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Goddamn, but LeGuin owned really hard.
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Jan 10, 2022 21:25
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The ending where Podkayne lives is obviously better because there's no reason why she ought to die except to let Heinlein complain about women with careers.
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Jan 10, 2022 21:43
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Groke posted:Goddamn, but LeGuin owned really hard.
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Jan 10, 2022 21:52
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That’s such a great article
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Jan 10, 2022 21:57
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Captain Monkey posted:Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the worst books I've ever read, and it has the worst Mary Sues this side of a fanfic archive. Lol I think the exact same thing but about Time Enough For Love
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Jan 10, 2022 23:46
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ursula k "i would simply imagine things well enough that everyone believed i was an expert. it is faster than research" le guin. rip to a legend
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Jan 11, 2022 00:24
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actually, you can only write about things that you know and have experienced personally. that's basically stolen valor.
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Jan 11, 2022 00:48
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Thranguy posted:I think it's specifically imitating Heinlein's Juveniles. Stross did fine with late Heinlein. Varley did well with the adult Heinlein inspired 9 worlds and horribly when he targeted the kids books, and Barnes' take on those books was a trainwreck.. David Gerrold did an outstanding job with the Jumping off the Planet series as a modern take on the juveniles. And his Loonies are much less hosed up than Heinlein's.
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Jan 11, 2022 01:08
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Stranger with a Strange Gland
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Jan 11, 2022 01:49
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tokenbrownguy posted:my book club finished stranger in a strange land last month. needless to say, group panned it pretty badly. god that ending loving sucked. You actually read it all? You poor bastards. I stopped at most halfway through, by which time I had read enough to know that I would never again be able to hear someone use "grok" unironically without an overpowering urge to kill.
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Jan 11, 2022 02:05
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At least the self-insert in stranger doesn’t take part in the group sex. That’s not true in all of Heinlein’s books
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Jan 11, 2022 02:09
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I think All You Zombies has a self-insert
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Jan 11, 2022 02:22
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General Battuta posted:I think All You Zombies has a self-insert Isn't literally every character in All You Zombies the same person at different points in a self-stable timeloop?
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Jan 11, 2022 02:26
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General Battuta posted:I think All You Zombies has a self-insert 
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Jan 11, 2022 02:28
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Zore posted:Isn't literally every character in All You Zombies the same person at different points in a self-stable timeloop? whoosh
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Jan 11, 2022 02:29
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General Battuta posted:whoosh 
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Jan 11, 2022 02:36
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Jan 11, 2022 02:41
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General Battuta posted:I think All You Zombies has a self-insert Someone ban this man. Or make him king. Any option in between is cowardice.
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Jan 11, 2022 03:01
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I think I'mma skip Glen Cooks Silver Spike and move right back into the main story with Croaker and Lady. Its more interesting and I wanna find out what happens.
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Jan 11, 2022 03:26
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I liked moon is a harsh mistress a lot. I don't think it really has much interesting to say beyond 'dont put slaves at the top of the gravity well'. But it's pretty decent. The family units are bizarre but since they're, on a base level, just a futuristic clan or tribe it's whatever. It didn't feel like Heinlein was jacking himself off over it like in Stranger.
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Jan 11, 2022 03:57
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General Battuta posted:I think All You Zombies has a self-insert So Does Time Enough For Love, technically. For all the weird sex stuff it was the author insert Mary Sueing that most irritated me about Heinlein (and plenty of his peers are guilty of it too). If you are writing an author surrogate character who is an incredibly smart and competent man who never experiences any failures or doubts and is constantly lecturing the inferior, unintelligent characters around him, then I can only assume that's how the author literally views the world as he moves throughout his life. Not the kind of guy you want to get stuck in an elevator with.
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Jan 11, 2022 04:14
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Larry Parrish posted:I liked moon is a harsh mistress a lot. I don't think it really has much interesting to say beyond 'dont put slaves at the top of the gravity well'. But it's pretty decent. The family units are bizarre but since they're, on a base level, just a futuristic clan or tribe it's whatever. It didn't feel like Heinlein was jacking himself off over it like in Stranger. I mean it's still super gross though as usual. The main character is married, among other people, to a 14-year-old girl. Another 14-year-old is sexually assaulted and other characters say that women her age ought to be married. The women of the moon are stated to have all the power but their main role is still to just be emotional, look pretty, and sleep with men to keep them productive and happy. It's just so loving tedious, the same bullshit. Heinlein didn't really think of women as people, or not *real* people anyway, not like men are real people.
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Jan 11, 2022 04:50
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HopperUK posted:I mean it's still super gross though as usual. The main character is married, among other people, to a 14-year-old girl. Another 14-year-old is sexually assaulted and other characters say that women her age ought to be married. The women of the moon are stated to have all the power but their main role is still to just be emotional, look pretty, and sleep with men to keep them productive and happy. It's just so loving tedious, the same bullshit. Heinlein didn't really think of women as people, or not *real* people anyway, not like men are real people. lol. i don't remember any of that at all. but the last half is true, he definetly treats women like particularly smart cats or something. only autonomous in a vague sense. but it's so common to see that attitude especially in old books that i pretty much tune it out.
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Jan 11, 2022 06:14
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Nomnom Cookie posted:At least the self-insert in stranger doesn’t take part in the group sex. That’s not true in all of Heinlein’s books wrong
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Jan 11, 2022 09:17
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also I finished the seven and half deaths of evelyn hardcastle, a pretty decent parlor mystery. maybe a bit long, but there's a fun level of character building for the protagonist that makes the dryer first half worth it. and the second half gets pretty fun pretty quick
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Jan 11, 2022 09:19
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Nomnom Cookie posted:ursula k "i would simply imagine things well enough that everyone believed i was an expert. it is faster than research" le guin. rip to a legend That's a funny story. Reminds me of this one about the mathematician Ramanujan: quote:"Imagine that you are on a street with houses marked 1 through n. There is a house in between (x) such that the sum of the house numbers to the left of it equals the sum of the house numbers to its right. If n is between 50 and 500, what are n and x?" This is a bivariate problem with multiple solutions. Ramanujan thought about it and gave the answer with a twist: He gave a continued fraction. The unusual part was that it was the solution to the whole class of problems. Mahalanobis was astounded and asked how he did it. 'It is simple. The minute I heard the problem, I knew that the answer was a continued fraction. Which continued fraction, I asked myself. Then the answer came to my mind', Ramanujan replied.
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Jan 11, 2022 09:24
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I will disagree with the Nicoll article in one particular: as a kid in the 1970s, I loved the (late 50s/early 60s) Tom Swift Jr. novels. (I had a complete set, but stupidly gave it away to another kid.) And I even liked my grandparents' copies of the original 1910s Tom Swift novels, although they're pretty cringeworthy in retrospect. The books, not my grandparents. As for Heinlein juveniles, I remember reading Podkayne of Mars when I was a kid but it didn't make enough of an impression on me to remember much about it. I much preferred Louis Slobodkin's Space Ship Under the Apple Tree books, or the Matthew Looney books.
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Jan 11, 2022 15:13
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Selachian posted:I will disagree with the Nicoll article in one particular: as a kid in the 1970s, I loved the (late 50s/early 60s) Tom Swift Jr. novels. (I had a complete set, but stupidly gave it away to another kid.) And I even liked my grandparents' copies of the original 1910s Tom Swift novels, although they're pretty cringeworthy in retrospect. The books, not my grandparents. I read my dad's old Tom Swift Jr. collection in the 90s and enjoyed them a lot. Bounced off the OG books, though. Apparently there's a fan project to update/modernize the books, called Tom Swift Lives; I keep meaning to check it out but have yet to get around to it.
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Jan 11, 2022 16:19
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ToxicFrog posted:I read my dad's old Tom Swift Jr. collection in the 90s and enjoyed them a lot. Bounced off the OG books, though. That's probably needed, the originals got updated at least once during reprints because they were horribly dated with racism (and technology, but mostly racism), I think only the original versions are the public domain ones. Tom Swift is in the Nancy Drew tv show I think and they were trying to make a spinoff but IIRC the network passed I never read Tom Swift stuff but I did read lots of old books (i.e. the original Oz books including tracking down the Thompson ones), absolutely no one I knew as a kid read anything similar to that. I'd probably have liked the Tom Swift Jr books had I heard of them. Years ago I got into reading about old series of kids adventure books after watching episodes of Venture Brothers, ran across the Three Investigators series, which was first published as Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, and Hitchcock was a character the kids would talk to. Eventually he was dropped and a rando adult was substituted, then after 50ish books they revamped the series and made the kids old enough to drive for a few books (in the originals, one of the kids had a driver that would drive them around). One of the kids is named Jupiter Jones, whose is probably the character you may have seen references to in other media. The series is mostly dead in the US beyond occasionally republishing books to retain rights (which are split between several parties so the whole thing is a mess) BUT! There are foreign versions. Germany started translating books and then just wrote their own, including spinoff series and audio plays and a few movies that came out within the past decade. They were published in Bangladesh by Sheba Prokashoni as Tin Goyenda (heavily modified to fit the country) , when they rand out of books they then translated another kid series, Enid Blyton's The Famous Five, and then more Blyton series called The Five Find-Outers and The Adventure Series. They also just outright copies other juvenile book plots, like Hardy Boys, and later translated Christopher Pike's Spooksville as stories. As you can guess, the whole thing is a mess but also hilarious to read about, just imagine if Encyclopedia Brown was like 8 different unrelated franchises. The series is still going on and has a tv show, at this point it looks like they've aged up the main characters so the new main characters are their kids. They've been translated to at least 20 other countries complete with localizations though none as extensive as Germany and Bangladesh
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Jan 11, 2022 18:33
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Tom Swift (jr? I don't remember) and Encyclopedia Brown were my jam at at a very specific age, growing up.
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Jan 11, 2022 19:01
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Three Investigators and Encyclopedia Brown were very much in my list at a young age. I still remember the key clue from the Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot.
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Jan 11, 2022 19:09
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So I tuned out of The Laundry Files a few books back. It was maybe about vampires or maybe about elves but was definitely about something I didn’t care much about. If any one is caught up (new book out today), has Bob come back into the main story in a significant way? If not as the protagonist but at least as a major NPC?
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Jan 11, 2022 19:16
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Wait, there's a new book today? Dead Lies Dreaming is the start of a spin-off series with a non-Laundry cast in the rather hosed-up world of Normal Island, which now has rubbish superheroes, an even nastier prime minister, a lot of human sacrifice, and refugee elves. I liked it and am eagerly awaiting the sequel. Bob's mostly been busy off doing high-level stuff in the main series but apparently he's coming back at some point? e: oh poo poo, that sequel is the new book 90s Cringe Rock fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 19:19
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navyjack posted:So I tuned out of The Laundry Files a few books back. It was maybe about vampires or maybe about elves but was definitely about something I didn’t care much about. If any one is caught up (new book out today), has Bob come back into the main story in a significant way? If not as the protagonist but at least as a major NPC? It looks like we're getting two Laundry Files books this year. The one that comes out this year follows the storyline from Dead Lies Dreaming and on March 1st we get a new Bob book.
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Jan 11, 2022 19:54
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Tars Tarkas posted:Years ago I got into reading about old series of kids adventure books after watching episodes of Venture Brothers, ran across the Three Investigators series, which was first published as Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, and Hitchcock was a character the kids would talk to. Eventually he was dropped and a rando adult was substituted, then after 50ish books they revamped the series and made the kids old enough to drive for a few books (in the originals, one of the kids had a driver that would drive them around). One of the kids is named Jupiter Jones, whose is probably the character you may have seen references to in other media. Somehow, the tidbit that Jupiter "Baby Fatso" Jones won the use of a chauffeured Rolls Royce in a contest is always at the back of my mind. Otherwise I remember nothing about those books and forgot they existed.
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Jan 11, 2022 20:07
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The one that I read, The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale, replaced the chauffeur with a Mexican kid named Pancho who drove them around in a Mad Max junkmobile. This is one of two things I remember about that book, the other being the wacky Asian guru who tried to get them to eat raw fish. Really stuck out to me when I read it in the late '90s or so, feels like it would have been a bit much even in 1983. Also, I had assumed that Pancho's whole story had been told in a previous book, but it appears that this was his entire introduction:quote:Pancho was a young Mexican the Three Investigators had helped out of trouble when the police suspected him of stealing spare parts from the garage where he was then working. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 20:48
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Just realized that even though i have a bunch of them, I've never actually read any books by Octavia E. Butler. Should fix that.
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Jan 11, 2022 21:21
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Sibling of TB posted:Just realized that even though i have a bunch of them, I've never actually read any books by Octavia E. Butler. Should fix that. This is Valente for me. I have like 3 of her books sitting in my to-read since before the pandemic.
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Jan 11, 2022 21:27
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Search Party did a take on Stranger in A Strange Land for its final season and even as a parody/satire the general beats of the plot kind of sucks.
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Jan 11, 2022 22:11
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Sibling of TB posted:Just realized that even though i have a bunch of them, I've never actually read any books by Octavia E. Butler. Should fix that. Eh, I read the Xenogenesis series and found it mediocre to bad. I hope you have a better experience.
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Jan 11, 2022 22:19
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