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I think it's a must that Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) be mentioned here, friends. Painfully readable novel. Dune (Frank Herbert) is great also. It won the Hugo & Nebula awards & is the bestselling sci-fi book.. engrossing read. Great books, amirite?
A3th3r fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 03:57
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Ender's Game is the perfect book, for pre-teens and autistic manchildren.
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Sep 13, 2014 06:11
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Ender's Game - great read when you are an 11-year-old dweeb Not great when you are a dweeb of any other age I say that as somebody with a high degree of respect for a lot of YA media. The ability to connect to that particular narrative should naturally and rapidly fade as one goes from being "smartest kid in this middle-school, so put-upon, so misunderstood" (something most people here probably were at some point) to being a regular type joe in the broader world. At the same time, the underlying neuroses in the story become more glaring. I have never known anybody to re-read it later in life and go "wow, that is still just as amazing as it was when I was ten!" PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 06:18
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When I was a teenager I thought Ender's Game was great because of how Ender outsmarted everybody. Today I think Ender's Game is even better than I did back then but for the way it presents ideas about war, fear, hate, morality, and perspective.
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Sep 13, 2014 06:33
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Ender's Game is better than modern YA but that isn't much. Please don't read YA if you are an adult.
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Sep 13, 2014 07:46
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mallamp posted:Ender's Game is better than modern YA but that isn't much. Please don't read YA if you are an adult. What? No. There is plenty of quality in the YA section of your library or bookstore. It's not all Maze Runner and Divergent, any more so than the adult Sci Fi isn't limited to Brian Herbert's raping of his father's corpus.
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Sep 13, 2014 07:48
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ZerodotJander posted:When I was a teenager I thought Ender's Game was great because of how Ender outsmarted everybody. Today I think Ender's Game is even better than I did back then but for the way it presents ideas about war, fear, hate, morality, and perspective. see, this is why I like Speaker For The Dead the best, of the series. It tackles those things more evocatively than Ender's Game ever did and does so without the creepy ubermensch narrative (though the "I'm gonna talk poo poo about dead people and you're gonna like it," tangents are dumb aren't actually required to reinforce the role Ender has assumed, the way Card probably reckoned). PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 08:36
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mallamp posted:Ender's Game is better than modern YA but that isn't much. Please don't read YA if you are an adult. This is stupid, don't listen to this person. There is great YA fiction. John Green comes to mind, Lois Lowry, Neil Gaiman. I don't think the ratio of good:bad YA fiction is that different from SF/Fantasy, except that the former has less rape and misogyny.
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Sep 13, 2014 14:58
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Good adult fiction = good YA fiction. Dumbing things down for teens is stupid. Reading those dumbed down books about teens and teen problems as an adult is even more stupid. Don't be stupid. I've actually tried reading John Green, maybe 50 pages or so. Reading whole book of that would be like visiting tumblr unironically. mallamp fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 16:58
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mallamp posted:Ender's Game is better than modern YA but that isn't much. Please don't read YA if you are an adult. There's so much great YA fiction these days. I loved the Keys to the Kingdom series by Garth nix, which I started when I was 10 when the first book was published, and finished when the last book was published my senior year of high school. Railsea was great, The Forest of Hands and Teeth series is supposed to be great, and motherfucking Clariel, the fourth book in the Abhorsen series, is coming out October 14 and I'm probably gonna read that in like a day. I also just finished The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter yesterday, and it was a pretty entertaining read with a very interesting, non-fantastical setting. It basically takes place a few decades after something similar to WWI, and a bunch of nations decided to sign a treaty that would create an international patent office whose purpose was to prevent the development of "unseemly" technology so that a war like that could never happen again. Almost every other nation in the world quickly signs on, with the effect that by 1973 when the novel takes place, the technology and culture is still largely Victorian. The main character is a girl who grew up in a gypsy traveling carnival and makes a living impersonating her twin brother working as a sort of private detective, and at the start of the story is hired by a duchess in a neighboring country (in a split Great Britain) to find her brother, who has run away with some sort of device. It's the first book in what I think is going to be a fairly long series, and if the quality can stay at this level then it'll be great.
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Sep 13, 2014 17:16
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nnedi okorafor owns bones, get over it
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Sep 13, 2014 17:17
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regularizer posted:I also just finished The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter yesterday, and it was a pretty entertaining read with a very interesting, non-fantastical setting. It basically takes place a few decades after something similar to WWI, and a bunch of nations decided to sign a treaty that would create an international patent office whose purpose was to prevent the development of "unseemly" technology so that a war like that could never happen again. Almost every other nation in the world quickly signs on, with the effect that by 1973 when the novel takes place, the technology and culture is still largely Victorian. The main character is a girl who grew up in a gypsy traveling carnival and makes a living impersonating her twin brother working as a sort of private detective, and at the start of the story is hired by a duchess in a neighboring country (in a split Great Britain) to find her brother, who has run away with some sort of device. It's the first book in what I think is going to be a fairly long series, and if the quality can stay at this level then it'll be great. An alternate history with two contradictory points of divergence, neat.
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Sep 13, 2014 17:31
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YA has exploded so much these days that it's basically a marketing term more than anything. But that said, to me it's kinda in the same area as self-publishing. I'm sure there's stuff that isn't terrible simply because there's so much of it, but damned if I want to take the time and effort to find it.
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Sep 13, 2014 18:42
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regularizer posted:There's so much great YA fiction these days. I loved the Keys to the Kingdom series by Garth nix, which I started when I was 10 when the first book was published, and finished when the last book was published my senior year of high school. Railsea was great, The Forest of Hands and Teeth series is supposed to be great, and motherfucking Clariel, the fourth book in the Abhorsen series, is coming out October 14 and I'm probably gonna read that in like a day. I am so loving there. Loved the feel of the magic in Abhorsen, especially when it bleeds into Ancelsteirre. Was Tales from Beyond the Wall any good? Wasn't it supposed to clear up Chlorr of the Mask being a fallen Abhorsen?
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Sep 13, 2014 19:26
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House Louse posted:An alternate history with two contradictory points of divergence, neat. It's not really clearly explained in the book, but I think the British Civil War that led to the split was linked to the overall war that led to the formation of the patent office. The appendix said that a lot of European countries revolted against their monarchies around that time, and I'm sure later books will explain more. The explanation of what the "Gas-Lit Empire" means is really cool though and adds a lot of background to the setting, but you should read it to find out.
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Sep 13, 2014 19:29
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I adore the Abhorsen books but Clariel isn't very good at all  The protagonist is hilariously grumpy, and the center of a good narrative develops near the end of the book, but the pacing is all off and the inciting event occurs after a couple hundred pages.
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Sep 13, 2014 19:32
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Have you read The Buried Life yet? It looked really good but I just found out it got pushed back to next year.
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Sep 13, 2014 19:45
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mallamp posted:Good adult fiction = good YA fiction. Dumbing things down for teens is stupid. Reading those dumbed down books about teens and teen problems as an adult is even more stupid. Don't be stupid. As a high school English teacher, I'd just like to agree that you're very wrong and are coming off a bit condescending. Since this is a sci-fi/fantasy thread, I'll provide a list of good sci-fi/fantasy YA to try: -The Knife of Never Letting Go -Graceling -The Monstrumonologist -The Fifth Wave -Steelheart (which is by Brandon Sanderson, and also try The Rhitmatist by him while you're at it) -The Raven Boys -Sabriel -The Golden Compass -The Graveyard Book There is, no doubt, a ton of crappy YA fiction out there. But I feel it gets a bad rap simply because of Twilight and the assumption that it is all exactly like that when the reality couldn't be farther from the truth. Paranormal Romance has been all but phased out at this point. It's your preference if you don't want to read YA, that's fine, but don't discount the genre altogether just because of a few bad apples (or because you're still stuck in the 90s when YA really did suck). A good book is a good book, regardless of whether the protagonist is two, seventeen, thirty, or eighty-nine. Or even human at all. Captain Mog fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 21:26
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Are any of these not dystopian? 
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Sep 13, 2014 21:55
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mallamp posted:Good adult fiction = good YA fiction. Dumbing things down for teens is stupid. Reading those dumbed down books about teens and teen problems as an adult is even more stupid. Don't be stupid. You do realize that the category of 'Young Adult' is a fairly recent invention and has exploded in the past few years as mostly a gimmick related to the increase of marketing research? There are a lot of new releases that are marketed as 'young adult' that were not necessarily written or intended by the author for that market, but were pigeonholed as such because of the simple fact that they have a teenage protagonist. Because of this, if Catcher in the Rye were released in 2014, it would be marketed as young adult. On the topic of fantasy novels, I just last night finished Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and highly recommend it. It's been getting a lot of buzz and had a fairly decent review in the NYT. I thought that the post apocalypse genre was fairly played out but this was a book that really brought something new to the genre, while also elevating the material into something entirely different.
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Sep 13, 2014 21:59
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Megazver posted:Are any of these not dystopian? Yeah
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Sep 13, 2014 22:05
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I just finished Daryl Gregory's latest book We Are All Completely Fine and it was really good. It's about a therapy group for survivors/victims of Lovecraft type supernatural horrors and Gregory does a great job at adding depth to the premise with good characters, interesting backstories, and his love of playing around with genre tropes & archetypes that he's shown a talent for in his previous books I've read.
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Sep 13, 2014 23:02
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Try The Apothecary. YA fantasy with the Cold War as a backdrop. One of the best in this genre IMO.
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Sep 14, 2014 03:21
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mallamp posted:Good adult fiction = good YA fiction. I'd argue that the overall quality of current mass market YA is better than the overall quality of mass market adult fiction. And it's OK to enjoy both these types of books, but it shouldn't be all you read. mallamp posted:I've actually tried reading John Green, maybe 50 pages or so. Reading whole book of that would be like visiting tumblr unironically. I really want to like John Green, but his Manic Pixie Dream Uncle online persona rubs me the wrong way, and which each book he writes, his characters sound more and more like he does in his YouTube videos.
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Sep 14, 2014 09:05
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Golden Compass is pretty good, LeGuin's "YA" books are good too. But what they have in common is that they weren't written with some "YA market" in mind. When author says "I'm going to write YA book" that's when things usually go wrong. Ok yeah, Graveyard Book and Sandersons stuff is pretty good. Ambercrombie just wrote a decent YA book. But there's pattern again, these writers aren't "YA authors". When I'm talking about YA being poo poo I'm no talking about those. They're examples of fiction that could be just aswell called adult fiction. What is dumb is this new wave of authors whose genre isn't really sci-fi or fantasy, but "YA". They don't write dystopia or whatever because they have something original to say, they write it because it sells and because morons buy it. They're easy to tell apart because they usually have their ideas copied from thousand similar books (as these authors don't really have an imagination, or even understanding of the genre they're writing, they just need some trendy setting to put their annoying dream teenagers in). And then the readers who are "YA fans" (not really sci-fi or fantasy fans), especially if they're adults. gently caress that poo poo. mallamp fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 14:06
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I think I remember reading a Marion Zimmer Bradley quote at some point that the way to write a "young adult" novel was to write a novel for adults, but make your protagonist sixteen years old.
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Sep 14, 2014 14:12
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think I remember reading a Marion Zimmer Bradley quote at some point that the way to write a "young adult" novel was to write a novel for adults, but make your protagonist sixteen years old. That checks out, because I'm pretty sure at some time during her cross examination she said she felt that children were perfectly capable of making decisions like an adult.
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Sep 14, 2014 14:18
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Chairchucker posted:That checks out, because I'm pretty sure at some time during her cross examination she said she felt that children were perfectly capable of making decisions like an adult. Yeah, was wondering if anyone would catch that :P
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Sep 14, 2014 14:20
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mallamp posted:Golden Compass is pretty good, LeGuin's "YA" books are good too. But what they have in common is that they weren't written with some "YA market" in mind. Now I think I understand what you're saying better. YA dystopian is by and large awful because of "copycat syndrome": Hungry Games hit it big so now everybody with Word decided to write "the next Hunger Games" and publishers ate it up. My students (the ones who enjoy reading, I should add) have noticed this too and are just as critical of it. I always try to encourage them to "read up" as well and check out adult novels which are similar to the YA works they've enjoyed in the past. Captain Mog fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 14:43
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mallamp posted:Golden Compass is pretty good, LeGuin's "YA" books are good too. But what they have in common is that they weren't written with some "YA market" in mind. Except everything you're saying applies equally to just about any fiction genre. A lot of what people write is going to be cruft meant to piggy-pack off current trends/successes. Think of all the authors who write/wrote Tolkien-eseque fantasy. They don't write about elves and orcs or whatever because they have something original to say, they write it because it sells and because morons buy it. Ugh, and readers who are "Fantasy fans". gently caress that poo poo. It takes cherry-picking to pick out the gems in any genre, not exclusively YA fiction by any means. I'm sorry that you seem to have some unbridled hatred for mass-market YA Fiction. Yes, it's mostly crap but so is most of everything/anything. It seems odd to attack another genre in a thread about a genre whose authors are often racists, misogynists an right-wing extremists. At least there's less of that in most other genres of fiction.
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Sep 14, 2014 14:46
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Scott Westerfield's Leviathan trilogy is a neat little set YA alt-history novels. WWI with the Axis a dieselpunk culture using walkers and other machines, the Allies biopunk with living airships and loving WARBEARS the size of houses. Unfortunately it kind of underutilizes the potential of such a neat idea while going through its teen protagonist-y coming of age schtick. It kind of feels like the Temeraire series except without even some of the huge battle set pieces that has; mostly just a travelogue of cultures removed from the actual theater of war. It also comes to a bit of an abrupt end leaving plotlines hanging kind of like a book or two got cut. On the plus side it is full of lots of great Keith Thompson art.
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Sep 14, 2014 14:55
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The Scandinavia is nothing but dickfish. Just like in real life.
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Sep 14, 2014 15:00
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darnon posted:Scott Westerfield's Leviathan trilogy is a neat little set YA alt-history novels. WWI with the Axis a dieselpunk culture using walkers and other machines, the Allies biopunk with living airships and loving WARBEARS the size of houses. Unfortunately it kind of underutilizes the potential of such a neat idea while going through its teen protagonist-y coming of age schtick. It kind of feels like the Temeraire series except without even some of the huge battle set pieces that has; mostly just a travelogue of cultures removed from the actual theater of war. It also comes to a bit of an abrupt end leaving plotlines hanging kind of like a book or two got cut. On the plus side it is full of lots of great Keith Thompson art. That art is great, especially since I think it's a reference to a period map. fake edit: yeah, here we are: 
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Sep 14, 2014 15:27
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darnon posted:Scott Westerfield's Leviathan trilogy is a neat little set YA alt-history novels. WWI with the Axis a dieselpunk culture using walkers and other machines, the Allies biopunk with living airships and loving WARBEARS the size of houses. Unfortunately it kind of underutilizes the potential of such a neat idea while going through its teen protagonist-y coming of age schtick. It kind of feels like the Temeraire series except without even some of the huge battle set pieces that has; mostly just a travelogue of cultures removed from the actual theater of war. It also comes to a bit of an abrupt end leaving plotlines hanging kind of like a book or two got cut. On the plus side it is full of lots of great Keith Thompson art. This is dope. Is the Temeraire series worth reading? I don't think I've read a book about dragons since i read some of the Pern books as a kid.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:04
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regularizer posted:This is dope. Is the Temeraire series worth reading? I don't think I've read a book about dragons since i read some of the Pern books as a kid. The first few are enjoyable and worth reading, the rest of the series depends on how much you liked, and were into, those ones and the concept as a whole. And, yeah, that map is awesome. I had no idea what it was from but I used it as a screensaver a few years back after stumbling across it. Poutling posted:
I decided to check this out after seeing your post and I like it a lot so far. She does a good job of pulling you in right from the beginning and making you not want to put the book down.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:23
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regularizer posted:This is dope. Is the Temeraire series worth reading? I don't think I've read a book about dragons since i read some of the Pern books as a kid. The first couple of books if you don't mind a loving murder-dragon and a loving 19th Century Royal Navy officer talking about their feels while affectionately gazing into each others' eyes every other scene. "Oh Temeraire! - Oh Lawrence! - Oh Temeraire!"
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Sep 14, 2014 22:44
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regularizer posted:This is dope. Is the Temeraire series worth reading? I don't think I've read a book about dragons since i read some of the Pern books as a kid. The first book is actually really good. The later ones, not so much. It shifts from being historical fiction to alt-history and the plots get, well . . . they spend whole books searching for lost dragon babies instead of fighting.
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Sep 14, 2014 23:03
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I see no one really talked about the Chaos Walking series. If you want superb "YA" SF then this is the series. Anything by Patrick Ness, really.
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Sep 14, 2014 23:20
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PupsOfWar posted:Ender's Game - great read when you are an 11-year-old dweeb
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Sep 14, 2014 23:20
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coyo7e posted:I was told by a couple of Marines that it's nearly-required reading for officer training. Both those guys were full of poo poo though so I guess... They were Marines. It wasn't on the Commandant's Reading List at all from 2007-2010 iirc. Starship Troopers was though. None of that poo poo is mandatory either
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