Mikojan posted:Checking out the hamilton chap. Seems like he wrote a trilorgy called 'the Void'. Is that one worth picking up as well? They’re on my list but I’ve not read them yet. They’re in very distant future of same universe as the Commonwealth Saga books (Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained) with some overlap in characters. They’re supposedly heavier on fantasy (as opposed to sci fi) elements, for what that’s worth.
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Mar 18, 2024 19:52
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zoux posted:Arguably the Butlerian Jihad wasn't Humans v AI but rather Humans who were fat and lazy because of AI and because a major theme of the books is "hard living makes hard men" living the WALL-E life would be anathema. In the Bad Son Books it is explicitly a war between humans and 12 cyborg AIs that stomp around in huge Battletech warframes and call themselves Cymeks. Nah, man, the Butlerian Jihad entry in the appendix to Dune explicitly says it was "the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots," and the existential threat that Leto II sees is prescient seeker robots. Fighting against killer robots was always what the Butlerian Jihad was about. It's just Brian and KJA took that in the most boring direction they could and turned those conscious robots into Saturday morning cartoon villains that would make Megatron and Starscream blush.
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Mar 18, 2024 20:38
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PeterWeller posted:Nah, man, the Butlerian Jihad entry in the appendix to Dune explicitly says it was "the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots," and the existential threat that Leto II sees is prescient seeker robots. Fighting against killer robots was always what the Butlerian Jihad was about. It's just Brian and KJA took that in the most boring direction they could and turned those conscious robots into Saturday morning cartoon villains that would make Megatron and Starscream blush. Maybe the confusion here is about those 'titans' aka people turning themselves into robots enslaving humanity, before they themselves get enslaved by actual AI. edit - from the dune wiki quote:During the rule of the Titans, the group relied to a lesser or greater extent on the Thinking Machines - the limited artificial intelligences present in the various networks and robots around them. While many of the Titans sought physical pleasure (usually through violence or sex), the Thinking Machines controlled the daily operations of the new empire. So basically humans enslaved other humans by transferring their own consciousness into robotics called Cymeks. The cymeks relied on AI to deal with managing their empire. The AI eventually breaks free of the Cymeks and fucks everything. The Jihad comes in to deal with the double threat of the AI and the titans. So you are both right Mikojan fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 20:53
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PeterWeller posted:Nah, man, the Butlerian Jihad entry in the appendix to Dune explicitly says it was "the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots," and the existential threat that Leto II sees is prescient seeker robots. Fighting against killer robots was always what the Butlerian Jihad was about. It's just Brian and KJA took that in the most boring direction they could and turned those conscious robots into Saturday morning cartoon villains that would make Megatron and Starscream blush. Disagree. “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - R.M. G. Helen Mohiam to a young Paul Atreides, Dune. The very next line is Paul reciting the prohibition on thinking machines from the OC Bible. “What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger.” - Leto II, GEoD. Also here's another danger of technology - when all your books are digital, they can change your book covers from stylized and beautiful works of art to movie posters.
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Mar 18, 2024 21:00
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zoux posted:Yeah I just read the wiki summary of Sandworms of Dune and now I'm mad irl, don't read the prequels/sequels not written by Frank. It will never stop being funny to me that the guy I knew from childhood for writing bad star wars novels made his name writing bad sequels to a big SF classic.
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Mar 18, 2024 21:22
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Yaoi Gagarin posted:It will never stop being funny to me that the guy I knew from childhood for writing bad star wars novels made his name writing bad sequels to a big SF classic. Exactly the same. Friggin Jedi Academy.
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Mar 18, 2024 21:41
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Mikojan posted:Maybe the confusion here is about those 'titans' aka people turning themselves into robots enslaving humanity, before they themselves get enslaved by actual AI. The Titan stuff is from the Brian Herbert and KJA books exclusively and thus is not part of any decent and thoughtful discussion of Dune  zoux posted:Disagree. These lines do not contradict the appendix, which I previously quoted, or the part where Siona sees that "the seeking machines would be there, the smell of blood and entrails, the cowering humans in their burrows aware only that they couldn't escape" (God Emperor of Dune 348) or when Leto II tells her upon his death, "do not fear the Ixians ... They can make the machines, but they no longer can make arafel (the apocalypse) (God Emperor of Dune 420). Like don't get me wrong, the whole "computers and automation make humans easily enslaved" theme is totally there too and more important overall than the specific identity of the enemies cast down 10,000 years before the novels begin. But the Butlerian Jihad is explicitly fought against actual robots and AI. The Dune Encyclopedia states the inciting incident was a women finding out the AI running her local hospital was selectively aborting viable children for its own nefarious schemes.
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Mar 18, 2024 21:50
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Mikojan posted:Dang, thanks for that. Maybe I'll get deeper into the foundation universe. Mysterious alien races, alien planets, search for old technology, space battles, big dumb objects. First three are one big story. Marauder is stand alone and set after the trilogy. Tobias S. Buckell's Xenowealth: Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose, The Apocalypse Ocean Aztec gods, human rebellion, heavy Caribbean influence, books set in common universe with a few repeating characters and callbacks but still an overarching story. Corey J. White's The Voidwitch Saga: Killing Gravity, Void Black Shadow, Static Ruin Genetically engineered space witch can wreck space ships with her mind. Also has a pokemon-thing as a pet. Start-Middle-End trilogy Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Final Architecture: Shards of Earth, Eyes of the Void, Lords of Uncreation Almost done with Book 1, so I can't speak for the next two, but so far: Moon sized antagonists, plenty of alien races, zooming around the universe, old artefacts, lots of fighting and adventuring. eighty-four merc posted:They’re on my list but I’ve not read them yet. They’re in very distant future of same universe as the Commonwealth Saga books (Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained) with some overlap in characters. They’re supposedly heavier on fantasy (as opposed to sci fi) elements, for what that’s worth.
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Mar 18, 2024 22:37
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Stormwarden (Cycle of Fire #1) by Janny Wurts - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08S7JSSY9/ Keeper of the Keys (Cycle of Fire #2) by Janny Wurts - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08S6V4DV5/ The Magician's Apprentice (Black Magician) by Trudi Canavan - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001RTKITG/ Crucible of Chaos (Court of Shadows) by Sebastien de Castell - $0.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGHQG63V/ The Hour of the Dragon (Conan) by Robert E Howard - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07715L75N/ Some space opera not mentioned yet. Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire (Ninefox Gambit, Raven Stratagem, Revenant Gun) Max Gladstone's Empress of Forever pradmer fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 22:39
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PeterWeller posted:The Dune Encyclopedia states the inciting incident was a women finding out the AI running her local hospital was selectively aborting viable children for its own nefarious schemes.
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Mar 18, 2024 22:47
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Dune Encyclopedia is fan fiction so no need to sweat it.
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Mar 18, 2024 22:52
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DACK FAYDEN posted:this is some John C. Wright rear end bullshit It's pretty dumb. It's one reason why the Dune Encyclopedia is best taken with large grains of salt and not treated as any sort of canon (unless you're running a Dune RPG campaign, and then it's a pretty great source of esoterica). I only bring it up to show that Brian and KJA weren't the first people who saw Frank's writing and noticed the robots and that it was an "authorized" source.
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Mar 18, 2024 22:53
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Frank Herbert would consider the fact that I don’t have a single (currently relevant in my life) phone number memorized and can’t reliably navigate around the city in which I’ve lived for the past decade without the use of my nav program to be irrefutable evidence of Man’s decline. There’s your Butlerian Jihad right there. Killer robots, Hell, it’s about being neutered by your cellphone.
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Mar 18, 2024 23:37
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Zore posted:Not really? Its what if Harry Potter actually tried to tackle the social rot in Wizard society where just being good at killing a guy is kind of worthless and mostly just leads to more politically adept people manipulating you. I talked about this elsewhere but its really weird to me that people at the time didn't really seem to pick up on how strange it was that Harry Potter ends with a return to normalcy when the wizarding society has so many unresolved issues that led to the Voldemort poo poo in the first place. It might be because I was a kid at the time those books were coming out but it seems like the politics of that series only started to be scrutinized in like the mid-2010s, and even as a kid I found the subplot in Goblet of Fire where Hermione (who I really liked and identified with) gets mocked and made fun of for caring about house elf slavery really off-putting. Whirling fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Mar 19, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 23:43
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Before I had easily available GPS navigation I just spent a lot more time lost
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Mar 18, 2024 23:43
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Just read The Sparrow, and thought it rather botched the ending. It's a great premise and most of it has this tantalizing setup that has you wondering how it all went so wrong, but then it disposes of its well-drawn characters out-of-view and treats the main character's rape as the ultimate betrayal by God. No, he's betrayed by God when all his friends get murdered by the indigenous ruling class. When the peaceful villagers get slaughtered protecting their infants from mass murderers. You surmise easily from the loving beginning that he was raped. I mean, no poo poo. I thought all the cosmic horror and testing of the priest's faith was going to be in the death of his friends, but most of them get taken out in the span of about 2 chapters, with Sofia Mendes and Jimmy Quinn shunted aside in like a single paragraph. Emilio doesn't even get to mourn them, while the book then has a room full of people passing out and vomiting and the like when he talks about his rape. PostNouveau fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Mar 19, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 23:56
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Whirling posted:I talked about this elsewhere but its really weird to me that people at the time didn't really seem to pick up on how strange it was that Harry Potter ends with a return to normalcy when the wizarding society has so many unresolved issues that led to the Voldemort poo poo in the first place. It might be because I was a kid at the time those books were coming out but it seems like the politics of that series only started to be scrutinized in like the mid-2010s, and even as a kid I found the subplot in Goblet of Fire where Hermione (who I really liked and identified with) gets mocked and made fun of for caring about house elf slavery really off-putting. I wonder what the balance is when it comes to political transformation in YA from that era. My hunch is that HP is in the minority in being so conservative. Mortal Engines almost had a Marxist historical materialism thing going on by the final book.
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Mar 19, 2024 04:35
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Harry Potter was successful because it was narrowly targeted at a specific age bracket and teachers/other adults shoved it in as much of the relevant audience's faces as possible because they were just desperately happy that kids were reading any books at all. If you were a just a little bit too old for them or you had read literally any other books at all, you could tell they were rotten as they were being released and the whole phenomenon was just mystifying.
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Mar 19, 2024 05:10
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pseudorandom name posted:Harry Potter was successful because it was narrowly targeted at a specific age bracket and teachers/other adults shoved it in as much of the relevant audience's faces as possible because they were just desperately happy that kids were reading any books at all. If you were a just a little bit too old for them or you had read literally any other books at all, you could tell they were rotten as they were being released and the whole phenomenon was just mystifying. lol no it's popular because it was breezily written, used a bunch of classic tropes and forms, had vivid characters and you wanted to find out what happened next. you don't sell 600 million copies just because teachers recommend it.
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Mar 19, 2024 05:19
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pseudorandom name posted:Harry Potter was successful because it was narrowly targeted at a specific age bracket and teachers/other adults shoved it in as much of the relevant audience's faces as possible because they were just desperately happy that kids were reading any books at all. If you were a just a little bit too old for them or you had read literally any other books at all, you could tell they were rotten as they were being released and the whole phenomenon was just mystifying. You're extrapolating wildly from your own experience here mate. Harry Potter was very broadly popular, it wasn't a result of adults shoving it down unwitting kids' throats. Lots of kind of mid books get really popular, Harry Potter is just that par excellence. Twilight is another good example.
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Mar 19, 2024 05:24
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While it was definitely broadly popular for the listed reasons, if you were a big reader but slightly too old for it, it absolutely felt like that. I read the first couple and then aged out of the demographic, and it felt like the hype just never ended.
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Mar 19, 2024 06:07
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Yngwie Mangosteen posted:While it was definitely broadly popular for the listed reasons, if you were a big reader but slightly too old for it, it absolutely felt like that. I read the first couple and then aged out of the demographic, and it felt like the hype just never ended. I mean, that's not true. I read a few and aged out of it, but my wife, who's older than me, stuck with it and still enjoys it. People are allowed to read middling fiction because it's fun. Having read Joseph Campbell doesn't mean every hero story is suddenly valueless.
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Mar 19, 2024 13:59
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harry potter is for babies and i am not a baby. i am a grown man
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Mar 19, 2024 14:00
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holy cow The Last Policeman hosed me up
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Mar 19, 2024 14:06
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I got my copy of Exordia at the weekend and I'm finding it very difficult to read. Not because of the content, mind - it's just printed on incredibly thin paper and I'm worried that I'll tear the page every time I turn it. It's 540pp but it's the same thickness as the last Tor book I bought that was 320pp. Bears wipe their asses on this stuff, I'm told. E: I got to the dividing page at the start of Act 3 and I could literally read the next page through it. For gently caress's sake, Battuta, tell Tor that the next time they print one of your books they should at least print it on 2-ply. Jedit fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Mar 19, 2024 |
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Mar 19, 2024 14:22
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I just read the new Sand Butlers of Doom and it turns out the Butlerian jihad was an uprising by cleaning staff who smashed robot vacuums. It was led by Jimmy Butler but his last name was a confusing coincidence. Also Duncan Idaho was in it as the guy who invented and then betrayed the Roomba.
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Mar 19, 2024 14:28
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Jedit posted:I got my copy of Exordia at the weekend and I'm finding it very difficult to read. Not because of the content, mind - it's just printed on incredibly thin paper and I'm worried that I'll tear the page every time I turn it. It's 540pp but it's the same thickness as the last Tor book I bought that was 320pp. Bears wipe their asses on this stuff, I'm told. I have an old Charles Dickens that squeezes 800 pages into 2 centimeters. It's like that Disney short where Mickey is so poor he has to cut translucently thin slices of bread for dinner.
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Mar 19, 2024 15:04
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Jedit posted:E: I got to the dividing page at the start of Act 3 and I could literally read the next page through it. For gently caress's sake, Battuta, tell Tor that the next time they print one of your books they should at least print it on 2-ply. I do not have any input on these decisions, except indirectly through the manuscript's wordcount.
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Mar 19, 2024 15:06
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Ravus Ursus posted:I mean, that's not true. I read a few and aged out of it, but my wife, who's older than me, stuck with it and still enjoys it. That's fair, a better way to put it is; if it didn't catch you for whatever reason, it felt very oppressively pushed on you as 'a reader' during the time period of its popularity. Or at least it did for me, and obviously the other poster.
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Mar 19, 2024 15:24
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I guess it doesn't really matter because I'm the only one who sees it...wait that means it extremely matters...but I loving hate this trend of replacing good cover art with movie posters. My copy of dune used to look like this but now it looks like this  Going through my virtual library this has happened to Station Eleven, Lovecraft Country, WoT, Haunting of Hill House, and Horns. I wish I could opt out of this, I loving hate advertising and I'd never buy a physical book that had the NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE cover
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Mar 19, 2024 16:03
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If you've paid for the book then I think the universe will be ok with you downloading an epub with the old cover from lib gen or wherever
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Mar 19, 2024 16:09
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I enjoyed Harry Potter up until the last one and I was an adult the whole time. I'm not going to pretend I didn't just because now I see they're shallow and vacuous and they're written by a horrible bigot. I did enjoy them and I get why other people do. These days I'm way more concerned with prose and underlying message and stuff. I was a dope then.
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Mar 19, 2024 16:15
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Mikojan posted:I'm on a space opera binge lately and I'm curious if there are any obvious suggestions. It's long and incomplete but I really enjoyed The Spiral Wars by Joel Shepherd, 8 books in. Currently reading book 1 of the Exordium series after it got mentioned here a few times. Pretty good, I'd call it almost Game of Thrones-ish so far with the sheer number of named character deaths
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Mar 19, 2024 16:40
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Jedit posted:My copy of Exordia is in, finally. It'll still have to wait until I finish reading Wild Cards: Sleeper Straddle though. What's a good guide for someone wanting to get into Wild Cards?
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Mar 19, 2024 17:00
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zoux posted:I guess it doesn't really matter because I'm the only one who sees it...wait that means it extremely matters...but I loving hate this trend of replacing good cover art with movie posters. My copy of dune used to look like this I don't think there's anyone who likes this. Feels the same as when Plex fucks with my movie posters and ruins my whole server's vibe.
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Mar 19, 2024 17:05
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HopperUK posted:I enjoyed Harry Potter up until the last one and I was an adult the whole time. I'm not going to pretend I didn't just because now I see they're shallow and vacuous and they're written by a horrible bigot. I did enjoy them and I get why other people do. These days I'm way more concerned with prose and underlying message and stuff. I was a dope then. Yep same. It definitely contributed to me becoming a more critical reader
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Mar 19, 2024 17:10
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Ravus Ursus posted:
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Mar 19, 2024 17:13
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Yeah the Ur myth is Gilgamesh.
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Mar 19, 2024 17:14
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Kinda hard to claim a "universal" story structure that Little Red Riding Hood doesn't fit into.
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Mar 19, 2024 17:16
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PriorMarcus posted:What's a good guide for someone wanting to get into Wild Cards? It's complicated. This is a series of 32 books written across 37 years by 40+ authors, so the quality is guaranteed to be variable even within individual volumes. Some of the best stories are mixed up with the weakest arc plots - Sixteen Candles by Stephen Leigh falls right in the middle of the Jumper trilogy, for example. I think my suggestion would be to read the first volume, then to hit up Reactor to read all the short stories that were published on Tor's website during the 14 years that they ran the series. (They're mixed in with a bunch of blogs and reread articles, but with the exception of Ghost Girl Takes Manhattan, which is in the revised Volume 1, they should all be labeled as Original Fiction).
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Mar 19, 2024 17:49
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