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I've been working through Parker pretty much backwards (started with Prosper's Demon -> Siege. Engineer wasn't bad overall but it does suffer a bit because Parker loves repeated themes and setpieces and if you've read his later stuff you start seeing the same scenes but worse. Addictive but once you run across another war-denuded land or detailed crafting scene... In Fencer book two at the moment and it's a bit of a grind. Everything magic-related is boring but I enjoy the trader siblings enough to keep with it.
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Jul 23, 2021 02:14
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I've read the first two engineer books and the folding knife. I loved the folding knife, thought the first engineer book was fun, and then liked the second one less and less as it became clear where everything was going. I don't really enjoy "smart amoral dude pwns all the lesser mortals around him" fiction (probably why I don't love Joe Abercrombie) and the prince character was the most enjoyable part of the first book to me.
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Jul 23, 2021 02:15
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Yeah the way Parker uses magic in his short stories is so cool but in Fencer it’s a drag. It’s trying to tie into some grand metaphor about fate using various imagery, eventually settling on a piece of engineering as the most appropriate metaphor, but it just keeps getting in the way. There are a few series where I’ve read a lot of pages of something and the character involved is still just “some guy.” Ganoes Paran in Malazan is the worst offender, but Bardas Loredan in Fencer comes in at a close second place. Parker gives you so little of what’s going on inside his head and even though we see him take various actions it’s hard to empathize when he’s so opaque.
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Jul 23, 2021 02:53
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just encountered this post in SFL Volume 22a and it hits so well re: George R Martins published output for the 24 yrs since this post was made : ======= (SFL Volume 22a, May 1997) Subject: Sequel to Martin's "A Game of Thrones" Someone (Jo Walton, if memory serves) recently said that the sequel to this (IMNSHO) excellent book is due out in the UK this coming August. Where did this information come from? Does anyone know the title? Is this to be a trilogy only, or a longer series a la the Wheel of Time? And lastly, will Mr. Martin stick to the one book a year schedule until the putative trilogy is complete? Thanks for your time! DETCA DER ======= e: Also Jeff Vogel just made a reappearence in the SFL Archives, this time from his official game company email account to talk about good starting stories for a 1st time reader of Harlan Ellison. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Jul 23, 2021 |
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Jul 23, 2021 03:52
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I just finished Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge and I really dug it. The style was refreshingly different from a lot of stuff I've been reading lately and it sort of straddles fantasy and magical realism, at least as far as the vibes go. It almost feels like it'll be a series of thinly related chapters at first, each about a different kind of beast, but pretty quickly it's clear that they're more tightly woven together than that.
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Jul 23, 2021 03:58
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KKKLIP ART posted:Just got done with all of the Starship’s Mage (1-10), Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and the Hallowed Hunt. Don’t really know what to go for next. Anything new that is super interesting? Don’t necessarily want a whole series Read all the Penric and Desdemona novellas. They’re a series set in Bujold’s five gods world and are fantastic.
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Jul 23, 2021 07:57
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Jedit posted:I'm chuckling at you two picturing a character as looking like Jim Caviezel when you've both almost certainly drawn the association because the names are similar. I know I have, yep. Good question is whether that’s a sensible thing to do.
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Jul 23, 2021 09:48
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Man, the prince of nothing series loving sucks. kind of felt like I got tricked into reading that.
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Jul 23, 2021 19:23
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So lately I've read Mordew, which had great prose but was overall quite a frustrating read. The main character is a child, so it's natural that he wouldn't understand what was happening around him, but I felt like it took too long to get to a place where *I* understood everything, like a song that just will not get to the loving drop already. And it ended on a bit of a nothing disappointment. So although I'll be watching the author, Alex Pheby, I can't really recommend it. I'm also halfway through Lovecraft Country which is a collection of short novellas, really, about the family members of a black man named Atticus Turner, who is related through a grandparent to a typical Lovecraftian old-school New England family of white shitheads. I haven't seen the TV adaptation but I'm very curious, because the book is great. I love how the people all feel real and solid, and the contrast with Lovecraft's writing - and I do like his stuff though obviously it's *soaked* in vicious racism - makes it even more delightful. Just excellent. e: I *think* it's Atticus's mother who was born of an enslaved person and her white captor but it might be a great-grandma
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Jul 23, 2021 19:47
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Powerful stupidity & doubling down happening in this series of posts from SFL Archives 1997 Only the names & emails have been changed from the original posts. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 01 Jul 1997 06:40:25 GMT From: Curious@REDACTED Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: H.P. Lovecraft (The Transition of_) I picked up a copy of The Transition of H. P Lovecraft published by DEL REY and with an introduction from Barbara Hambly. (c) 1996. As a big admirer of Lovecraft's writing prowess, one tidbit struck as being incomprehensible. I don't understand is WHY did a mediocre writer such as Barbara Hambly (whom I have read) got to introduce H.P. Lovecraft? (I liked the book, but I found HAMBLY's introduction just baffling.) Barbara Hambly IMHO comes across as being jealous of Lovecraft's talents, self-effacing of her own, and petty at times, even going on to accuse Lovecraft of racism, while providing no proof. What I want to know is... are the accusations true? Or is she just blowing smoke? The paragraph that I am referring to appears on page (viii) where she writes: "Part of this, of course, is simply Lovecraft's racism, the racism that until quite recently could strip a fiar-skinned man or woman of civil rights and bar all entry into polite society, should it be discovered that one of their great-grandparents came from Africa; the racism that painted half of the villains and thugs of his stories as "Negroes," "Lascars," or "degenerates of horribly mixed race". (And let's not forget those "degenerate Eskimos" featured in "Call of Chthulu"!)" Maybe someone can correct me on this, if they have access to the direct texts from where she is quoting, (she provided none) but from the Lovecraft I recall, it was the narrator who expresses his/her bias: and most of the characters endure horrible deaths, or are mentally scarred for life. So where is the racism she attributes to Lovecraft's person - the writer of the stories? I do take exception to people who marginalize the issue of racism by wrongful attribution, and thus make it more difficult for all of us to live in a decent society. Anyhow, the accusation seems to me, a knock-down rather than a transparent statement of fact as she put it. The fact is I did not find ANY evidence of racism on the book, and neither do I recall on any other readings. The distinction being that if say a character in a book set in a certain colonial period, calls another character "a word name", thus reflecting his/her bias to the reader, why should the author be accused of being a racist? And be socially stigmatized? Isn't that part of exposition? Most of Lovecraft's stories are on the first person narrative, and set on a historical or cultural period. What I am saying is, I could understand her "statement of fact", if say it appeared as part of the description; where the writer (Lovecraft) describes a beautiful landscape (statements of fact) while casually mentioning a few yellow-skinned, camera-dotting tourists from a certain treacherous country (statements of fact) lollygagging across the hills. Now THAT I could interpert as being racist. But That I did not see. Or maybe they got lost in the translation (German to English), or some ancient teachers and editors withheld those stories in my infancy. So which is it? What I want to know is, should I modifiy my opinion of H.P. Lovecraft (the man not the writer) , or should I modify Barbara Hambly calling her names and accusing her of lacking in literary scholarship? At the very least, it seems quite odious of Del Rey to let someone rip apart the author of a book whom the buyers were seeking to purchase, and let her quite literally make money from a dead man while at the same time peeing on his grave. That I think most writers would find offensive. Dead or Alive. Don't writers get enough flak from outside critics that you have to pay the critics to criticize you on your own books? Is Del Rey trying to hurt their own sales?? Where is the logic? Hey Del Rey editors, are you listening, or were you just pandering to one of your living writers, whom you know socially. And who hasn't even achieved that *special few* circle at least *once*?) So can anyone out there who has purchased the book, and is a student of Lovecraft clarify this issue for me? I will be very interested to know the truth, however bitter medicine it is for anyone, myself included. Thank You. I really really didn't care about Hambly's opinion of the modern writer's struggles, who cares! or the constant references to Lovecraft as only being "chewy fun" suggesting they were lacking in substance, or her concluding remark of self-inclusion in his ability to dream. Godammit! The book is about Lovecraft NOT Hambly. So WHY COULDN"T YA PRAISE THE DEAD GUY TILL HE IS BLUE ON THE FACE MORE THAN HE WAS BEFORE THE WORMS FINISHED HIM OFF AND RAIN WASHED HIM AWAY INTO THE SEWERS?? AND THAT SEWER RAT DRANK HIM IN AND GOT SICK AND CHANGED INTO A HIDEOUS MONSTER WHICH DEVOURED HALF A RACIST VILLAGE POPULATED BY LOVECRAFT RELATIVES BEFORE DWINDLING BACK INTO THE UNMENTIONABLE NETHER REGIONS FROM WHENCE IT CAME... at least on his OWN works, and just pray you get just as many praises when you too are deceased...young lady. Sacrilege... Just sacrilege... ------------------------------ Date: 1 Jul 1997 07:49:23 -0400 From: NA.REDACTED@net Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: H.P. Lovecraft (The Transition of_) Imho, Lovecraft was playing into racism in those stories - he's evoking the fear of the strange, and there's no indication that the narrator is wrong about the non-whites. On the other hand, I'm not familiar with his letters, and don't know if he distrusted non-whites (non-WASPS?) in real life. NA.REDACTED@net ------------------------------ Date: 1 Jul 1997 16:41:22 GMT From:TE.REDACTED@edu Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: H.P. Lovecraft (The Transition of_) Lovecraft racist? Of course he was. To be honest, I don't see how you could read his stories and not pick that up; they're full of disparaging references to non-whites. And I don't find your argument about distinguishing the author's views from the character's that convincing; if Lovecraft himself felt differently about the issue, he probably would have tried to make that apparent somehow. On the other hand, it's not a slam on the man to say that he was a racist - it was the times he lived in. It would have been extremely difficult to be an educated Westerner in those times and *not* be a racist; it pervaded science and literature. Remember, this was before WWII and the Nazis showed the "master race" idea to be the crock that it is. >Or maybe they got lost in the translation (German to English), or some German? >What I want to know is, should I modifiy my opinion of H.P. Lovecraft (the >man not the writer) , or should I modify Barbara Hambly calling her names >and accusing her of lacking in literary scholarship? Well, neither, if you ask me. I happen to find Hambly a drat fine writer, for one thing. And Lovecraft, as I said, was a product of his times; he shouldn't be held to 1990's standards of cultural awareness. TE.REDACTED@edu ------------------------------ Date: 2 Jul 1997 02:38:07 GMT From: BO@REDACTED Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: H.P. Lovecraft (The Transition of_) L. Sprague de Camp's biography of Lovecraft suggests that he entertained some pretty racist views, to a degree that can't be dismissed with "Oh, everybody was a racist back then." However, de Camp contends that late in his (short) life he had begun to outgrow them. This is from memory; I don't own the book. BO@REDACTED ------------------------------ Date: 2 Jul 1997 21:46:13 GMT From: REDACTED@edu Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: H.P. Lovecraft (The Transition of_) I have a volume of Bram Stoker works including Dracula, The Lair of the White Worm, and some short stories. I enjoyed them all very much, but the woman who wrote the introduction (I don't recall her name.) seemed quite critical. I remember that the short stories were described as "sub-Poe" and much was made of the fact that Dracula had become a cultural icon and none of the rest of it was very good. I thought it was a strange way to introduce a book you are trying to sell. REDACTED@edu ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Jul 1997 19:06:04 GMT From: curious@REDACTED Reply-to: sf-lovers-written@Rutgers.Edu Subject: Re: H.P. Lovecraft (The Transition of_) REDACTED@edu writes: >Lots of people think Hambly is an excellent writer. She has certainly >written in the same general field that Lovecraft has. She sounds like a >fair choice to introduce the book. Mediocre = Average. Historically speaking of course A .500 team; an average pro player unqualified for the hall of fame. You might think me a little harsh on my criticism of Hambly, but if she wants to put herself in the league of Lovecraft, then she might as well get subjected to the same kind of glare and standards she casts upon Lovecraft. My current criticism of Hambly does not mean that at some point in the future she will go on to write a great novel, making her a household name (unlikely if she continues to strive for mediocrity in style); but she has to earn that respect, which she takes for granted and glorify in the manner of her writing on the INTRODUCTION of this particular book. >Everybody who has written biographies of Lovecraft has described him as >racist. His particular variant of racism was "The Yellow Peril." Hearsay. I don't disagree with you, but I think it more objective if you would quote specific passages in Lovecraft's own words supporting your point of view. It is poor scholarship to just insinuate that "everybody... described him as a racist." and add your own damnation to the proxy. Find what you think is the most obscene passage of say "The Yellow Peril", and quote it, and let the reader judge for himself/herself. That's what Hambly should have done. >Much of his stories about horrible creatures being produced by the union >of humans and nonhumans are obvious parables about mixed marriages. He >was, in short, a weird guy. He was also a complex guy - an avowed >anti-Semite who married a Jewess. Labels don't fit comfortably on him. A racist who then goes out of his race to MARRY... thus diluting his racial purity ... sounds to me like a man in transition: a human with flaws but still changing... who knows what he might learned if he stayed alive longer. (Thomas Jefferson, I should point out, was another devout racist until he went to France and met an educated black man, which was out of his realm of experience in America. Then his views began to evolve and change about blacks altogether. I will not change my view of J as an overall positive historical figure of magnitude, just because he was flawed with the times.) >As for "the times" being the source of Lovecraft's racism, I got the >impression his racism, while more acceptable in his time, was pronounced >and went beyond that of most of his peers. Who were his peers? History is replete with excellent writers who were racist or had major other character flaws in tune with their upbringing and society. Hemingway was no angel; Sun tzu was a cold-blooded war-monger; there are even writers today who are biased with the times, but like their historical peers are evolving . And that's what makes them excellent writers, not because they were afraid of labels, or how they might be perceived. But because they dare to be human, and expose the human condition. I apply the rule that you as long as you keep an open mind, (which is synonymous with good writing) and continue to strive to improve, and show a measure of evolution in your life performance, you shouldn't be lumped with the incurable. To conclude, I would like to add that I paid $10.00 for the book, and that anti-climactic introduction - money which went to Del Rey, Hambly, and others. I have a right to get my satisfaction. And I, unlike some of you, have read the book/Introduction in question. So go out and buy the book and read it, then I'd be more inclined to take your word at face value. And please quote often and in context.  Curious@REDACTED ------------------------------
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Jul 23, 2021 23:37
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I haven't read any Lovecraft stories but I really enjoy the letters he wrote shortly before his death. It's an amazing example of a man realizing what he used to believe was wrong, and its wonderful to see that such growth is possible: https://github.com/punchmonster/Lovecraft-Letters/blob/master/19370207-Catherine-L-Moore.md quote:Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 ... only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snonbish, self-centered, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get out more around 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done ..... except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a drat sight better than not growing up at all. He also developed some interesting political views: quote:Capitalism is dying from internal as well as external causes, & its own leaders & beneficiaries are less & less able to kid themselves. I'm no economist, but from recent reading I've been able to form a rough picture of the dilemma—the need to restrict consumers' goods & to pile up a needless plethora of producing equipment in order to maintain the irrational surplus called profit—which has caused orthodox economists like Hayek & Robbins to admit that only starvation wages & artificial scarcity could stabilize the profit system in future & avert increasing cyclical depressions of utterly destructive scope. Laissez-faire capitalism is dead—make no mistake about that. The only avenue of survival for plutocracy is a military & emotional fascism whereby millions of persons will be withdrawn from the industrial arena & placed on a dole or in concentration-camps with high-sounding patriotic names. That or socialism—take your choice. In the long run it won't be the New Deal but the mere facts of existence which will be recognised as the real & inevitable slayer of Hooverism. Nobody is going to "destroy the system"—for it has been destroying itself ever since it evolved out of the old agrarian-handicraft economy a century & a half ago.
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Jul 24, 2021 04:11
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I agree that it's good to see he was able to grow. I have read some of his stories and he is chokingly racist. It's not the characters, it's clearly the author. Anyone paying attention can tell the difference pretty easily, I think.
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Jul 24, 2021 04:24
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HopperUK posted:I agree that it's good to see he was able to grow. I have read some of his stories and he is chokingly racist. It's not the characters, it's clearly the author. Anyone paying attention can tell the difference pretty easily, I think. Yeah, I went through a Lovecraft phase in high school and read a lot of his stuff. How anyone with a smidge of awareness could read something like "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," where the whole 'horror' is that a guy finds out his great great etc. grandpa went to the Congo and married a gorilla (and the guy then commits suicide on learning he's descended from a gorilla because of how horrifying he finds that fact)... and not see how that racism is so thinly coated it's practically transparent? Yeesh. And his stuff only comes off as MORE racist the more context you have about stuff like the sadly popular eugenics movement, white supremacism resurgence, and other awful poo poo going on in the US at the time he was writing. Wild that he did start to turn over a new leaf toward the end of his life. Just a shame it didn't happen sooner.
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Jul 24, 2021 04:45
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HopperUK posted:I agree that it's good to see he was able to grow. I have read some of his stories and he is chokingly racist. It's not the characters, it's clearly the author. Anyone paying attention can tell the difference pretty easily, I think. I knew he was racist before I started reading his stuff, and even then I was still struck by how much it pervaded the work. I remember being particularly blown away by a segment in Shadow over Innsmouth when the narrator goes on this wild tangent about how ugly the people in Innsmouth are, and makes his point by listing all the races he can think of and saying 'they're even uglier than THOSE freaks!' It's nice to think Lovecraft grew out of that poo poo as he got older, but holy God did he have a lot of ground to make up. Nae fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jul 24, 2021 |
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Jul 24, 2021 05:08
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Another Dirty Dish posted:I read Neal Asher’s Spatterjay series a while back and mostly enjoyed it (mortal fear of leeches and anything with a leech mouth aside) but he has a pile of other books and I wasn’t sure where to go next. Any recommendations? The Polity series would be the next step, but skip gridlinked and go straight to the second book. Asher books are all similar in their execution with a fast moving story and fast paced battles and to a large extent the books are stand alone, so you can start anywhere.
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Jul 24, 2021 05:29
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Wandering down the Pournelle rat hole turned up a great parody of his Chaos Manor series that ran in Byte. I have a vague recollection of reading this at my dads house when I was probably 12 or so. http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/95q1/jpreviews.html
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Jul 24, 2021 05:36
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Cardiac posted:The Polity series would be the next step, but skip gridlinked and go straight to the second book. I remember when I was reading the Polity books, which are enjoyable, “oh, so this is the right wing version of the Culture”
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Jul 24, 2021 06:35
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LatwPIAT posted:One of my dream projects is to write a story that's a "sequel" to The Cold Equations about the accident investigator who tries to figure out what went wrong for the company that owns the rockets and trains the crews. He does things like interviewing the pilot of the rocket (stricken with grief and trauma over what he had to do) and encountering the various parts of the system that made the girl dying the only option. Corporate greed and corner-cutting would of course have to factor into it but I wanted it to have a part where the accident investigator meets a thinly veiled Campbell analogue who's the guy who writes the standards and shapes the attitudes of the people who built the rockets and develop the safety systems, who seems to take an almost obscene delight in the fact the girl was killed by the "necessity" he had created. From the trad games forum. Why didn't I think of that!
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Jul 24, 2021 10:19
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Nae posted:I knew he was racist before I started reading his stuff, and even then I was still struck by how much it pervaded the work. I remember being particularly blown away by a segment in Shadow over Innsmouth when the narrator goes on this wild tangent about how ugly the people in Innsmouth are, and makes his point by listing all the races he can think of and saying 'they're even uglier than THOSE freaks!' For me the most bewilderingly out-of-place racism is in 'Herbert West - Re-Animator' where one of the corpses they get is that of a black man and suddenly it's awful, horrible in describing him for like two paragraphs. There's a reading of those stories by Jeffrey Combs on youtube and they just snip that out and it doesn't show at all. Like a lot of his racism is thematic but that's just 'black people sure are horrible, right?' and like - Howard no, gently caress off with this poo poo.
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Jul 24, 2021 10:44
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I finished KJ Parker’s Savages. It’s great, a sort of speed run through the topics he loves to cover, very well paced, so much more confident and concise in its character work than Fencer. It also contains the most links with his other books as possible, though in Parker fashion it’s impossible to tell if he’s just reusing place names and cultures or there’s actually a coherent timeline to events. A lot of similar themes to The Folding Knife. In many ways Parker just writes the same few books over and over again in various combinations, but it’s exciting to see how he tweaks it each time.
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Jul 24, 2021 18:43
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Beefeater1980 posted:I remember when I was reading the Polity books, which are enjoyable, “oh, so this is the right wing version of the Culture” Nah, the Polity is the less subtle version of the Culture. Asher doesn’t do subtlety, which Banks did. Banks have little on Asher’s alien ecosystems though, which is the high points of his stories.
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Jul 24, 2021 21:24
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Cardiac posted:Nah, the Polity is the less subtle version of the Culture. Asher doesn’t do subtlety, which Banks did. There’s definitely a libertarian-type political system behind the Polity.
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Jul 24, 2021 21:43
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a foolish pianist posted:There’s definitely a libertarian-type political system behind the Polity. Well, it's socialist enough to have some sort of post-scarcity/universal basic income thing going on, at least.
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Jul 24, 2021 21:49
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UBI is a beloved libertarian concept, it has nothing to do with socialism.
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Jul 24, 2021 21:51
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:UBI is a beloved libertarian concept, it has nothing to do with socialism. OK, possibly a stupid question, but how do they square that with the whole no-government personal-freedom the-world-doesn't-owe-you-a-living etc poo poo? Is it because they're mostly basement-dwellers living off mum and dad?
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Jul 24, 2021 21:58
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Runcible Cat posted:OK, possibly a stupid question, but how do they square that with the whole no-government personal-freedom the-world-doesn't-owe-you-a-living etc poo poo? Is it because they're mostly basement-dwellers living off mum and dad? Yeah, I guess you’re right on track here. Also, the libertarian opinion leaders, extremely rich tycoons, want to introduce UBI and kill off all other social programs simultaneously.
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Jul 24, 2021 22:13
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Runcible Cat posted:OK, possibly a stupid question, but how do they square that with the whole no-government personal-freedom the-world-doesn't-owe-you-a-living etc poo poo? Is it because they're mostly basement-dwellers living off mum and dad? UBI's popular among the more bleeding heart libertarian types because they don't trust the government to actually do social programs in a fair or rational way, and it's much harder to gently caress up writing everyone a check then it is to gently caress up e.g. foodstamps.
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Jul 24, 2021 23:09
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Patrick Spens posted:UBI's popular among the more bleeding heart libertarian types because they don't trust the government to actually do social programs in a fair or rational way, and it's much harder to gently caress up writing everyone a check then it is to gently caress up e.g. foodstamps. Also then you can trick those rubes into handing over their check through your ubermenschian business prowess as there’s no regulation on what they spend money on or guarantee that the service or product they receive is t a ripoff.
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Jul 24, 2021 23:13
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There's also a big divide between UBI as a baseline living standard (in theory) and UBI as a minimum-cost excuse to slash benefits and shift the blame to recipients ~not spending responsibly~ (in practice)
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Jul 24, 2021 23:34
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That and there’s a difference between academic libertarian theorists (who can at least be interesting, see eg Nozick supporting reparations, and are worth at least understanding and responding to) and the caricature that Internet libertarians understand to be libertarianism.
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Jul 24, 2021 23:46
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Patrick Spens posted:UBI's popular among the more bleeding heart libertarian types because they don't trust the government to actually do social programs in a fair or rational way, and it's much harder to gently caress up writing everyone a check then it is to gently caress up e.g. foodstamps. Captain Monkey posted:Also then you can trick those rubes into handing over their check through your ubermenschian business prowess as there’s no regulation on what they spend money on or guarantee that the service or product they receive is t a ripoff. Strategic Tea posted:There's also a big divide between UBI as a baseline living standard (in theory) and UBI as a minimum-cost excuse to slash benefits and shift the blame to recipients ~not spending responsibly~ (in practice) To all of you I say, read Mack Reynolds. Mack Reynolds was a hardcore socialist that lived what he believed, and over the course of 20+ novels and short stories worked out a interesting world-setting where UBI & capitalism existed side-by side. This setting also had some extreme weirdness like public deathmatch reality tv and hyper-rich white guys who cosplayed as downtrodden black people to kick off race riots/social justice marches resulting in lots of death. e: Oh yeah, Expendable by James Alan Gardner seems to be what John Scalzi's inspiration and goal was when he wrote Red Shirts. Sadly least effort expended John Scalzi happened around that time, and least effort expended John Scalzi is never ever leaving. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jul 25, 2021 |
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Jul 24, 2021 23:52
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quantumfoam posted:public deathmatch reality tv and hyper-rich white guys who cosplayed as downtrodden black people to kick off race riots/social justice marches resulting in lots of death. Hm probably not
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Jul 25, 2021 00:38
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We're halfway there already 
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Jul 25, 2021 00:44
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There Is No Antimemetics Division was good, very absorbing. I got through it in less than a day which is rare. The recent Parker novel Savages also only lasted me a week, so that’s a good track record of books going by in a flash. I might now try Parker’s Engineer series or restart trying to read The Gray House which is an incredibly long and weird take on the magic school genre.
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Jul 25, 2021 02:52
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quantumfoam posted:least effort expended John Scalzi happened around that time, and least effort expended John Scalzi is never ever leaving.
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Jul 25, 2021 06:28
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Captain Monkey posted:Hm probably not Your loss then. I overstated the amount of his hyper-rich white dude stories because they are very eye-roll when you do encounter them, however everything else Mack wrote in his UBI/social classism shared universe is slightly aged but still decent to good in 2021. If you keep in mind that John W Campbell & Robert Heinlein were pimping the hell out of pro-fascism stories during the same time period, those Mack Reynolds stories look better and better. Remulak posted:This is loving spectacular. From now on I will only refer to Scalzi as LEE John Scalzi because LEE (Least Effort Expended) John Scalzi is such a good synopsis of him since 2012. offtopic: Finally stumbled across a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus yesterday; which was something I had been semi-curious about ever since the SFL Archives clued me into it's existence. Verdict: The ]Codex Seraphinianus was a total waste of time. It tried hard but lacked focus and was boring and oddly sterile. One section would be drawings weird morphed plants and animals with Elephant Man style overgrown body parts, the next section would be diagrams of rube-goldberg machines, the next section water-colored circles, then drawings of human body morphs, then budget human body cyborgization mods, then back to drawings of weird morphed plant shapes again, etc.
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Jul 25, 2021 10:41
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Finally wrapped The Golem And The Jinni last week. What an incredible book! There’s a little bit of sequel fodder at the end, but there’s a sequel. If I’d read this when it first came out though, I’d have been satisfied. One thing I had a small issue with was the overarching plot. The reveal that the evil rabbi was the reincarnation of the wizard that imprisoned the jinni in the flask came real quick, and from then on there was some weird pacing. The book sort of climaxed, stopped, and climaxed again which felt odd. Also, Michael didn’t have much of an arc and died unceremoniously. He felt like a speedbump for the golem’s development, honestly. Minor quibbles for a book that I really quite enjoyed. I hope the sequel is focused more on the development of these characters, as opposed to Earthshaking plot revelations, since I think that’s what she does better as an author. I only pick on this stuff because the book was so excellent.
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Jul 25, 2021 14:48
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Orc Priest posted:Man, the prince of nothing series loving sucks. kind of felt like I got tricked into reading that.
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Jul 25, 2021 17:16
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Armauk posted:Why did you hate it? Did you read all three books? I haven't read it and have no skin in the game here but this reply is hilarious. "Did you eat the whole poo poo sandwich before you decided it tasted like poo poo?"
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Jul 25, 2021 17:30
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Armauk posted:Why did you hate it? Did you read all three books? I read all three, and Orc Priest's not wrong.
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Jul 25, 2021 17:34
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