Mq posted:

Oh dear. Bad philosophy or bad writing?

BrianWilly posted:

Piers Anthony ... I read through the book

BrianWilly posted:

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?

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.

BrianWilly posted:

Not that this series has needed any help to be offensively terrible lately

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.

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.

tl;dr I expected him to be lovely about women and children. I didn't expect him to be lovely about this as well.

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.

BrianWilly clearly is not defending Piers Anthony's horrific pedophile apologia, let's not suggest he is.

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

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

xcheopis posted:

I've never read any Dan Simmons; did he go off the rails during the SFWA debacle or was it prior?

General Battuta posted:

9/11 broke his brain.

xcheopis posted:

Well, crap. I'd heard good things about Hyperion and was thinking of reading it and now I'd just hate it.

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.

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.

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

Piell posted:

No one should ever read Piers Anthony.

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 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.

quote:

“It can all be yours,” she said. The alluring fourteen-year-old reappeared. “No other woman can make you this promise.”

Bink was suddenly, forcefully tempted. There were times when he wanted this, though he had never dared admit it openly.

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 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.

PupsOfWar posted:

Bolos

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.

muike posted:

Is there a place where I can read in sperging detail kind of equipment a bolo has

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.

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.

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.

Highways are disintegrating, people live in former malls cut into cubicles, and, adding insult to injury, right-wing talk radio has been banned. Japanese overlords have set up “green zones” across the land and America’s once proud and powerful military is now hired out as mercenaries to fight for Japan and India. At the same time, a New Global Caliphate flourishes and Islam spreads. An immense and towering mosque sits at ground zero and annual celebrations commemorate the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In Los Angeles, where much of the story takes place, the bells of Christian churches add their peels to “the cries of the muezzin … to show their solidarity, understanding, and forgiveness.” The Caliphate has obliterated Israel with 11 exceedingly dirty nuclear bombs, killing 6 million Jews. The survivors of this “Second Holocaust” are now sequestered in a former Six Flags amusement park in Denver by a U.S. government “terrified of angering the Global Caliphate” that is waiting to exterminate them.

FewtureMD posted:

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.

Azathoth posted:

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Highways are disintegrating, people live in former malls cut into cubicles, and, adding insult to injury, right-wing talk radio has been banned. Japanese overlords have set up “green zones” across the land and America’s once proud and powerful military is now hired out as mercenaries to fight for Japan and India. At the same time, a New Global Caliphate flourishes and Islam spreads. An immense and towering mosque sits at ground zero and annual celebrations commemorate the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In Los Angeles, where much of the story takes place, the bells of Christian churches add their peels to “the cries of the muezzin … to show their solidarity, understanding, and forgiveness.” The Caliphate has obliterated Israel with 11 exceedingly dirty nuclear bombs, killing 6 million Jews. The survivors of this “Second Holocaust” are now sequestered in a former Six Flags amusement park in Denver by a U.S. government “terrified of angering the Global Caliphate” that is waiting to exterminate them.