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Sorry for the vague question - I just starting reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant after finishing the Gap Into books. I quite like the author (obviously) and the modern day twist is interesting, but a few chapters into the 'fantasy' part of the book it seems to be the most generic Tolkein-esque thing I can imagine, which is a bit of a turn-off. Without spoiling anything, does the story get less derivative/tropey if I keep reading, or should I just quit while I'm ahead?
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Feb 10, 2014 04:34
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Vulpes posted:Sorry for the vague question - I just starting reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant after finishing the Gap Into books. I quite like the author (obviously) and the modern day twist is interesting, but a few chapters into the 'fantasy' part of the book it seems to be the most generic Tolkein-esque thing I can imagine, which is a bit of a turn-off. Without spoiling anything, does the story get less derivative/tropey if I keep reading, or should I just quit while I'm ahead? Thomas Covenant rapes a woman, which I guess is technically not derivative of Tolkien
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Feb 10, 2014 04:37
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Vulpes posted:Sorry for the vague question - I just starting reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant after finishing the Gap Into books. I quite like the author (obviously) and the modern day twist is interesting, but a few chapters into the 'fantasy' part of the book it seems to be the most generic Tolkein-esque thing I can imagine, which is a bit of a turn-off. Without spoiling anything, does the story get less derivative/tropey if I keep reading, or should I just quit while I'm ahead? He's setting up the tropes so he can knock them down HARD. I ended up really disliking that whole series, but for the same reasons I disliked the Gap books (hint: all the rape), so if you liked the Gap books you'll probably like the Thomas Covenant books also. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Feb 10, 2014 |
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Feb 10, 2014 04:39
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:He's setting up the tropes so he can knock them down HARD. I ended up really disliking that whole series, but for the same reasons I disliked the Gap books, so if you liked the Gap books you'll probably like the Thomas Covenant books also. Thanks, I'll keep at it and see how it goes. crowfeathers posted:Thomas Covenant rapes a woman, which I guess is technically not derivative of Tolkien What is it with Stephen R. Donaldson and  , jeeze.
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Feb 10, 2014 04:49
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I've read the whole Gap series and the first three Thomas Covenant books; I didn't like any of them. And for the exact same reason: everyone and everything within is awful. The characters do awful things for awful reasons, and when they fail, it's because something even more awful happened.
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Feb 10, 2014 06:36
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Vulpes posted:What is it with Stephen R. Donaldson and Looking at the Wikipedia page for the Gap Cycle, you weren't kidding  quote:Angus and Morn/Siegmund and Sieglinde consummate their relationship illegally (rape/incest) and produce invaluable offspring (Davies/Siegfried) who hold the key to freeing humanity from their dependency on the UMC/Gods.
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Feb 10, 2014 06:54
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NovemberMike posted:I'm a bigger fan of urban fantasy and I still agree. The series takes a "all myths are real" approach that keeps it from having a thematically consistent setting and the main character feels like he's got all of the author's interests except he's a thousand year old magical muscle dude. Vulpes posted:Sorry for the vague question - I just starting reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant after finishing the Gap Into books. I quite like the author (obviously) and the modern day twist is interesting, but a few chapters into the 'fantasy' part of the book it seems to be the most generic Tolkein-esque thing I can imagine, which is a bit of a turn-off. Without spoiling anything, does the story get less derivative/tropey if I keep reading, or should I just quit while I'm ahead?
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Feb 10, 2014 09:38
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Which books that you read while a teen hold up well after 15 years? Dune might be one of them. I read tons of sci-fi, but for world-building there is not much out there that comes close to it.
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Feb 10, 2014 11:17
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Off the top of my head, about 2/3 of the Discworld series. The rest, I wasn't a teenager anymore for. 
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Feb 10, 2014 11:20
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Grimwall posted:Which books that you read while a teen hold up well after 15 years? Stephen Baxter's Vacuum Diagrams was pretty awesome both then and now. Really want to get into Ring, but Blindsight and all of the Culture books are on my to-read list first. e: About 30% into Blindsight right now and holy poo poo is that a crazy/creepy book! Another great novel I've read thanks to the goons here. BadOptics fucked around with this message at 11:46 on Feb 10, 2014 |
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Feb 10, 2014 11:43
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ConfusedUs posted:I've read the whole Gap series and the first three Thomas Covenant books; I didn't like any of them. And for the exact same reason: everyone and everything within is awful. The characters do awful things for awful reasons, and when they fail, it's because something even more awful happened. Cardiovorax posted:I don't know about less tropey, but they certainly don't get less awful. I honestly don't even know what it is I dislike so much about these books, but I hate them with a passion. Something about the weird, incoherent plots and the stilted, "epic" prose makes me feel like I was reading some kind of weird fever dream. I absolutely couldn't stand it and stopped reading after the second book or so. I might bitch about Hobb torturing her characters, but Stephen Donaldson is worse. I remember I kept reading the first two series hoping for some major payoff to happen sooner or later, which really didn't happen until the end of each trilogy. It is pretty far from straight forward fantasy. The main reasons for reading the series is: Lord Foul is probably one of the nastiest and most insidious adversaries in fantasy literature, so in contrast to other series there is no sympathy for him. The way he corrupts and destroys everything in ways unlike more classic fantasy is interesting and disturbing to read. Also the way he portrays a hero, in the Covenant series, that is for most of the time completely powerless and useless and who is ruled by self-hatred. I think he also does a good job at worldbuilding.
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Feb 10, 2014 11:51
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Vulpes posted:What is it with Stephen R. Donaldson and Look, do you ask Asimov what's with all the robots? Do you ask Chalker what's with all the body swapping?
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Feb 10, 2014 12:46
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Grimwall posted:Which books that you read while a teen hold up well after 15 years? I read everything Asimov ever wrote before I was 18 (I was a boring teen) and everything I've re-read since has continued to be great, including the weird poo poo where The Robot and the Most Correct Human Ever decide to force humanity to merge with a Gaia entity to defend the galaxy from invasive alien life and also they have a E: Agree that Dune has held up well.
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Feb 10, 2014 13:44
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Grimwall posted:Which books that you read while a teen hold up well after 15 years? I first read Fahrenheit 451 when I was 13 or so, and while I didn't entirely grasp all the nuances of the story at the time, I quite enjoyed it. Fast forward 15 years and I've now read it at least 10 times (helps that it's short enough to read in a weekend), and it's still one of my favorite sci-fi novels ever. I don't even know if it counts though since it was obviously already considered a classic by the time I first read it.
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Feb 10, 2014 15:54
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Vulpes posted:Thanks, I'll keep at it and see how it goes. If you read the introduction to the reprint of The Real Story you'll find out it's because Stephen Donaldson really wants to rape women, but can't.
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Feb 10, 2014 17:24
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fritz posted:The nicest thing you can say about the covers of the US editions of early Discworld novels was that they protected the pages inside from getting torn and smudged, and that was followed by several years where there were no US editions of Discworld at all, and you had to import them from the UK or Canada. edit: Oops, I got it mixed up with the puppeteers in Discworld. 
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Feb 10, 2014 18:44
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On the other hand, some of them get amazing covers like this: Night Watch as per Pratchett Compare to this:  The Night Watch by Rembrandt
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Feb 10, 2014 20:59
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Cardiovorax posted:On the other hand, some of them get amazing covers like this:
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Feb 10, 2014 23:53
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For lack of anywhere else to complain about this, it really sucks that I can't get John Steakley's Armor on Kindle. And since he is dead I never will (and it will in all likelihood be out of print in the next 3 years)
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Feb 11, 2014 00:40
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Fried Chicken posted:For lack of anywhere else to complain about this, it really sucks that I can't get John Steakley's Armor on Kindle. And since he is dead I never will (and it will in all likelihood be out of print in the next 3 years) Dang, that does suck. I think it was on Kindle at one point, too (and goodreads seems to back me up on this), so it's weird that it came off.
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Feb 11, 2014 02:11
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RightClickSaveAs posted:The Martian by Andy Weir comes out on Tuesday. It's a near future hard sci-fi that's basically Hatchet (Gary Paulsen's book Hatchet, not the horror movie) set on Mars with an astronaut MacGyver as the main character. It was very fun to read and I blew through it way more quickly than I usually read books.
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Feb 11, 2014 02:40
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coyo7e posted:Is the guy in black on the left, holding an enema bottle?
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Feb 11, 2014 04:27
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Grimwall posted:Which books that you read while a teen hold up well after 15 years? The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper
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Feb 11, 2014 04:32
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gvibes posted:I felt this was terribly cheesy but I nevertheless could not put the thing down. Yeah it was the good kind of cheesy. It also has a pretty solid ending after he's back on earth!
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Feb 11, 2014 04:40
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ulmont posted:Dang, that does suck. I think it was on Kindle at one point, too (and goodreads seems to back me up on this), so it's weird that it came off. I messaged someone at Amazon about it after looking it up on GoodReads. They said the publisher makes the call. Which is dumb as hell, it is passive revenue coming in. So anyways, we need to  the page for this and Contact and hit the "Tell the Publisher!" link and enough positive feedback and the publisher may make it available on kindle again.
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Feb 11, 2014 04:55
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Phobeste posted:The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper That is perhaps my favorite young adult series. I need to go back and re-read those, shame the movie was a disaster.
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Feb 11, 2014 14:52
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calandryll posted:That is perhaps my favorite young adult series. I need to go back and re-read those, shame the movie was a disaster. There was a movie? Yeah, that was doomed to failure. Still though that was a really brilliant series as a teen. My first thought of YA fantasy that holds up well is the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, but really YA Classics could be its own separate thread topic, there are a lot of really good options.
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Feb 11, 2014 15:02
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There was a movie? Yeah, that was doomed to failure. Still though that was a really brilliant series as a teen. I'd love to see an Artemis Fowl movie but it'd probably come across like the new Hitchiker's Guide or something.
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Feb 11, 2014 15:09
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Seriously? I've tried to read those once, just to see what the fuss was about, and thought it was some of the worst prose I've ever seen. Pretty awful even by young adult standards. I have no idea why it gets praised so much. \/\/\/\/\/ Sorry, I was talking about The Dark is Rising. Never read Artemis Fowl. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 15:10
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ninjaedit: it's way too early here and I may have misread: where you saying The Seeker was lousy prose, or Artemis Fowl? I don't recall The Dark is Rising winning me over with its quality writing, but the runic or celtic or whatever stuff, was novel enough to help it stand out.Cardiovorax posted:Seriously? I've tried to read those once, just to see what the fuss was about, and thought it was some of the worst prose I've ever seen. Pretty awful even by young adult standards. I have no idea why it gets praised so much. I'd rather give either series to a kid over Twilight or Goosebumps or Piers Anthony. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 15:45
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Cardiovorax posted:Seriously? I've tried to read those once, just to see what the fuss was about, and thought it was some of the worst prose I've ever seen. Pretty awful even by young adult standards. I have no idea why it gets praised so much. The first one has a lot of really iconic imagery in it, I think. Scenes that fix themselves in your memory. I agree with you about the later books in the series.
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Feb 11, 2014 16:03
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Yeah, the first one was alright. It had a very Enid Blyton tone to it, and I wouldn't be too surprised if The Famous Five (which more or less founded the genre) was a big inspiration for Cooper. Everything after was plain bad, though.
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Feb 11, 2014 16:25
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coyo7e posted:I'd rather give either series to a kid over Twilight or Goosebumps or Piers Anthony. Giving Piers Anthony books to a kid in 2014 is a pretty cruel thing to do.
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Feb 11, 2014 16:28
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fritz posted:Giving Piers Anthony books to a kid in 2014 is a pretty cruel thing to do. Giving a kid Piers Anthony is probably something that can be reported to social services.
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Feb 11, 2014 16:41
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I thought the This American Life episode tangentially (sorta kinda?) related to Piers Anthony was going to get dark.
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Feb 11, 2014 17:21
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GrandpaPants posted:I thought the This American Life episode tangentially (sorta kinda?) related to Piers Anthony was going to get dark. It didn't? I listened to the first half in the car and was really glad when I got to my destination and turned it off, because yeah, I was expecting it to go full pedo.
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Feb 11, 2014 17:23
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Reviews: Ancillary Justice. http://goo.gl/UCQ045. This book was underwhelming even though I mostly enjoyed it. It's the kind of story that hinged on having a good ending, because it was ultimately plot-based despite its emphasis on characterization. The main character is the last surviving piece of a warship; the warships are ships with A.I. that synchronize anywhere from 20-1,000 "ancillaries," which are human bodies that the A.I. controls more or less directly and simultaneously. Just how directly becomes a big plot point and question mark throughout the story. Half of the narrative takes place in flashbacks where the protagonist is still the full warship with hundreds of ancillaries, while the other half takes place when the protagonist is just a single human body that remembers being the warship. There is a big made up empire, the Radch, with a distinct culture, but despite a lot of cool details, it never felt very real to me. Various cool ideas thrown together don't automatically create a real and existing world. Even though one of the defining characteristics of the Radch was that it just absorbs thousands of other civilizations, I still didn't experience the Radch as anything more than the author's ideas strung together and labelled. The only thing that really worked well was the Radch concept of no genders. Everyone who is Radch, including the ship, refers to everyone as "her," and gender is essentially irrelevant in their culture. There are no "gender norms," and the language they speak does not label gender. As a "linguist," this generally worked without making me roll my eyes too much. I think most of the Radch were wearing puffy robes and such, but it still did strain my imagination to think that you couldn't simply see someone's wide shoulders, breasts, or other physical indicators and legitimately not realize the gender. The author makes it explicitly clear that Radch cannot tell the difference, as various Radch characters are thrown in foreign places where they have to speak a language that marks gender. You often see lines like, "I used the male pronoun, and she didn't correct me, but still I wasn't sure." I liked how much genre tropes this story subverted. The main character is a warship, but there are no big space battles. There are cases of people shooting each other, but there are no drawn-out, libertarian military sci-fi battles that take 100 pages to resolve. It's usually something like, "I point my gun at her and she dies." The conflict and focus is all on plot and characterization, and the conflict is very much intrigue, political maneuvering, and characters disagreeing about different issues. The author tried to make this a character-driven story about the relationship between two very different "people," but it ultimately felt plot driven, and the plot let me down. The protagonist does go through some fairly believable and satisfying changes, but her little side-kick character's development feels forced and wooden. Since this side-kick character is the catalyst for the protagonist's character development, it taints the protagonist's development. I found the ending and the primary conflict fairly boring, and the ending was basically a setup for the next book in a trilogy that will likely turn into more than three books. This story is worth reading and better than most sci-fi, but it's not totally pretty commonplace. China Mountain Zhang. http://goo.gl/cbuvey I am about 80% through this, but I don't quite care if the ending is good. Unlike Ancillary Justice, this is truly character-driven, and as long as the characters have sufficient development (they already do), the ending won't need to pop for it to be a great novel. I speak Mandarin, my wife (and thus in-laws) are Chinese, and I have lived in China, so this has greater appeal to me than it probably will to others. The premise is that in 22nd/23rd century or so, the U.S. has a socialist revolution similar to what China had in the mid-20th century. China becomes the only real superpower, and it has huge influence over the entire world. The main protagonist is a gay, half-mexican and half-chinese man living in NYC (though his mother had his genes manipulated before birth, so he appears fully Chinese). Ethnic Chinese are given preferential treatment regardless of where they are born, and Chinese-born Chinese have it the best. If you mess up while living in China, it's common to be "re-assigned" to somewhere like the U.S., or if you really gently caress up they might re-assign you to Mars. In between each entry from the main character, there are one-off stories from different characters (that almost always have at least a passing or tenuous connection to the main protagonist) which show more of the world and reinforce the themes of the book. The story does a wonderful job at showing Chinese culture. Its depiction of "face" and "connections" for instance, are extremely accurate. It's very serious, but manages to have genuine and funny moments that don't feel forced or cheap. The main character, for instance, has the same given name as Sun Yat-sen, because his mom was bad at picking Chinese names. He remarks that his name gives him away as not really Chinese, because it is like being named John Abraham Lincoln, or Ivan Vladimir Lenin. The main character's plot goes through his life and career. It shows him struggling with being gay (in this world it is not accepted, and in China, incredibly illegal), struggling with his mixed/fake identity in various settings/countries, deciding what he wants to do with his career, and dealing with death and loss. The first conflict the main character goes through, for example, is his exiled from China boss trying to set him up with his daughter. He can't tell his boss that he is gay, so he has to go through the motions and deal with his boss losing face when he ultimately rejects his daughter. This is definitely not for everyone; if you want action sci-fi or "goony poo poo," you probably won't like this. I'd highly recommend it though as a sci-fi story that uses a made-up setting and world to hit on really human and universal experiences and struggles. edit: I have the "Upworthy" plug-in and have edited this for content, so if I say really weird sounding things it's because Upworthy changed them. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 17:36
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Giving a kid Piers Anthony is probably something that can be reported to social services.
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Feb 11, 2014 19:17
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I'm not sure why you would give anyone Piers Anthony, except maybe one of his pedophile fans (not a joke)
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Feb 11, 2014 20:07
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Just finished Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer -- It's pretty good! The sense of the uncanny and the horror of the protagonist's situation is really well done and there's a ton of awesomely creepy parts as the book goes on. As you might expect from Vandermeer's stuff, it's heavily focused on fungus, moss, and lichen, but moreso than his other works there's a focus in infestation and colonization that pervades the book. Unlike, Shriek, an Afterword, or Finch though, there isn't the "knowable versus unknowable" -- the protagonist is sort of sandwiched between a weird and sinister government and the weird and terribly apathetic environment she's sent into and anyone who might know anything aren't telling. If I had to say anything it'd be that the book's ending sort of falls flat -- this is sort of a problem not only with Vandermeer's books but also with this type of horror in general -- if the main focus is unknowable, you either have the protagonist flee or succumb to it, since something like "shooting a bunch of bullets into the pulsating brain" doesn't quite cut it as far as endings go. It works as a standalone book (if somewhat unsatisfying) but the knowledge that this is a trilogy really makes me curious what he has cooking for the other two books. fake edit : Okay all the book jacket summaries are up on Amazon and they pretty definitively answer "where will he go?!" I'm really glad they're all coming out this year though. The cover for the next book, Authority, has a bunny rabbit and a smashed cellphone on the cover  systran posted:China Mountain Zhang  China Rises!! subgenre? I'm interested but sort of wary of reading about another book featuring a person with a vaguely formed idea of how China and Chinese people probably act.
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Feb 12, 2014 00:52
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