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Slow Graffiti posted:Anyway, the real reason I'm posting is to say that if you would like to read an awesome (and fun) fantasy series written by a really nice and engaging fellow, then check out the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust. Not only did I inhale every manuscript as soon as it came in to the editor, but I also had lunch with him one day. We shot the poo poo about music, books, liquor, and our mutual love of American Spirit cigs for a couple of hours. I was in marketing, so I generally tried to avoid contact with authors/agents, but I truly regret not being able to spend more time with Brust.
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Feb 21, 2014 19:25
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I just finished Nekropolis by Maureen F. McHugh. Before I dive into the review, here are her readability stats: Readability Stats posted:Race: Caucasian. -5 points Review of Nekropolis: I didn't enjoy Nekropolis as much as China Mountain Zhang, but if you enjoyed CMZ or like sci-fi that isn't about spaceships or aliens, Nekropolis is worth reading. CMZ had a main narrative told in first-person, and it was broken up by what were essentially short stories (also in first person.) Nekropolis doesn't have as solid a main narrative; I think Hariba, the main character, only has two sections where you hear directly from her viewpoint: the first and last sections of the book. Everything in the middle is told from different people Hariba is close to, and their conflicts are directly related to Hariba's situation. Hariba is a slave that is "jessed," which is a technology that makes her feel loyalty to her owner. Her owner buys a "Harni," which is a manufactured organism that looks and acts a lot like a human, but it's ultimately created to please real humans. McHugh is good about not letting the scifi techno-babble creep in and overpower the narrative; she presents this idea of a Harni by giving sparse information about modified DNA, but then you mostly understand what a Harni is through adept "showing and not telling." The inciting incident is Hariba falling in love with the Harni and fleeing her master with him. Nekropolis has good characterization, but I didn't find myself as enthralled as I did with CMZ. I liked hearing from different characters, but it happened frequently enough that I always felt jolted out of the character's head just as I was becoming comfortable with them. The novel explores a lot of different relationship dynamics: Hariba to the Harni and the Harni to her; Hariba to her mother, brother, and best friend; her best friend and her best friend's husband, etc. You get to see a lot of different people, who all feel quite real, and see how their relationships are changed due to Hariba's situation. Since the last POV goes back to Hariba, the book basically ends by showing you how Hariba feels and copes with all the changes she has inflicted onto everyone close to her. There are some emotionally powerful moments that I felt very strongly, but when the novel finished I was left with a kind of ambiguous feeling of not knowing whether everything Hariba went through was worth it or not. I suspect this uncertain conclusion is what McHugh was aiming for. I've seen people complaining about the ending, and I agree it didn't exactly pop and make you say, "Wow!" But it's not a bad ending by any means, and I vastly prefer it to reading the first book in a trilogy where the ending is just setting up for the second book. Nekropolis reaches a solid end, it just leaves the reader to think back on the story and consider how all of Hariba's loved ones were affected. I have basically decided that she did the right thing, and I feel happy for her. A lot of people who read this will likely think she made a mistake and that it wasn't all worth it. I think that's a pretty admirable effect for an author to achieve. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 19:26
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Jesus Christ.
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Feb 21, 2014 19:35
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Golf clap. I would read more. It's like that Christian website that reviews movies based on how sinful they are.
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Feb 21, 2014 20:10
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Nerds and their need to defend terrible people lest something happens to their elfmans. e: I'm leaving it for posterity, but yeah, sorry for being a dick. I'm done. ravenkult fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 20:22
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I feel really strongly that there are rational and morally lucid reasons to critique SF/F authors and their beliefs. Some of them (otherizing poo poo and cultural appropriation, for instance) you seem to think are otherkin-level bullshit, which, well, I guess we'll just have to disagree on.  But these are topics that good authors in the field are talking about right now; these are things they care about. I know because we're Twitter friends!  We really should take this to another thread. ravenkult posted:Nerds and their need to defend terrible people lest something happens to their elfmans. I think the two halves of this conversation are increasingly disconnected from each other: one side thinks the other wants to set up some kind of ridiculous point-scored blacklist for assholes, the other just hears apologism for inexcusable shitheads. It's a pretty vicious spiral.
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Feb 21, 2014 20:23
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Slow Graffiti posted:Other really nice authors I hung out with (I'm not going into the assholes): Cory Doctorow, Ken Macleod, John Scalzi, and Carrie Vaughn. Feel free to read them and not have your mind corrupted. Doctorow might be a nice person, but his books have their own problems and I don't even know whether they are actual scifi. Scalzis main protagonists are smug as hell, which becomes tedious after a while. To a certain extent I don't give a poo poo about the political views of authors, unless it starts to affect their writing. The Ilium series by Simmons come to mind as an example of the latter. Most of the people in this thread have read HP Lovecraft and he makes modern authors seem like Jesus in comparison. Will we stop reading Lovecraft based on this?
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Feb 21, 2014 20:26
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Cardiac posted:To a certain extent I don't give a poo poo about the political views of authors, unless it starts to affect their writing. If you told me Harlan Ellison shared the same views as Piers Anthony I'd keep reading the former but not the latter for exactly this reason.
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Feb 21, 2014 20:51
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Cardiac posted:
Another big point of confusion in the debate is are we talking authors or their books? I am would love to discuss the racism in Lovecraft's books, but who cares about some anecdote where he was racist in his actual life?
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Feb 21, 2014 20:54
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Some people don't want to support racist or sexists even tangentially, but nobody is talking about forcing people to do anything.
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Feb 21, 2014 20:56
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Seldom Posts posted:Another big point of confusion in the debate is are we talking authors or their books? I am would love to discuss the racism in Lovecraft's books, but who cares about some anecdote where he was racist in his actual life? Racism on Lovecraft is kind of trite. (1) No one reads him for his incisive social commentary. (2) It is widely acknowledged he is a flawed writer with a powerful imagination who writes in a very specific style. (3) He comes from a time where such opinions were more acceptable. (4) His personal development was retarded as hell due to his weird mother and how reclusive he became. (5) He created his own bubble of familiar things to shield himself, so anything like race that challenged it was distasteful. It's not really much of a discussion. He was a strange guy who wrote some influential stories and had some major character flaws. In the books the racism manifested as another example of what was other and strange, but in itself I don't think is worthy of much comment given the things set out above. Anyway, I do agree that authors having opinions I disagree with is only offensive to the extent it influences their work. People with opinions I consider bad can still write well and have valid points. Sometimes something is worth reading despite that, sometimes it overwhelms it, and a lot of where the line falls is hugely subjective. I can tolerate a lot of things I don't agree with as long as it doesn't guide the story. The Dispossessed is an example of something I just couldn't read because of how fundamentally I differed from the author, but the whole story was about cultural norms so that kind of disagreement was always going to break the book (I don't mind some of Le Guin's other stuff). Someone incidentally talking about something I disagree with or spending a few pages wanking over some bullshit isn't going to make me throw away the book. I don't agree with Mieville politically but I still like a lot of things about his writing. Neurosis fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 21:09
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Neurosis posted:
That's not actually true. Lovecraft was so racist that even his contemporaries asked him to tone it down a notch.
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Feb 21, 2014 21:13
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Alhazred posted:That's not actually true. Lovecraft was so racist that even his contemporaries asked him to tone it down a notch. I am going to be pedantic and point out I said 'more', not 'acceptable', and his circle of friends may not have reflected wider society. Lovecraft himself was hypocritical given his marriage.
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Feb 21, 2014 21:15
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I actually think cultural appropriation, sexism, gender identity, etc. are all valid concerns and worthy of discussion (and especially worthy themes within a scifi/fantasy book.) I just wish people would use this thread to talk about books and authors that they like. Is it really so common that there is a great novel that everyone would otherwise love, but the author is terrible so you can't read the book? I have almost never seen this happen, so it is grating to me that this kind of thing dominates the thread. If an author writes crappy books that no one likes, then why even bother discussing their political opinions? I kind of enjoyed Hyperion, and then it got worse and worse (I guess directly correlating with Simmons' political opinions becoming worse). I stopped reading it because it was bad, not because I found out he hated Muslims etc. A lot of people praise Sanderson, but I haven't read his books in part because he is a Mormon. It's not so much that I don't want to support the LDS Church, but more that I know, as a Mormon, his world-view will prevent him from writing very meaningful novels. It's just starting to feel like a lot of people in here really like dumping on certain authors for being bad people over talking about scifi/fantasy novels.
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Feb 21, 2014 21:27
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systran posted:It's just starting to feel like a lot of people in here really like dumping on certain authors for being bad people over talking about scifi/fantasy novels. It happens all over the forums, the thread will be quiet for ages about it's actual long-term topic and someone will say something lovely or controversial and suddenly the thread is flooded with all these people just wanting to be part of the pile on. They're not interested in the topic at all, just the drama. The Power of the Internet. Or as SA has been saying for ever.. Serious Business.
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Feb 21, 2014 21:36
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Neurosis posted:I am going to be pedantic and point out I said 'more', not 'acceptable', and his circle of friends may not have reflected wider society. Lovecraft himself was hypocritical given his marriage. No but the point is even for a country that had slavery in living memory and was actively rolling back the reconstruction through terrorism lovecraft stands out as exceptionally racist. Guy was so bad other white supremacists didn't want to associate with him
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Feb 21, 2014 21:47
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Tony Montana posted:It happens all over the forums, the thread will be quiet for ages about it's actual long-term topic and someone will say something lovely or controversial and suddenly the thread is flooded with all these people just wanting to be part of the pile on. They're not interested in the topic at all, just the drama. That sort of raises the question: if the thread is that quite so much of the time why does it matter if it gets "derailed" by author chat?
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Feb 21, 2014 21:50
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I'll take a stab at getting this thread back to talking about actual SF/F. I've been reading 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, and am a little more than halfway through. The world (or, rather, solar system) he's built is absolutely breathtaking and I love getting lost in it, however I'm a bit disappointed in the plot in the sense that it moves at a snail's pace. Through 350 pages, it feels like only 3 meaningful things have actually happened that actively progressed the story forward ( Alex dying, Terminator being attacked, and Swan & Genette finding the hidden spaceship in Saturn's atmosphere ). The rest of the time its been a lot of descriptions about the economics and sociology of the solar system - which, as I said, has been fascinating, but after awhile I feel bogged down by it and just want something to actually happen. I'm not sure how many others have read it or if you had the same experience. Does the plot pick up at all in the latter half of the book? I'm going to finish it, as a book needs to be completely devoid of good qualities in order for me to put it down, but I would be keen to know if I should expect more of the same going forward or if there's a good rise in the tension and intrigue coming (without spoilers, obviously).
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Feb 21, 2014 21:53
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Right, yeah, Lovecraft's circle was not exactly a bunch of moderate liberals even by the standards of the time. Howard, for instance, was creepily enthusiastic about exterminating 'savages', whether they be sub-Saharan Africans or native Americans, at a time when the KKK had been terminally discredited, Eleanor Roosevelt's civil-rights movement was gaining major ground, and the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing (the situation for native Americans still sucked, but they'd been granted automatic American citizenship by the time he started publishing stories, so his 'put them all to the sword' approach was not exactly in vogue).
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Feb 21, 2014 21:57
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Tony Montana posted:It happens all over the forums, the thread will be quiet for ages about it's actual long-term topic and someone will say something lovely or controversial and suddenly the thread is flooded with all these people just wanting to be part of the pile on. They're not interested in the topic at all, just the drama. Or, alternatively, people actually concerned about the dust-up because this is their career and it concerns people they'll meet professionally.
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Feb 21, 2014 22:00
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But you know you're in the minority and most people are just there for the gang-bash
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Feb 21, 2014 22:03
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Talent has a strange way of erasing all this stuff, though, even external of "death of the author" considerations. Like Lovecraft was undeniably a horrible person and much more racist than, say, Simmons, but one of those guys is worthy of study decades after their death and it ain't Dan. I'm not saying it's completely irrelevant that you're a major rear end in a top hat as long as you're a literary legend, but I think we sometimes go too far in the other direction. Fortunately if you're a dick it usually manifests unpleasantly in your writing, and so the circle of life goes.
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Feb 21, 2014 22:09
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You are all incredibly stupid. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 21, 2014 22:12
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CestMoi posted:You are all incredibly stupid. Tell me more 
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Feb 21, 2014 22:15
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Tony Montana posted:But you know you're in the minority and most people are just there for the gang-bash Being appalled by appalling people isn't inherently bad. In most cases probably the opposite. You realize we're talking about a Campbell-award winning author being called a dog and an unperson? In the context of an industry where legendary authors (Harlan Ellison) grope women on stage during award ceremonies? SFF needs to confront this bullshit, because SFF is hosed up. I don't think there's much point to pretending otherwise. The occasional eruption regarding the unbelievable shittiness of some authors is, as far as I'm concerned, a healthy and reasonable reaction. e: I went to the reputedly finest, most literary con in the circuit a couple years ago, sat down in a panel about cross-racial marriages in SF/F, and spent an hour listening to the panelists talk about human/gorilla hybrids. At the next panel, about blind spots in SF/F, the sole black woman at the table was told that race had been 'solved in the 80s' and the white panelists went on to discuss the economics of Star Trek. These are not isolated nut jobs. The entire organizing committee of the con later resigned because it came to light they'd been protecting a serial stalker. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 22:27
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Got an Asimov stories? Yeah, I guess this is why I enjoy my scifi alone or with select friends. Going to a scifi club or something always made me feel dirty.
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Feb 21, 2014 22:42
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Tony Montana posted:But you know you're in the minority and most people are just there for the gang-bash All said I didn't see much gang-bashing going on in the thread. It's been generally interesting and thoughtful discussion. Unless you're referring to Mr. I also feel the need to apologize for my wording in the derail. I used the term "blacklist", which probably wasn't the right term to use for what some posters in the thread were attempting to do. That further derailed the discussion, since people took it to mean that those posters were considering banning discussion of books by those authors. They were not, and I agree with their reasoning to make a list of authors they're not comfortable giving money to. To clarify my own position on the matter: when I used that term, I was attempting to state my concern that the presence of such a list would produce a chilling effect on discussion. I've occasionally seen posters hesitant to mention books in the thread for fear of finding out their authors are shitlords, even when that isn't necessarily the case. There are some decent books by lovely authors and I think posters shouldn't feel hesitant to discuss the content of those books, even if their author's views shouldn't be given the time of day Tony Montana posted:Got an Asimov stories? Start here.
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Feb 21, 2014 23:13
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Tony Montana posted:Got an Asimov stories? Slow Graffiti posted:Anyway, the real reason I'm posting is to say that if you would like to read an awesome (and fun) fantasy series written by a really nice and engaging fellow, then check out the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust. It also made a really episodical impression on me. It didn't seem like there was anything connecting the novels, other than the setting and some of the characters, which made it difficult for me to keep engaged through the weaker sections. Does that change later?
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Feb 21, 2014 23:15
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You are absolutely not going to get a coherent picture of the Taltos stuff's setting from any single one of the books, but once you've ready any random 3-4 of them you will probably have a good handle on things. It's definitely disorienting at first but I actually kind of like how it works out - it just means that, yeah, your first exposure will seem incoherent. That also makes it sort of tough to answer your question about how episodical they are - there are a lot of common threads and there are a lot of important events you'll learn a little bit about in each of several different books. I think they're all pretty thoroughly interconnected, but you're definitely not going to find a cliffhanger directly setting up the next book very often. edit: On reread this doesn't seem like a great answer to your questions, but I've never read anything else that fits together the same way they do and I'm having a little trouble pinning it down, I guess. Sorry!
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Feb 21, 2014 23:30
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I've read Book of Jhereg, the first three stories in publication order, and the setting didn't come across as incoherent to me. But I enjoy the sort of setting where the author holds information back and the rest is up to you to figure out or decide. My biggest issue was that I really struggled to put my finger on the kind of technology they actually have, and there were a few modern sounding concepts and technologies that seemed out of place.Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:I'll take a stab at getting this thread back to talking about actual SF/F. Well without spoiling anything, no, it doesn't really pick up. The main intrigue is resolved but it doesn't build up to a climax in as much as the resolution just shows up. My experience with 2312 was very much like yours, a brilliantly realized universe with a poorly realized protagonist (Swan; Wahram rocks) and a muddled plot. Sulphagnist fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 23:48
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Irony.or.Death posted:You are absolutely not going to get a coherent picture of the Taltos stuff's setting from any single one of the books, but once you've ready any random 3-4 of them you will probably have a good handle on things. It's definitely disorienting at first but I actually kind of like how it works out - it just means that, yeah, your first exposure will seem incoherent. That also makes it sort of tough to answer your question about how episodical they are - there are a lot of common threads and there are a lot of important events you'll learn a little bit about in each of several different books. I think they're all pretty thoroughly interconnected, but you're definitely not going to find a cliffhanger directly setting up the next book very often.
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Feb 21, 2014 23:51
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I felt very much the same. I'm a huge KSR fan and love listening to interviews where he explores, say, possible alternative socio-economic systems of the future. But I feel he's always been primarily a systems guy and, at this point, his plots may only serve that end.
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Feb 22, 2014 01:53
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Cardiac posted:Doctorow might be a nice person, but his books have their own problems and I don't even know whether they are actual scifi. I care a little, because people with strong political views will tend to put money into those interests (I.e. OSC and his anti-homosexuality). If they're dead or the books are public domain though that's not an issue.
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Feb 22, 2014 02:08
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Yeah, I've always gotten the impression that KSR is one of those people who really needs a collaborator with his writing. He can really do worldbuilding in a way others can't, but he desperately needs someone who's good with writing characters to really make his worlds seem realistic.
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Feb 22, 2014 02:08
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I read Sheri Tepper's books sometimes. Gonzo crazy woman who writes very strange science fiction.
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Feb 22, 2014 02:13
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Is there some sort of weird sea change happening at SA? I only follow a few threads regularly, but this discussion about what should and shouldn't be talked about in threads keeps coming up. It's an internet discussion thread, which means that the discussion is going to meander and it's not always going to be 100% interesting to every single person reading. The moderator is in charge of keeping the discussion on topic and will say something if the discussion isn't on topic. I think a part of evaluating art, whether it's serious art or pop culture, is understanding who the creator is. HP Lovecraft, to take an example recently discussed, is a fascinating person for a lot of reasons, and if you look at his stories without bothering to learn anything about him, then you're missing out on a lot, since there are so many ways in which his life and outlook on the world did or could have influenced his writing. (If anyone is interested in delving more into his psyche, Michel Houellebecq's "HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life" is a really interesting piece of literary criticism). I don't really care for a list of "bad people," but I do think discussing author's public statements about different views and beliefs they have is a valid part of a discussion about their work. On the subject of actual books, I just finished the Acacia series by David Anthony Durham. I have kind of mixed feelings about it. It's an entertaining fantasy trilogy with powerful protagonists who save the world from terrible threats and grow and change along the way. It also has some really interesting ways of dealing with topics like racial and cultural divides and the use and abuse of power, as well as the human condition. And the character of Corinn is one of the best genre characters I have encountered aside from Scott Lynch's characters. On the other hand, I felt like Durham had a bunch of interesting things to say, using this plotline he had engineered, and then when he had sort of introduced all of the interesting ideas that he wanted to, he had placed his characters in an impossible situation that would take a really long time to work out plausibly. But rather than go the route of George RR Martin and plan eight more books in the series, he just waved his hands and went with an "a wizard fixed it" type of ending. I appreciate the brevity, but I wished he might have worked a little harder to come up with something more in keeping with the tone of the rest of the story. And in order to effect his miraculous ending that solves all the problems, he undermined his message about power and the fallibility of humanity by creating a Jesus-like savior character that makes no mistakes, does no wrong and can fix any problem, now matter how huge and dire in scale, with some vague and magical solution.
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Feb 22, 2014 02:14
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Lowly posted:
I read that series too. I loved the first book but thought the second was kinda boring and didn't enjoy it that much. I read the third and final book in the hopes that it would return to the form of the first, and while it did have some things I liked a lot, it also had some of the same problems that made me dislike the second. I didn't have strong feelings about how it ended really because I became disinterested with it as a whole and wasn't invested enough with it anymore. I think one of my major problems was that he killed/abandoned some of the more interesting characters/settings too soon and the stuff he replaced them with just didn't measure up. Also, yeah, Corinn was a great character. If more of the story arcs in this were anywhere near as good as her's, this would've been a much better/popular series.
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Feb 22, 2014 02:33
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Whalley posted:I would really enjoy going and getting your old job at Tor and spending time with Steven Brust please. Working in books is a dream of mine and Brust is an author I've always wanted to meet and shoot the poo poo with. Goddammit, internet forums user Slow Graffiti, stop stealing my dreams retroactively. Ha! If you only knew what working at Tor involved you would be quickly disabused of your desire to have my old job. My current job as a ship captain is quite more enjoyable. I'd love to comment on the current discussion if I had a better internet connection, but at present I'm posting off an iPad near a small island in the Bahamas. However, if people have some publishing questions I'll be happy to answer them as my internet access allows.
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Feb 22, 2014 02:41
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Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:I've been reading 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, and am a little more than halfway through. The world (or, rather, solar system) he's built is absolutely breathtaking and I love getting lost in it, however I'm a bit disappointed in the plot in the sense that it moves at a snail's pace. If you've read Red/Green/Blue Mars, how would you compare 2312 to those? I liked the Mars books a lot but not The Martians or Antarctica.
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Feb 22, 2014 02:57
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crowfeathers posted:I read Sheri Tepper's books sometimes. Gonzo crazy woman who writes very strange science fiction. I used to really enjoy Sheri Tepper because she's one of the few authors that has been able to surprise me with a plot twist. Unfortunately, she seems to have become increasingly shrill and (dare I say it?) anti-man with each subsequent book. By the time I got to The Fresco, I gave up. At the end, when Benita becomes sort of superwoman due to her friendly alien backup and there's the little diatribe about not needing men (what the gently caress is the difference between a woman relying on a man and relying on some super-powerful alien? She still isn't doing gently caress-all on her own behalf without needing help), I gave up. I do still trot out the True Game series once in a blue moon, though.
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