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Kopijeger posted:As for worst book, possibly "The Bear and the Dragon" by Tom Clancy. Aside from the infamous "Japanese sausage" euphemism, it seemed ridiculous how easily Russia allied with the US, how absurdly effective the high-tech cluster bombs were, how Ryan put himself at risk on the cruiser rather than allow himself to be evacuated and how the Chinese government was toppled in a bloodless coup just because they put a camera feed from drones on the internet. Don't forget the repeated characterization of Chinese people as "Klingons" who "don't value life the way we do".
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# ? Aug 9, 2015 23:30 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 20:07 |
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Don't forget the repeated characterization of Chinese people as "Klingons" who "don't value life the way we do". If the china.jpg thread has taught me anything its that is kinda/sorta/possibly true but not in the way Clancy probably intends.
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# ? Aug 9, 2015 23:52 |
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loquacius posted:Also I just wrote a post in another PYF thread about Ready Player One yesterday so I'll just paste that post here I recently reread RPO before reading Armada and this is what I posted in the Book Barn: Vanderdeath posted:I posted in this thread that I didn't mind Ready Player One after I immediately finished it but as the weeks went on, I kept thinking about the book and getting annoyed about it. I recently went back and re-read it, along with Armada and god-loving-drat. Seriously, gently caress Reddit and every other "nerd" site using Cline's books as an awful tentpole for their bullshit beliefs and justification for their lovely personalities they've carefully groomed through nostalgic consumerism. I vastly prefer Super Sad True Love Story as a near-future sci-fi story about a lonely, haughty nerd-cum-intellectual who gets the girl before everything goes to absolute poo poo
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 00:17 |
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Post Your Favorite (or Request) > PYF terrible book as long as it was written by Ernest Cline
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 00:45 |
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To indulge in my own nostalgia, teenage me read To Sail Beyond The Sunset because it was mentioned in a fan theory about the Wheel of Time from somewhere on the internet. I don't remember noticing heinlein's politics, just that it was like this endless line of wife-swapping and incest set in the 1910s. I don't think there was a plot and don't remember any scifi elements (time travel?). It was my first exposure to heinlein, too. There's probably a lot of awful poo poo in there but I doubt it's worth dredging 600+ pages to find
The Killing Jelq has a new favorite as of 01:23 on Aug 10, 2015 |
# ? Aug 10, 2015 01:20 |
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I am only five pages into this thread, so this may have been mentioned. Two of my favorite books of all time are Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. I recently found out that he wrote a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, so I instantly grabbed the audiobook on Audible. Complete, boring poo poo. I actually got about 1/3 of the way through it and returned it to Audible for credit. I'll do what I did when I started reading King's Wolves of the Calla. Put that poo poo down and make up my own series ending.
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 03:14 |
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The Killing Jelq posted:To indulge in my own nostalgia, teenage me read To Sail Beyond The Sunset because it was mentioned in a fan theory about the Wheel of Time from somewhere on the internet. I don't remember noticing heinlein's politics, just that it was like this endless line of wife-swapping and incest set in the 1910s. I don't think there was a plot and don't remember any scifi elements (time travel?). It was my first exposure to heinlein, too. There's probably a lot of awful poo poo in there but I doubt it's worth dredging 600+ pages to find
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 03:17 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Post Your Favorite (or Request) > PYF terrible book as long as it was written by Ernest Cline ignoring the tribute to the 80s (it was acceptable in the 80s; it was acceptable at the time) of Cline's novels, reading the summaries of RP1 and Armada really reminded me of the books by Stephen Gould. u may remember him as the writer of the YA novel which turned into the not-at-all successful movie, Jumper i read Jumper and Wildside as a teen and these are some things i remember, without cheating and referring to wikipedia or some inevitable stephengould.wikia dot com Jumper a nerdy kid, i.e. u the audience stand-in, discovers he can teleport. i don't recall how he discovered it, probably some "hmm, imma think about this sick place" and boom. he calls this "jumping" because teleporting sounds less cool and involves more than one syllable. i think at one point it's described like he just vanishes like a tv movie with zero production values (caveat i have not watched the movie or its trailer and i assume there are special effects. pls don't correct me) the kid develops a weird objectivist set of values in that "ok, the bank stores money... and if the bank loses money, the banks have to pay them back out of their pockets, and the customers aren't affected... so i should steal from banks!" he spends the first part of the book just jumping into bank vaults and stealing money like a video game protagonist running into people's houses to break vases. he is also super clever in avoiding cctvs and stuff and blah blah, because being an idiot dipshit child who uses his powers for selfish purposes requires intelligence, and cunning anyway after lots of talent-squandering-for-self-important-purposes, he watches tv and oh my, terrorism exists! so he says ok i will be selfless now, i will capture terrorists! this book was written in the 90s and tbf, the public consciousness is not well-educated with this idea of a grey area between freedom fighters and terrorism. but anway it was a p dumb plot which i don't think was used in the movie he catches these terrorists through his teleporting means, then he teleports them to a cliff and drops them. they scream like an idiot being dropped off a tall cliff for a long while before he teleports mid-fall and then BANG! send them to the clifftop again. then he keeps throwing them until they pee and poo poo themselves dry and will not do the naughty terrorist things again and then he sends them to the cia/fbi/government agency i forgot the resolution to that, or the whole book even i do remember one thing though: there was a hot supermodel. this super hot supermodel was on tv and he's like "imma go and teleport to where she is, kidnap her and then when she's stuck alone with me with nowhere out, i'll seduce her with my charms and make her LOVE ME" which is of loving course exactly what he did. anyway that was how jumper had a story involving a young man who threatened a beautiful lady with his powers and made her a sexual victim Wildside i cannot quite recall this book. i remember it had a kickass yellow cover of a puma jumping out at you. i was also very in my young teens when i read it and thought black t-shirts with dragons were appropriate attire. my friend borrowed the book and lost it. i think i may forgive him one day because the book was not very good so Wildside is, once again, a story about a young nerd i.e. audience you getting a miracle handed to him on a silver platter with nary any effort put into on his part i think the young nerd goes to the basement of his dad's house or something, and discovers a portal. THe portal goes to some alternate universe (it wasn't fully explaiend), but it was basically Jurassic World The Real Thing, Without The Park. it's dangerous as poo poo but our nerd has SURVIVAL SKILLS so he metal gear solided his way out of the place back into the mundane real world I think Jurassic Park was released at the time of this book? Maybe that's why i picked it up. dinosaurs are rad i dont' recall dinosaurs were in the book yeah maybe that's why the book isn't rad anyway he's like, how can this portal enrich me in any way? i know, i'll start learning how to use firearms, buy a bunch of guns, and hunt innocent jurassic era animals (like the sabre tooth tiger) and sell their stuff for profit ok, i'll get some of my friends to go with me, including the Hot Girl Who Will Fall In Love With Me If We Get Stuck And There Is No Way To Get Out Without My Assistance then one of the friends who was mad at him for idiot young people friendship reasons inevitably leaked the news and the military/fbi/cia come to spoil the fun. and the protag is like, haha, guess who has the experience of playing this world too many times and have enough knowledge to write the GameFAQS wiki for it. so yeah the more well-trained people with less experience about Jurassic World gets eaten up. Then he fucks the Hot Girl. the end and thats the story of Wildwide, involving a guy who once again uses his powers to threaten a young woman into having sex with him. i think that's a pattern with S.Gould books. thats all
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 03:49 |
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John Big Booty posted:Yep. It's Heinlein's second meandering novel about travelling back in time to have sex with a parent. Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until. There's a scene where he's having sex with... whoever, and in the throes of passion she cries out, "Thou art God!" Aaaaannnd that's where I gave up in disgust. According to a friend of mine who read the whole thing, I picked a good place to stop.
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 03:52 |
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Well, they weren't great, but they weren't what you portray either. There are bad things about them as books, but you feel the need to make poo poo up whole cloth. I mean it's like you're mixing up the books with a combination of drug damaged memory mixed with bad 90's direct to VHS movies with a dash of wish-fulfillment thrown in. For example: The Saddest Rhino posted:i do remember one thing though: there was a hot supermodel. this super hot supermodel was on tv and he's like "imma go and teleport to where she is, kidnap her and then when she's stuck alone with me with nowhere out, i'll seduce her with my charms and make her LOVE ME" which is of loving course exactly what he did. Literally did not happen at all in the book. Not once.
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 03:56 |
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cool please correct me
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 04:03 |
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Zamboni_Rodeo posted:Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until. And that might be one of his better ones. I think it's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in which the protagonist concludes that having sex with your teenage cousin is totally fine and it's just cultural hangups about incest and paedophilia that made him think it was bad.
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 04:32 |
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Zamboni_Rodeo posted:Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until. I want to give a wedgie to myself just for having written it. Tiggum posted:And that might be one of his better ones. I think it's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in which the protagonist concludes that having sex with your teenage cousin is totally fine and it's just cultural hangups about incest and paedophilia that made him think it was bad. Ellie Crabcakes has a new favorite as of 04:37 on Aug 10, 2015 |
# ? Aug 10, 2015 04:34 |
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The Killing Jelq posted:To indulge in my own nostalgia, teenage me read To Sail Beyond The Sunset because it was mentioned in a fan theory about the Wheel of Time from somewhere on the internet. I don't remember noticing heinlein's politics, just that it was like this endless line of wife-swapping and incest set in the 1910s. I don't think there was a plot and don't remember any scifi elements (time travel?). It was my first exposure to heinlein, too. There's probably a lot of awful poo poo in there but I doubt it's worth dredging 600+ pages to find Yeah, first Heinlein I ever read was Number Of The Beast. I was thirteen. I ... wasn't quite sure what to make of it. "Perhaps this is actually good. This guy's supposed to be good, right?" Next was I Will Fear No Evil. I did get into his non-seniles after that. I do like the fan theory that Number Of The Beast is literally a worked example in how to write a lovely novel, because every time something loving dumb happens it's an author standin doing it.
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 12:39 |
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Zamboni_Rodeo posted:Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until. I read it in high school. I was really enjoying all the future sci-fi political stuff up until the guy makes a bunch of space cops disappear and it goes off into crazy religious sex orgy bullshit. I stuck through to the end because, seriously, this is just padding, right? He's going to get back to the real plot soon, right? Nope. I was actually kinda disappointed when the Martians decided not to blow up the Earth, I recall.
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 13:42 |
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The Saddest Rhino posted:ignoring the tribute to the 80s (it was acceptable in the 80s; it was acceptable at the time) of Cline's novels, reading the summaries of RP1 and Armada really reminded me of the books by Stephen Gould. For a second I was worried you were talking about the other Stephen Gould and we were going to get a lecture on the merits of the Bell Curve.
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 15:04 |
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--All You Zombies-- is the only thing by Heinlein I've ever read and I honestly enjoyed it but am 100% okay with never touching anything else he ever wrote Especially if the weird hosed-up time-travel incest stuff is a general theme of his writing rather than just some weird concepts that story was designed to explore
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 19:18 |
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Zamboni_Rodeo posted:Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until. I never read it, but I want to like it for 2 reasons. 1) It's Space Jesus vs. Scientology-Christianity. 2) Senile Libertarian Heinlein hated it.
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# ? Aug 10, 2015 19:37 |
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pentyne posted:I only read the first third of the book, but the MC's wife/gf is part of a social of elite liberal arts/sociology/"enlightened" group and the figurehead, some free thinking professor gets smug and starts talking about how the US governemnt is going to destroy ghettos and bulldoze parks to build the "information superhighway" and the MC just starts yelling at him. The funny thing is this is basically what is literally figuratively happening right now.
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# ? Aug 13, 2015 01:51 |
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Zamboni_Rodeo posted:Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until. You sure did. I gave up shortly after the main female character said that most of the time, women did something to deserve getting raped. The plot of human raised on Mars was interesting, but the rest of the story is absolute horseshit. Someone mentioned Amanda McKittrick Ros previously in the thread. This woman was almost brilliant in how badly she wrote, and of course, she was completely oblivious to how bad she was (although of course, she hated the critics, and made them evil characters in some of her books). In her biography, her biographer mentions that he one time suggested that her having a villain named Lord Rasberry was probably not a good idea, and she just stared at him uncomprehendingly. Anyways, have some quotes. As you'll see, she really loved alliteration. Irene Iddesleigh posted:At the commencement of Irene’s answer of lavishing praises and flimsy apologies, her affianced moved to the opposite corner of the rustic building to scan the features of her he wholly worshipped and reluctantly doubted. Every sentence the able and beautiful girl uttered caused Sir John to shift his apparently uncomfortable person nearer and nearer, watching at the same time minutely the divine picture of innocence, until at last, when her reply was ended, he found himself, altogether unconsciously, clasping her to his bosom, whilst the ruby rims which so recently proclaimed accusations and innocence met with unearthly sweetness, chasing every fault over the hills of doubt, until hidden in the hollow of immediate hate. The opening sentence of Delina Delaney posted:Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness? Visiting Westminister Abbey posted:Holy Moses! Have a look!
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# ? Aug 13, 2015 05:53 |
I recently was recommended rpo by someone who usually just reads David McCullough books. I told her I had heard mixed things, and she assured me that no it was awesome.
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# ? Aug 13, 2015 12:03 |
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Visiting Westminister Abbey posted:Holy Moses! Have a look! Am I alone in thinking this is not exactly 'good', but is at least not bland, and achieves a flippant tone that's clearly deliberate? AFAIK nearly all McKittrick Ros' poetry is in this weird sarcastic style, but there's such a load of ruminating, Gray's Elegy style verse about the vanity of human wishes that it's a fairly fresh approach here. Parody, But Barely Worse Than The Original posted:When he killed the Mudjokivis, This floats around the net often unattributed, but my copy of 'Verse and Worse' names the perp as George A. Strong.
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# ? Aug 13, 2015 12:54 |
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It's basically children's rhymes. Not poetry for children, but poetry by children. The flippancy is the same.
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# ? Aug 13, 2015 13:01 |
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Ambitious Spider posted:I recently was recommended rpo by someone who usually just reads David McCullough books. I told her I had heard mixed things, and she assured me that no it was awesome. It's "awesome" in the since that people love tons of inside jokes on every page that only they, "real" fans, would get. Do you want to see 3 pages of teenagers from the 2040s arguing about LadyHawke? Because that's the essential core of the book. I say this having read it, it's cringe-worthy for the level of 80s cultural obsession that author has but its still fun as hell to read, like so bad its good terrible fanfiction. You'll keep getting blown away by just how juvenile the writing is for a major NYT bestseller.
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# ? Aug 14, 2015 18:48 |
I do not know the book from which this passage resides, but it is utter magic. Someone earlier in the topic mentioned Ender's Shadow and I have to agree as to its terribleness. I had the exact same problems with Bean being set up as The Ultimate Guy. The thing that frustrated me the most is the very end when Ender elects to use the Dr. Device on the formic planet, Bean already knows that that's what to do and he can do it at any time but he chooses to let Ender pull the trigger and be the hero!! But he still delivers the ~secret message~ to the pilot to fire the Dr. Device into his own cockpit, because if he didn't do that the chain reaction wouldn't work and the plan would fail. So Bean was the Real Hero. It made me like Ender's Game even less than I did at the time I started reading Shadow, because while at least you could argue some subtlety in Ender's story, Bean, if not the "Hitler As Christ" figure you guys were talking about, is certainly the "unsung hero" type of which that figure is the extreme. So I felt like it made that image stick out more in Ender's Game, and made me feel like OSC had such an obnoxious narrative in his mind from the start.
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# ? Aug 14, 2015 19:24 |
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tbf my grades improved after i read it
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# ? Aug 20, 2015 02:56 |
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How does one manage to get paid to write this sort of garbage? There are millions of these books written by people you've never heard of, all containing basically the same, mostly useless content mixed with terrible jokes. Do publishing companies just pay some random employee a nominal fee to put an updated version together every few years or what?
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# ? Aug 20, 2015 04:17 |
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I guess Gary Larson just had too much self-respect, so they hired someone to rip off Gary Larson.
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# ? Aug 20, 2015 04:29 |
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Tiggum posted:How does one manage to get paid to write this sort of garbage? There are millions of these books written by people you've never heard of, all containing basically the same, mostly useless content mixed with terrible jokes. Do publishing companies just pay some random employee a nominal fee to put an updated version together every few years or what? Authors like Brian Herbert gotta start somewhere
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# ? Aug 21, 2015 14:30 |
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:Authors like Brian Herbert gotta start somewhere Authors like Brian Herbert, Christopher Tolkein et al got started by (a) picking the right genes (b) calling Kevin J. Anderson (c) calling for MORE COKE! AND HOOKERS!
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# ? Aug 21, 2015 14:54 |
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divabot posted:Authors like Brian Herbert, Christopher Tolkein et al got started by (a) picking the right genes (b) calling Kevin J. Anderson (c) calling for MORE COKE! AND HOOKERS! Doesn't Christopher Tolkien just publish his father's library of old notes?
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# ? Aug 21, 2015 15:28 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Doesn't Christopher Tolkien just publish his father's library of old notes? He does a lot of editing, which he's gotten better at over the years. It's a better management of the legacy than Brian Herbert, that's for certain. Some of the History of Middle-Earth books are more scholarly analysis of the evolution of the story through JRRT's life.
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# ? Aug 21, 2015 16:40 |
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Someone should do one of those readthroughs of the Brian Herbert dunebooks, because they are super-dumb in ways that are kind of interesting.
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# ? Aug 21, 2015 17:05 |
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John Big Booty posted:That's where he started to let his libertarianism shine, if I recall correctly.
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# ? Aug 21, 2015 19:11 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Someone should do one of those readthroughs of the Brian Herbert dunebooks, because they are super-dumb in ways that are kind of interesting. I like how in the first prequel book he wrote he gave the Harkonnens no-ship technology, which wouldn't exist in universe for thousands of years. Also the Baron was fat because Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam hypnotized him to overeat.
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# ? Aug 21, 2015 23:10 |
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muscles like this? posted:I like how in the first prequel book he wrote he gave the Harkonnens no-ship technology, which wouldn't exist in universe for thousands of years. Also the Baron was fat because Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam hypnotized him to overeat. I know, right? Also remember how it was mention that Paul's grandfather got gored by a bull? In the prequels, they changed it into an insect space bull, because
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# ? Aug 21, 2015 23:38 |
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For some reason dear ol dad forgot to mention that it was an insect in the scene where Jessica talks about how much she hates the preserved head.
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# ? Aug 21, 2015 23:41 |
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Julian May's The Many Coloured Land/Golden Torc. Someone recommended it in another thread on the premise of 'future people can travel back to post-dinosaur age to get away from everything but there's aliens already there'. Premise sounds good, starts well, and then everyone's a loving Mary Sue over-powered telepath/shape shifter vs Medieval Space Elves/mutant underdog trolls, it's complete shite.
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# ? Aug 22, 2015 00:31 |
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Goldskull posted:Julian May's The Many Coloured Land/Golden Torc. Someone recommended it in another thread on the premise of 'future people can travel back to post-dinosaur age to get away from everything but there's aliens already there'. Premise sounds good, starts well, and then everyone's a loving Mary Sue over-powered telepath/shape shifter vs Medieval Space Elves/mutant underdog trolls, it's complete shite. God, that series was amazing. (-ly disastrous.) The first book is pretty cool for the early '80s. Next three, ehh okay finish it off fine for a sci fi adventure, but you can hear the typewriter by the fourth one. Fifth book ("Intervention") was actually really nice, I loved the viewpoint character. The second trilogy ... you can really tell that she plotted the entire epic before she started, and by the end she was typing with her forehead while swearing continuously. The last book was mumbled in by phone. I read to the end because I'd started twenty years before so I was going to loving well finish, but frankly she shoulda handed the outline to Kevin Anderson and it would have been a far less worse second trilogy. I didn't read Pliocene Companion if I did now thirty years later I might be tempted to dig out the books again and there's badly-written 100k unfinished fanfics I'd rather be getting on with.
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# ? Aug 22, 2015 01:51 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 20:07 |
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Has anybody read the Iron Druid books? Amazon kept recommending them to me for ages and they looked like hot garbage.
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# ? Aug 22, 2015 01:56 |