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A Proper Uppercut posted:One of the guys on a non-book related podcast pronounced Elric's title as Elric of Melon bone. That was long before I listened to the audiobooks and it took a while to get that straight in my head. drat you. Now I want a parody movie called El Rick of Melon Bone. Preferably starring Jack Black.
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Aug 6, 2022 14:39
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freebooter posted:Incidentally Rama is Denis Villeneuve's next project, which given his track record should be loving great 
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Aug 6, 2022 15:05
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freebooter posted:Incidentally Rama is Denis Villeneuve's next project, which given his track record should be loving great Hm this seems like it could be good.
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Aug 6, 2022 15:18
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Finished up Upgrade this morning by Blake Crouch. Was a pretty good read but I was kinda disappointed. When the plot involves virus infection altering human bodies, I kinda expect it to have some body horror style shenanigans. This was not the case. Mood wise it was kinda dismal/dark but it tried to play up hope as well, so it wasn't quite a dystopian nightmare seeing but damned close. Overall I'd rank it 4 out of 5. Good but more of a hardish sci fi thriller than an action packed weird horror book.
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Aug 6, 2022 15:21
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A Proper Uppercut posted:One of the guys on a non-book related podcast pronounced Elric's title as Elric of Melon bone. That was long before I listened to the audiobooks and it took a while to get that straight in my head. I think it's not uncommon, since Moorcock felt the need to slip a pronunciation guide into one of the stories (at one point, someone tells Elric they've never heard of "Mulnebooney").
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Aug 6, 2022 16:36
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"ah El-rick of Melonbone, we meet at l-" *my soul is sucked out my body*
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Aug 6, 2022 16:51
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Selachian posted:I think it's not uncommon, since Moorcock felt the need to slip a pronunciation guide into one of the stories (at one point, someone tells Elric they've never heard of "Mulnebooney").
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Aug 6, 2022 17:00
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Finished up Upgrade this morning by Blake Crouch. Was a pretty good read but I was kinda disappointed. When the plot involves virus infection altering human bodies, I kinda expect it to have some body horror style shenanigans. This was not the case. Similar feelings from me, except I couldn't get over how the author took the hyperloop seriously. Took me out of the story and made me question the authors competence.
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Aug 6, 2022 17:19
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Philip K Dick books The Best of Philip K Dick - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NN7S26B/ The Cosmic Puppets - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LVQZFM/ We Can Build You - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LVQYW/G The Simulacra - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LVQZKW/ The Red Knight (Traitor Son #1) by Miles Cameron - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007ZFPUL2/ Spellslinger (#1) by Sebastien de Castell - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079DNTPRK/
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Aug 6, 2022 17:29
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General Battuta posted:This literal game exists and was my childhood? Except you do have to do adventure game bullshit too. The 1984 version is on archive.org, https://archive.org/details/msdos_Rendezvous_with_Rama_1984
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Aug 6, 2022 18:10
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Finished up Upgrade this morning by Blake Crouch. Was a pretty good read but I was kinda disappointed. When the plot involves virus infection altering human bodies, I kinda expect it to have some body horror style shenanigans. This was not the case. Yeah it felt like a sort of bloated version of that one Ted Chiang short story.
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Aug 6, 2022 18:10
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Well, bought the Elric saga for the third time. A new comprehensive, chronological version was too much to pass up. Link to this?
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Aug 6, 2022 18:17
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Carrier posted:Elric owns. Moorcock owns. I think he's criminally under-represented in discussions of foundational fantasy online. I laughed at this as absurd but on further reflection I think you're right: the series as a whole is namechecked all the time and Elric is a legendary figure, but there's not the amount of modern discussion on the stories I'd expect (at least, as much as they probably deserve: don't want to go too far on this as to pretend they're unknown or whatever, and they're still in print to this day). Moorcock's tinkering with the texts and the order and then his determination to pretty much only have them published in this revised (textually and chronologically) fashion likely hasn't helped, as it raises the buy-in on the series in terms of word count and pads out the good stuff with the weaker later bits. I really like the Gollancz single-volume edition that just has the original mid-60s run of stories: pair that with the prequel novel and I think you're good. And yeah, Corum, Hawkmoon and whatnot are pretty much footnotes to Elric, which is too bad, as there's some great stuff there. At the same time, I tend to feel SF has a bit of a history problem anyways: there's a lot of foundational stuff that seems to be rapidly disappearing into history, and while some of that is clunky stuff that's logically becoming just a footnote, plenty more is worth a read to this day. As an aside, I think it's neat that Elric was one of those things that everyone knows but seems to have been little copied. There were tons of Conan knock-offs like the awful Thongor books, and even some Tolkien knock-offs like The Sword of Shannara and Dennis L McKiernan's Iron Tower series (along with all the broader Tolkienesque works), but I don't think anyone tried to create a world-weary albino sorcerer bandwagon. Xotl fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Aug 6, 2022 |
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Aug 6, 2022 21:27
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re: blake crouch's upgrade, i got to the encrypted dna secret message and it just got way too stupid for me to continue. in case anyone's curious: If my mother had intended to message me through my genetic code, she had a problem to overcome. How to communicate using only four symbols. And how to create a cipher with A, C, G, and T that only someone looking for it could detect. Kara walked over, put her hand on my shoulder. I looked up at her, said, “What if the T’s and A’s don’t actually represent letters or other symbols?” “Why wouldn’t they?” “Because they never repeat. Maybe their purpose is to indicate the start of a word or…” And suddenly, I saw how I would create a substitution code based on the four letters of DNA. “Oh my god.” “What?” “If you had created this code,” I said, “what two base units of communication would be essential for this cipher to indicate?” “Numbers and letters.” “What if the T’s and A’s indicate what the next character will be? One of them—the A perhaps—means the character will be a number. And the T means that you have to go a step further and translate the number into a letter of the alphabet.” “You mean like one equals A, two equals B, all the way to twenty-six equals Z?” “Exactly.” “So then the G’s and C’s represent numbers?” she asked. “That’s how I’d do it. And if I only had two symbols with which to write any number, I’d use something like the Roman numeral system. Let the G equal five, and the C equal 1. Or the other way around. Look at the first sequence.” I wrote out TCCCCCCCG. “Assume T means that the CCCCCCCG is creating a number. The sequence could stand for twelve or thirty-six. Or the T could be designating that the sequence is creating a letter, which means we do one more operation to get a letter of the alphabet. So then it’s L or…wait, no.” I scanned the code again, smiling now. “Yep. If my theory is right, I know what C and G are. G is one, C is five.” “You sure?” “Look at the second sequence. ACCCG. Let’s assume C is one. You would not write the number eight that way with Roman numerals. You’d write it GCCC.” “So G is one, C is five.” “Let’s assume that for now. Which means the only outstanding question is, what do the T and the A stand for. Based on our assumption that G is one and C is five, I just have to solve this code as if T represents a letter, A a number, and then do the inverse.” “The T’s can’t signal letters,” she said. I looked at the first sequence again. “You’re right.” Seven C’s followed by a G is thirty-six. Too high to correspond to a letter of the alphabet. I made a pot of coffee, and while it brewed, I glanced outside again through the curtains. The snow had stopped. It was eight in the morning, and the town was waking up. I returned to the table and started the process of transposing the nucleotides, making the T’s signal numbers, the A’s letters. The first nine characters translated to the number 36. The next five sequences spelled out the word point. I raced to transpose the rest. 36POINT5625NORTH106POINT217777WEST
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Aug 6, 2022 22:46
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Zoracle Zed posted:re: blake crouch's upgrade, i got to the encrypted dna secret message and it just got way too stupid for me to continue. in case anyone's curious:
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Aug 6, 2022 23:38
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Xotl posted:I laughed at this as absurd but on further reflection I think you're right: the series as a whole is namechecked all the time and Elric is a legendary figure, but there's not the amount of modern discussion on the stories I'd expect (at least, as much as they probably deserve: don't want to go too far on this as to pretend they're unknown or whatever, and they're still in print to this day). Moorcock's tinkering with the texts and the order and then his determination to pretty much only have them published in this revised (textually and chronologically) fashion likely hasn't helped, as it raises the buy-in on the series in terms of word count and pads out the good stuff with the weaker later bits. I really like the Gollancz single-volume edition that just has the original mid-60s run of stories: pair that with the prequel novel and I think you're good. And yeah, Corum, Hawkmoon and whatnot are pretty much footnotes to Elric, which is too bad, as there's some great stuff there. Well, there's always Anomander Rake from the Malazan Books. And while I'm a Moorcock fanboy (I've got a solid two shelves of his stuff, everything from the Eternal Champion books to The Golden Barge and the Hawkwind novels), I'm not really surprised they're falling out of favor. They may not be as problematic as Lovecraft or Howard -- the torture scene in Elric of Melniboné aside -- but they are dated. I'm not really crazy about the Gollancz chronological edition, either. Having to wade through the script to the Elric: Making of a Sorcerer comics before you get to Elric of Melniboné seems like the sort of thing that'd put off anyone who's not already a hardcore fan.
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Aug 7, 2022 00:11
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navyjack posted:Link to this? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W2M5JQX?binding=kindle_edition&qid=1659827924&sr=8-2&ref=dbs_dp_awt_sb_pc_tukn Broken up into three omnibusses with the last coming in October.
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Aug 7, 2022 00:20
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Zoracle Zed posted:re: blake crouch's upgrade, i got to the encrypted dna secret message and it just got way too stupid for me to continue. in case anyone's curious: Oh, don't worry, it gets way dumber. More actiony though, so it's a fair trade off.
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Aug 7, 2022 01:10
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Xotl posted:As an aside, I think it's neat that Elric was one of those things that everyone knows but seems to have been little copied. There were tons of Conan knock-offs like the awful Thongor books, and even some Tolkien knock-offs like The Sword of Shannara and Dennis L McKiernan's Iron Tower series (along with all the broader Tolkienesque works), but I don't think anyone tried to create a world-weary albino sorcerer bandwagon. I don't know, I think the stereotype of albino men being angsty anti-heroes (when they aren't outright villains) has stuck around to a bizarre degree, unfortunately. I'm not sure the Elric books have been particularly influential beyond that one trope, though.
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Aug 7, 2022 01:13
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W2M5JQX?binding=kindle_edition&qid=1659827924&sr=8-2&ref=dbs_dp_awt_sb_pc_tukn Just hardcover and audiobook options for me (Australia but with a .com based account). I have most of them somewhere in storage but would probably buy a Kindle edition because I'm too lazy to look for them
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Aug 7, 2022 01:16
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Xotl posted:
Out of curiosity, what do you see as disappearing? I agree in general, I'm just always curious what authors or eras in particular people see as being underrepresented because I came to a lot of non-modern sci Fi and fantasy pretty late as a reader, so I'm not sure what just doesn't get mentioned anymore. I feel like I didn't really get many Jack Vance recommendations until I was on SA, and I'm sure he's not the only one.
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Aug 7, 2022 02:33
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Lord Dunsany Alfred Bester
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Aug 7, 2022 02:41
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Not gonna lie, almost everything in my library is from 1970 or later, and a very good portion is from 2000 or later, so yeah. Maybe that's just life, though. Older stuff is quickly forgotten unless it's exceptional, and the more time that passes, the harder it is to clear the bar.
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Aug 7, 2022 03:24
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Revenger trilogy by Alastair Reynolds was kinda a Bester homage.
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Aug 7, 2022 03:40
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TOOT BOOT posted:Not gonna lie, almost everything in my library is from 1970 or later, and a very good portion is from 2000 or later, so yeah. Maybe that's just life, though. Older stuff is quickly forgotten unless it's exceptional, and the more time that passes, the harder it is to clear the bar. Pretty much where I am as well. Aside from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the oldest stuff I own is The Doomfarers of Coramonde and The Starfollowers of Coramonde by Brian Daley from 1977 or so before he wrote the Han Solo books. They both hold up pretty well.
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Aug 7, 2022 03:44
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Has anybody read Silk Fire? It's been subject to a pretty intense reviewbombing campaign and most of the reviewers seem angrier about twitter discourse than the book, but the excerpts I've seen strike me as a bit overdeveloped and purple, trying to figure out whether it's worth picking up.
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Aug 7, 2022 03:48
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W2M5JQX?binding=kindle_edition&qid=1659827924&sr=8-2&ref=dbs_dp_awt_sb_pc_tukn Sir, you tempt me. I haven't seriously tried to read Elric in over a decade and it might be time. Would this be the ideal order for a newcomer to Moorcock's stuff?
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Aug 7, 2022 04:04
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StrixNebulosa posted:Sir, you tempt me. I haven't seriously tried to read Elric in over a decade and it might be time. Would this be the ideal order for a newcomer to Moorcock's stuff? Studying the tables of contents, it looks like a pretty good order. For some reason, it interpolates The Revenge of the Rose and The Fortress of the Pearl, which are later books, in the main sequence, probably for reasons of chronology. It seems odd to me to introduce a single book featuring the Rose, who is a major character in Moorcock's post-80s work but doesn't appear at all in the 70s books. I'm not sure what the third omnibus is going to consist of, but I assume it's the 2000s books (The Dreamthief's Daughter, The White Wolf's Son, The Skrayling Tree). On the Moorcock tip, I'm currently reading one of his attempts at being a serious mainstream writer, King of the City. It has its moments, but it's running out of energy long before the end, and the bits where Moorcock tries to comment on contemporary (early 2000s) politics are heavy on the old-man grumbling, and the part where his photojournalist protagonist gets caught in the Rwanda genocide feels like misery tourism. For my money, Moorcock's best "serious writer" book is still his first one, The Brothel in Rosenstrasse. Admittedly, I haven't managed to make it through Mother London yet. Selachian fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Aug 7, 2022 |
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Aug 7, 2022 04:18
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Selachian posted:I'm not sure what the third omnibus is going to consist of, but I assume it's the 2000s books (The Dreamthief's Daughter, The White Wolf's Son, The Skrayling Tree). That’s right, yeah. This has all the included books: https://www.tor.com/2021/03/02/revealing-omnibus-editions-of-michael-moorcocks-elric-of-melnibone/ There’s also going to be a new novel (novella?) at the end of these being published. The order is pretty good for a new reader, although yes, the Fortress of the Pearl fits chronologically but yeah the tone shift is pretty loving wild.
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Aug 7, 2022 04:55
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Gaius Marius posted:Lord Dunsany Oh Dunsany is a good call, I've been aware of him for years because when I was younger I made a (very ill-advised) attempt to read all of Lovecraft's works and heard that all his dream cycle stuff was pretty heavily influenced by Dunsany. I should read more from him.
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Aug 7, 2022 05:41
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Gaius Marius posted:Lord Dunsany for a really, really long time the only place I'd ever heard of Bester was this joke on The Simpsons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0rgZf35KxU
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Aug 7, 2022 06:07
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Well, bought the Elric saga for the third time. A new comprehensive, chronological version was too much to pass up. Is this on Kindle, and if so, can you link it? Edit - NM, it was linked like three posts above me. Thanks! Silly Newbie fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Aug 7, 2022 |
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Aug 7, 2022 08:15
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MockingQuantum posted:Out of curiosity, what do you see as disappearing? I agree in general, I'm just always curious what authors or eras in particular people see as being underrepresented because I came to a lot of non-modern sci Fi and fantasy pretty late as a reader, so I'm not sure what just doesn't get mentioned anymore. I feel like I didn't really get many Jack Vance recommendations until I was on SA, and I'm sure he's not the only one. I was gonna say Jack Vance, but you said it. Avram Davidson R. A. Lafferty Greg Egan feels like even though he's still publishing is getting less and less recommended (his 90s stuff is really good!) Roger Zelazny Samuel R. Delany Theodore Sturgeon Nancy Kress Simak (he wrote a lot S.F. that could now be described as cozy) Christopher Priest Pat Cadigan Thomas M. Disch Hugh Cook was never really appreciated which is a shame because he did harshly ironic picaresque sf/fantasy better than anyone since Vance I don't think Mary Gentle gets any play outside this forum Robert Silverberg John Crowley is enormously rewarding to read (except ironically his big iconic series) Maureen F. McHugh fez_machine fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Aug 7, 2022 |
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Aug 7, 2022 11:50
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Falls Down Stairs posted:for a really, really long time the only place I'd ever heard of Bester was this joke on The Simpsons My awareness came indirectly from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s72fJb7a-s8 Incidentally, that character is the first suggestion from Google search. Still cool that Walter Koenig actually has two iconic sci-fi characters.
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Aug 7, 2022 12:30
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Zoracle Zed posted:re: blake crouch's upgrade, i got to the encrypted dna secret message and it just got way too stupid for me to continue. in case anyone's curious:
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Aug 7, 2022 12:33
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Everyone posted:My awareness came indirectly from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s72fJb7a-s8 lol I was kinda expecting this from your blind youtube link  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1IxOS4VzKM
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Aug 7, 2022 12:50
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Shwoo posted:Is there some context for why encoding a message with only four possible symbols is treated as difficult here, or does the author just not know about binary? Or codons, actually. I'd guess there's a lot the author doesn't know about (such as triplets of codons represent amino acids, which have at least 20 letters to choose from)
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Aug 7, 2022 13:07
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Shwoo posted:Is there some context for why encoding a message with only four possible symbols is treated as difficult here, or does the author just not know about binary? Or codons, actually. No. Also the encryption scheme was devised by the greatest genius of all time or whatever.
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Aug 7, 2022 14:27
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fritz posted:I'd guess there's a lot the author doesn't know about (such as triplets of codons represent amino acids, which have at least 20 letters to choose from) Also people have already encoded the entire works of Shakespeare to DNA. If this author had bothered to look it up, maybe he coulda found out how
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Aug 7, 2022 14:33
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Bester's The Demolished Man will always be a book whose adaptation would be vastly improved if they kept the basic premise ( murderer plays cat-and-mouse with telepath detective) and threw everything beyond that into the loving bin.
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Aug 7, 2022 14:42
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