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Mq posted:Oh dear. Bad philosophy or bad writing?
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 12:29 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 07:49 |
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Piers Anthony I swear to loving god. Sorry all, I didn't know where else to post this so I'm just going to rant about it here because I've very rarely ever wanted to punch a 79 year-old man in the teeth and yet here we are! So, you know the Xanth books? Sure you do. And did you also know that the latest book in this series, Esrever Doom, features a protagonist who is a gay man in the "real world" but gets magically "reversed" so that he's attracted to women while he's in the magical land of Xanth and, in fact, ends up falling deeply in love with a woman while he's there? No, I'm not kidding; I read through the book and this seriously happens. And if I had ten thousand years I still couldn't list all the reasons that this is crazy goddamn offensively terrible. Not that this series has needed any help to be offensively terrible lately, but holy drat, dude. Did I honestly used to enjoy these books?
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 16:15 |
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BrianWilly posted:Piers Anthony ... I read through the book Found your problem. The problem is that Piers Anthony is a bad author, and no one should ever read his books. Compared to some other things that he's written, what you've described sounds just peachy.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 16:25 |
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Oh my god he's still writing books?
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 16:27 |
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BrianWilly posted:Piers Anthony I swear to loving god. Piers Anthony literally wrote a story where a man had sex with a five year old girl and during the trial the jury said he wasn't morally guilty because she wanted it. Also he wrote this in the author's note Piers Anthony posted:It may be that the problem is not with what is deviant, but with our definitions. I suggest in the novel that little Nymph was abused not by the man with whom she had sex, but by members of her family who warped her taste, and by the society that preferred to condemn her lover rather than address the source of the problem in her family. No one should ever read Piers Anthony.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 16:35 |
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The Adult Conspiracy to Keep Interesting Things From Children is actually what he thinks because he's legit a pederast.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 17:23 |
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BrianWilly posted:Not that this series has needed any help to be offensively terrible lately
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 17:42 |
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At least that's just run-of-the-mill sexual perversion. The other thing is actively insulting to real people that actually exist.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 17:51 |
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Cardiovorax posted:At least that's just run-of-the-mill sexual perversion. The other thing is actively insulting to real people that actually exist. What? No. Perving on children isn't run-of-the-mill and girls are real people, too. Piers Anthony has a fairly large fan-base and he writes books with the constant theme that young girls can't be raped because, really, they totally enjoy sex with adults.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 18:04 |
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Okay, obviously the point of my rant was not to play oppression Olympics between homosexuals and victims of child molestation. I know Anthony had that hella godawful sex monster pedophilia book, but at the very very least that sort of thing was confined to a sex monster pedophilia book and not a whimsical series about a magical land of puns. The Xanth series has a lot of terrible sexism and instances of child sexuality that becomes kinda creepy when we consider the source, but I don't recall it ever legitimately depicting pedophilia at face value. In any case, I just think there's something profoundly, tone-deafedly offensive about having the one and only gay character in your books become straight and gently caress women when he goes into your "idealistic" fantasy world, particularly because I've never heard of Anthony having that kind of bass-ackwards notions of homosexuality before. tl;dr I expected him to be lovely about women and children. I didn't expect him to be lovely about this as well.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 18:41 |
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My default expectation for SF/F writers is they are terrible about issues involving representations of anyone who isn't in the stereotypical demographic for SF/F (straight white men). It is so loving awesome when that isn't the case and I think things have been getting better, but the backlog does not lie and it does not forget. And then you have cases like Dan Simmons where he writes an awesome POC character like Kassad in Hyperion and then goes loving crazy and becomes a huge awful racist That's why I really like this thread; it helps me avoid awful bullshit because you all went and read it instead. You are all heroes in my heart. fookolt fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Jan 3, 2014 |
# ? Jan 3, 2014 18:48 |
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BrianWilly posted:Okay, obviously the point of my rant was not to play oppression Olympics between homosexuals and victims of child molestation. I know Anthony had that hella godawful sex monster pedophilia book, but at the very very least that sort of thing was confined to a sex monster pedophilia book and not a whimsical series about a magical land of puns. The Xanth series has a lot of terrible sexism and instances of child sexuality that becomes kinda creepy when we consider the source, but I don't recall it ever legitimately depicting pedophilia at face value. In any case, I just think there's something profoundly, tone-deafedly offensive about having the one and only gay character in your books become straight and gently caress women when he goes into your "idealistic" fantasy world, particularly because I've never heard of Anthony having that kind of bass-ackwards notions of homosexuality before. Mmm, it's one thing for an author to present a sexual relationship between a grown man and a five year old girl as totally A-OK because the five year old girl totally wanted it and was thus able to provide her consent to the (apparently explicitly detailed) sexual acts in question, but when he magically changes a character's sexuality so they are attracted to (adult) women, that's when he's crossed the line.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 19:08 |
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I think the point here is that Piers Anthony is horrible in many ways. Some of those ways are atrocious and familiar, others are atrocious and new-to-you. BrianWilly clearly is not defending Piers Anthony's horrific pedophile apologia, let's not suggest he is.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 19:11 |
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General Battuta posted:I think the point here is that Piers Anthony is horrible in many ways. Some of those ways are atrocious and familiar, others are atrocious and new-to-you. But he does enjoy all those books with all the egregious sexism and sexualization of minors (which is only "kinda creepy" and only "when we consider the source"). Everything is all fine and great and worth spending money on when Piers Anthony is being lovely towards women and children but one incident of mild homophobia? THIS WILL NOT STAND
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 19:47 |
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fookolt posted:And then you have cases like Dan Simmons where he writes an awesome POC character like Kassad in Hyperion and then goes loving crazy and becomes a huge awful racist
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 19:48 |
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xcheopis posted:But he does enjoy all those books with all the egregious sexism and sexualization of minors (which is only "kinda creepy" and only "when we consider the source"). Everything is all fine and great and worth spending money on when Piers Anthony is being lovely towards women and children but one incident of mild homophobia? THIS WILL NOT STAND Yeah, ok, that is a little weird. Never enjoy Piers Anthony, never read Piers Anthony. xcheopis posted:I've never read any Dan Simmons; did he go off the rails during the SFWA debacle or was it prior? 9/11 broke his brain.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 20:01 |
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General Battuta posted:9/11 broke his brain. Well, crap. I'd heard good things about Hyperion and was thinking of reading it and now I'd just hate it.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 20:03 |
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I think you should give Hyperion a shot. It's mostly madness-free and it has some genuinely admirable Muslim characters, even if you can see the beginnings of Simmons' phobia in there.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 20:06 |
xcheopis posted:Well, crap. I'd heard good things about Hyperion and was thinking of reading it and now I'd just hate it.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 20:07 |
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General Battuta posted:I think you should give Hyperion a shot. It's mostly madness-free and it has some genuinely admirable Muslim characters, even if you can see the beginnings of Simmons' phobia in there. Azathoth posted:If you can get by the fact that the author became a terrible person and want to read it without paying the author, I'd honestly recommend picking it up at a second-hand bookstore or checking it out from your library. I read it a few years back and it is quite good, in particular I liked the framing device he used and it was written well before his present insanity began manifesting in his writing. That said, I'm told that as the series went on, he explained all of the cool mysteries presented in Hyperion, and that the explanations are profoundly unsatisfying, but I thought it worked perfectly fine as a standalone novel. OK, I'll keep on the list of books to get from the library but it's getting bumped way down. I'll be re-reading Clark Ashton Smith first.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 20:13 |
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Azathoth posted:If you can get by the fact that the author became a terrible person and want to read it without paying the author, I'd honestly recommend picking it up at a second-hand bookstore or checking it out from your library. I read it a few years back and it is quite good, in particular I liked the framing device he used and it was written well before his present insanity began manifesting in his writing. That said, I'm told that as the series went on, he explained all of the cool mysteries presented in Hyperion, and that the explanations are profoundly unsatisfying, but I thought it worked perfectly fine as a standalone novel. Pretty much. I would recommend reading Hyperion and then if you really, really, *really*, truly, desperately want more of the universe, read The Fall of Hyperion.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 20:16 |
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The warning signs were there even in Hyperion, in retrospect it's got a bad case of 'one of the good ones takes out the bad ones in a juvenile and gratuitous way'. I thought Hyperion was a good book worth reading but felt no need at all to read more because I could feel the collapse looming just past where the book ended.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 20:24 |
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I attempted to read Nathan Lowell's The Quarter Share. Some guy's mom dies in a plane crash, he gets kicked out of the corp planet he's living on, and gets hired to an interstellar cargo ship. I was hoping for an intriguing coming of age story with interesting dialogue, lots of drama and conflict. The book had none of that, the characters were the most unrealistic bland crap I've read in quite a while. No mechanical malfunctions, heightened tensions, space pirates or anything. Felt like YA The Care Bears in space, I gave up half way in.
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# ? Jan 3, 2014 21:14 |
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xcheopis posted:But he does enjoy all those books with all the egregious sexism and sexualization of minors (which is only "kinda creepy" and only "when we consider the source"). Everything is all fine and great and worth spending money on when Piers Anthony is being lovely towards women and children but one incident of mild homophobia? THIS WILL NOT STAND I also said that there is no actual pedophilia in the Xanth books. This is a goddamn statement of fact as far as I know, explaining the actual context of this situation instead of hysteric hyberbole. Anthony's themes of child sexuality is, yes, only "kinda creepy" if you don't know any further context from reading a different obscure book of his from a totally different genre. loving Madeleine L'Engle, Phillip Pullman, and George RR Martin also write themes of child sexuality. And nice call defending his "mild homophobia," you offensive Xanth apologist. See? I can get worked up over nothing as well! Something made me really angry in a book and I came here to vent about it, clearly that was a mistake for some reason. BrianWilly fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Jan 4, 2014 |
# ? Jan 4, 2014 02:20 |
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Piell posted:No one should ever read Piers Anthony. I read On a Pale Horse. That was enough.
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# ? Jan 4, 2014 02:36 |
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BrianWilly posted:Buddy, when you're done putting words into my mouth could you also maybe stop jumping to conclusions and tripping over them? I said I used to enjoy these books, as in, "I have not finished one since 1999." I read through this new one while I was in Barnes & Noble because I was curious what the series was like now. Well, there's certainly some very questionable stuff about fourteen-year-olds in A Spell For Chameleon. quote:“It can all be yours,” she said. The alluring fourteen-year-old reappeared. “No other woman can make you this promise.”
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# ? Jan 4, 2014 02:49 |
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BrianWilly posted:Buddy, when you're done putting words into my mouth could you also maybe stop jumping to conclusions and tripping over them? I said I used to enjoy these books, as in, "I have not finished one since 1999." I read through this new one while I was in Barnes & Noble because I was curious what the series was like now. I just took your post to be "Wow, I already knew this guy sucked, but apparently he found a whole new way to suck!", if that helps.
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# ? Jan 4, 2014 03:50 |
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PupsOfWar posted:Bolos I'll second this. Start with the Bolo collection by Keith Laumer. If you like where's he's going with that, go for the shared universe anthologies put out by Baen. Everything Bolo is on this page, http://www.baenebooks.com/s-70-keith-laumer.aspx The Compleat Bolo is the collection you want to start with. There are two stories available as samples, both are excellent. Annoyingly, neither of them feature an AI Bolo. One of them is a Retief story, so you get two awesome series in one go. Aha ! The Best of the Bolos collection has Combat Unit in it. That's Bolos in a nutshell right there. quote:I do not like it; it has the appearance of a trap, but the order has been given. I enter the room and the valve closes behind me.
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# ? Jan 4, 2014 05:40 |
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Is there a place where I can read in sperging detail kind of equipment a bolo has
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# ? Jan 4, 2014 07:18 |
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muike posted:Is there a place where I can read in sperging detail kind of equipment a bolo has The wiki page is a good start, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(tank)#Bolo_offensive_systems Follow that up with a visit to the Bolo wiki where you'll find some images too, http://bolo.wikia.com/wiki/Bolo_Mark_XXIV
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# ? Jan 5, 2014 00:35 |
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Why are we supposed to hate Dan Simmons so much anyway? I know he has some fairly lovely views on a couple of subjects and that he sometimes inserts them into his books but as far as I know he's not like Orson Scott Card who has lovely views and funds lovely organisations that are making the world a shittier place for people who don't share them. Also, Orson Scott Card wrote a book where the protagonist (who in the afterword Card admits is just himself with a different name) discovers that a co-worker is a paedophile who has molested their bosses kid and wants to molest his daughter and doesn't report him to the police because he decides that apart from that he's not a bad person. Orson Scott Card is awful. High Warlord Zog fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Jan 5, 2014 |
# ? Jan 5, 2014 02:43 |
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You can dislike both for being huge bigots and writing stories based on their bigotry. It's not a competition.
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# ? Jan 5, 2014 02:58 |
High Warlord Zog posted:Why are we supposed to hate Dan Simmons so much anyway? I know he has some fairly lovely views on a couple of subjects and that he sometimes inserts them into his books but as far as I know he's not like Orson Scott Card who has lovely views and funds lovely organisations that are making the world a shittier place for people who don't share them. Dan Simmons posted:It is circa 2032, or more precisely, the 23rd year of Jobless Recovery. The U.S. is tottering, weighing in at only 44 ½ states, its mass eaten away by Mexico, its interior rotted out by floods of immigrants, by loss of faith in a free-market economy, by national healthcare and a myriad of other entitlement programs, by the global-warming hoax and green-energy boondoggles, and by drugs, the most pervasive being “flashback,” which allows its users to visit their pasts in a dream state. It’s a bad, bad time, and its fatal origins lie, we are instructed, with the Obama presidency, its spendthrift domestic programs and pusillanimous foreign policy.
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# ? Jan 5, 2014 04:16 |
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If you want non-appalling fantasy by a decent person, I just finished NK Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy. An interesting cosmology, protagonists and major characters of various genders, ethnicities, and sexual orientations, and some really crackerjack writing. I especially like how each book is framed as the protagonist telling a story to an audience.
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# ? Jan 5, 2014 05:06 |
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FewtureMD posted:If you want non-appalling fantasy by a decent person, I just finished That looks really interesting; thanks!
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# ? Jan 5, 2014 06:01 |
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What I got from this is that Dan Simmons doesn't know the difference between 'peel' and 'peal'.
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# ? Jan 5, 2014 06:46 |
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Does anyone have any recommendations for genre crossovers, e.g. heist books, spy books, private detective books and police procedurals in a sci-fi or fantasy setting? I've already read Altered Carbon, the first Mistborn novel, Pratchett's Watch series and the first few books in Cook's Garrett P.I. series.
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# ? Jan 5, 2014 15:32 |
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sam16 posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for genre crossovers, e.g. heist books, spy books, private detective books and police procedurals in a sci-fi or fantasy setting? The City and The City by China Mieville.
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# ? Jan 5, 2014 15:42 |
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sam16 posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for genre crossovers, e.g. heist books, spy books, private detective books and police procedurals in a sci-fi or fantasy setting? The Lies of Locke Lamora is a really popular fantasy heist book.
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# ? Jan 5, 2014 15:49 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 07:49 |
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Dan Simmons posted:
Man why do so many white dudes think the New Caliphate is a plausible thing? I'm actually more confused about why the Ringo/Kratman MilSF yahoo set keeps dredging it up than I am about Simmons (who has clearly just gone of the deep end by this point), considering that those guys, unlike Simmons, have often lived and worked in the Middle East for periods of time, and should be aware that these disparate groups are never going to cooperate on that kind of hegemonic level again. It's not even "they should know better" so much as "you'd think their disparaging of Muslims would go in a different direction" What are some works that have had a better or more interesting take on a futuristic Middle East? Most everything I've ever read either ignores it (in much the same way that most SF ignores the current developing world) or does this same nonsense. Does Ian McDonald have something maybe? PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Jan 5, 2014 |
# ? Jan 5, 2014 16:12 |