a near future novella set on a huge off shore wind farm in the north sea, about a young man trying to find out what happened to his father, who he has replaced as an on-site maintenance worker. I also enjoyed the Embers of War series by Gareth L Powell, and the Spin Trilogy by Andrew Bannister, both of whom had brief mentions somewhere in the thread. e: one more thing - I'm about a third through The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell on Audible and really enjoying it so far. I only came across it because it's part narrated by Adjoa Andoh, who has rapidly become one of my favourite narrators. If you haven't read The Power by Naomi Alderman yet, Andoh's narration is superb. Has anybody here read the sequels to The Vorhh? Are they as good? I really loved the first book once I'd got my brain into the right mode to enjoy the prose. Also, quantumfoam, your SF Archives readthrough is heroic. The Sweet Hereafter fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Jan 10, 2021 17:37
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