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MrSmokes posted:I really liked Rendezvous with Rama and I'm looking for more books that are similar. I enjoy stories that are about exploring what remains of lost alien civilizations. I prefer stories with a lot of mystery, where not everything is carefully explained, and is instead left to your imagination. As long as the mystery isn't clearly a point where the author couldn't think of something good and cool, and just wanted to get out of having to explain it. There really aren't many books like Rendezvous with Rama, unfortunately (do not read the other books in that universe). You could maybe try Eon, by Greg Bear, or Marrow by Robert Reed. They are the closest I can think of off the top of my head. I enjoyed both.
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Sep 22, 2015 07:49
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Torrannor posted:There's a thread to discuss the works of Patrick Rothfuss here: I've come to appreciate the writing from a technical standpoint, but I think I fall into the camp of readers who just can't get on board with Kvothe as a character. It's ALL about him and I haven't really had a reason to like him. He's super good at everything, he miraculously didn't lose any social graces or skills from his time in Tarbean, and his only character flaw is that he is too proud to accept the frequent kindness of strangers that could've got him out of a lot of bad situations. anilEhilated posted:It mostly gets more complex as it goes. I don't know how the stories are grouped up in the English release but they start spoofing (and subverting) folklore and proceed to more interesting theme. The novels (starting with Blood of the Elves) start off fairly slow but it's definitely a great read. darnon posted:I'd recommend reading The Sword of Destiny before getting into the Blood of Elves which kicks off the novel series proper. If you have played the game you're probably familiar with a lot of the Ciri stuff already, but like The Last Wish it's another anthology that sets up more of the world. For whatever reason they initially held off translating it so going from The Last Wish to Blood of Elves which has a fair number of things going on at the onset was a little jarring.
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Sep 22, 2015 07:50
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The Ninth Layer posted:My narrator doesn't have to be from Earth (or the US/England, for that matter) to speak English to me.
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Sep 22, 2015 08:48
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The trouble with renaming eponyms, toponyms, etc is that most readers can only deal with a certain amount of neologism. It very quickly becomes utter gibberish. The author is in great danger of not noticing, because it takes months to write a decent novel, and as their creator, the words become familiar and simple. It's very easy to forget that they're very different for the reader. The bottom line is that whatever scenes you are painting for your readers, language is just the palette. To switch metaphors, a good writer is like a good waiter -- unnoticed, invisible, but facilitating every aspect of a wonderful meal. The job of the author is get out of the way and let the reader devour the text.
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Sep 22, 2015 11:09
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MrSmokes posted:I really liked Rendezvous with Rama and I'm looking for more books that are similar. I enjoy stories that are about exploring what remains of lost alien civilizations. I prefer stories with a lot of mystery, where not everything is carefully explained, and is instead left to your imagination. As long as the mystery isn't clearly a point where the author couldn't think of something good and cool, and just wanted to get out of having to explain it. The hechee saga, by Frederick Pohl, comes immediately to mind. Begin with Gateway and go on if you like it.
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Sep 22, 2015 11:50
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Trying to remove all historical/Earthly reference from the language you use is impossible. So many words in English are contingent on historical events or people. There's no point coming up with a new term for 'sabotage'. Readers will accept that you're 'translating' from whatever the characters are speaking.
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Sep 22, 2015 12:25
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Khizan posted:Putting a map in the middle of the book makes it a pain in the rear end to find if you ever want to refer to something. There is exactly one book I've read that failed to abide by this good advice, and that was Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World. Not the biggest problem the book had, but a perplexing one nonetheless. Khizan posted:This really doesn't bother me. I don't think a book will be notably improved by making up a completely new word for something like sodomy, or cologne, or champagne, because most people are going to associate those words with "buttsex", "masculine perfume", and "bubbly wine". They're not going to read those words and jump to "biblical reference", "town in Germany", and "bubbly wine made from grapes from the champagne region blah blah blah". It's an interesting thing to aspire to in theory but in practice it's almost impossible to adhere to completely. You can fall down a rabbit hole of looking up origins of words if you really try, and it doesn't take much of this to make a book hard to read and chop up the flow. Solitair fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Sep 22, 2015 |
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Sep 22, 2015 14:18
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I'm listening to the audio book of Baru Cormorant, how do you spell 'Tane Hyu'? Is the TANE reference intentional??? edit: btw Battuta, have you checked out the audiobook? The narrator they got does a really nice job with it
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Sep 22, 2015 14:21
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Hedrigall posted:Re: all the English-in-secondary-worlds talk above: Cormorant also does this in a couple of places, like the etymology of Baru Fisher and a few other little points. I like it when fantasy or SF novels (or even non-genre works) take time to explain a little bit about their use of language, and having studied foreign languages a lot, the little shades of meaning between similar words are really interesting to examine.
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Sep 22, 2015 14:21
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Yeah, I'm about halfway through Baru Cormorant right now (really good btw) and I hadn't even thought about the 'sodomite' thing. The only neologism that's ever taken me out of a fantasy novel was Brandon Sanderson using "hat trick" in Mistborn.
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Sep 22, 2015 14:24
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General Battuta posted:Trying to remove all historical/Earthly reference from the language you use is impossible. So many words in English are contingent on historical events or people. There's no point coming up with a new term for 'sabotage'. I still think though that avoiding the names of things which are AOC and using the generic name instead is advisable.
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Sep 22, 2015 14:25
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angel opportunity posted:I'm listening to the audio book of Baru Cormorant, how do you spell 'Tane Hyu'? Is the TANE reference intentional??? It's Tain Hu, so probably not.
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Sep 22, 2015 15:32
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MrSmokes posted:I enjoy stories that are about exploring what remains of lost alien civilizations. I prefer stories with a lot of mystery, where not everything is carefully explained, and is instead left to your imagination. As long as the mystery isn't clearly a point where the author couldn't think of something good and cool, and just wanted to get out of having to explain it. Revelation Space
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Sep 22, 2015 15:55
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The Ninth Layer posted:My narrator doesn't have to be from Earth (or the US/England, for that matter) to speak English to me. The point is that all of English - is historically contingent, on real world history. If you don't have a problem with that, it's fine, but you're the one saying you do. Mars4523 posted:The translation convention (the characters are thinking and speaking in a wholly different language that's only just being translated to english on the page) is done pretty well in the Imperial Radch books. For example English translations of alien songs have no meter to speak of, because why should they? Because the translator chose to translate them that way? I don't think "translation convention" is a terribly useful way of thinking about stories.
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Sep 22, 2015 16:10
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less laughter posted:Predestination. Excellent adaptation of Heinlein's —All You Zombies—. CaptCommy posted:It's Tain Hu, so probably not. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Sep 22, 2015 |
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Sep 22, 2015 17:47
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coyo7e posted:I'm really glad that I had no idea what the source was until it was over, that movie was a pretty decent mindfuck if you didn't know what it was about. Glad it wasn't an adaptation of 'The Man Who Folded Himself,' because it would probably be the worst porn flick ever made. Ever.
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Sep 22, 2015 20:47
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I got around to reading A Fire Upon the Deep finally and I really did not much care for it. I picked up the prequel (I think?) A Deepness in the Sky at the same time but I don't have much inclination to read it. There are some really, super cool ideas in Vinge's universe, the zones and powers and transcendence and all is really rad. So I was really disappointed that so much of the book is dedicated to the Tines' world and the power struggle between MR STEEL and Flenser and Woodcarver, none of whom had any real characterization or depth. And for being group-mind dog-things whose bodies are replaceable, they really could have just been humans for the purposes of the story, there was nothing "alien" about them at all. Same with the skroderider plant dudes, the one big twist that they had been created by the Blight didn't really amount to anything. The galactic-spanning newsgroups were pretty entertaining, though. So is A Deepness in the Sky worth reading if I didn't like the first one?
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Sep 23, 2015 00:27
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my bony fealty posted:I got around to reading A Fire Upon the Deep finally and I really did not much care for it. I picked up the prequel (I think?) A Deepness in the Sky at the same time but I don't have much inclination to read it. It's probably just preference--and no--don't read A Deepness in the Sky because you'll dislike it for the exact same reasons you disliked A Fire Upon the Deep. If it helps though, I think Vinge is doing two things that may not have worked for you. First off, in his world or viewpoint, any alien intelligence that is on the same level as us (e.g. not a Power or something in a higher zone of thought) is going to end up being relatable and comprehensible to humans. Things will seem pretty alien at first, but once you break the language and cultural barriers, the two races will understand each other provided they are on the same level. In both novels, humans who spend prolonged periods on an alien race's homeworld are featured, and it does take a while for them to understand the aliens enough to think of them in terms similar to humans. It's also largely due to his writing style and from making aliens POV characters along with humans. It's more a stylistic choice that he didn't want to give the alien POVs like an "alien filter," rather he made it all feel human, as he chose to put you in the alien's head by making you see things without thinking they are strange. He kind of lampshades this in A Deepness in the Sky, because the species don't interact for a long time, but you see alien and human POVs develop and finally meet. Once they meet and see each other, it's kind of shocking to see the characters you have mostly started to feel are 'human' seen as grossly alien from the human POVs.
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Sep 23, 2015 01:14
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The Limyaael rants are good. People on this website have basically no grounds to talk about how awful Benjanun Sriduangkaew is. Silver2195 posted:Limyaael stopped posting in 2010, back when some people still liked Requires Hate. I'm a bit surprised they'd be friends, though; Requires Hate hated a lot of the stuff Limyaael held up as good, and Limyaael seemed rather unenthusiastic about feminism (at least in the forms it tends to take in fantasy). I don't understand what the last clause is supposed to mean. Silver2195 posted:Tying this back to Limyaael, how do people feel about her dislike of words in fantasy that refer to real-world people, places, or legends, like herculean (https://curiosityquills.com/limyaael/modern-language-in-fantasy/)? I noticed the use of "sodomite" in The Traitor Baru Comorant, in a world without any Sodom. I'm not sure it's possible to totally avoid eponyms and so forth. A month or so ago I was reading The Eyes of the Overworld and noticed the word "quixotic," but it's technically set in the future of our world. I'm not sure how I feel about the eponym issue myself. I think that implicit in this is her talking about its use in dialogue or internal thoughts, where someone saying "Brobdingnagian" in speech will raise questions that using it in omniscient description will not (not that using it in description won't raise some other questions). Obviously there's a limit, but these aren't supposed to be catch-all rules.
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Sep 23, 2015 06:08
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Effectronica posted:The Limyaael rants are good. People on this website have basically no grounds to talk about how awful Benjanun Sriduangkaew is. She harassed people (women and women of colour predominantly, which is weird), sending them death threats and directing her friends and fans to do the same. Hows dem grounds? The Limyaael rants are good though.
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Sep 23, 2015 07:19
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MrFlibble posted:She harassed people (women and women of colour predominantly, which is weird), sending them death threats and directing her friends and fans to do the same. Hows dem grounds? Mixon's report has been getting a fair amount of criticism lately. This is a particularly huge and comprehensive takedown. Might still be summat to it, and her behaviour was undoubtedly weird and unpleasant, but the circumstances of the campaign against Sriduangkaew do seem murkier than we'd hitherto imagined.
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Sep 23, 2015 08:50
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MrFlibble posted:She harassed people (women and women of colour predominantly, which is weird), sending them death threats and directing her friends and fans to do the same. Hows dem grounds? The definition of harassment in use by Mixon is such that you yourself are probably technically a harasser, just from making fun of some trashy book. Someone willfully posting on a website where a person told someone their poison womb was making heaven too crowded should drat you by association as well. Mixon's graphs are basically the same thing as a JFK conspiracy theorist seizing on the supposed difficulty of the shot to conclude JFK was shot from the grassy knoll. It ignores a whole world of other evidence in favor of a prearranged conclusion. There's also no evidence for any coordinated harassment by Sriduangkaew that isn't at least as strong or stronger for coordinated harassment of her. Sriduangkaew is an rear end in a top hat who said some unkind things to people, but nobody's engaging in this kind of campaign against the hundreds or thousands of people who called for other people to "die in a fire" over the last decade, only one against a nonwhite lesbian, with a campaign dedicated to implying she's neither of those things, supported largely by white people. That is, regardless of whether the desires of some people to forbid Sriduangkaew from ever mentioning reading their books are considered reasonable or not, there are still many people who are doing this for inherently unreasonable reasons. Also, the revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband not getting nominated for a Hugo while Mixon's post did should be infuriating even if you loathe Sriduangkaew with a passion that cannot be assuaged.
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Sep 23, 2015 10:50
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Effectronica posted:The definition of harassment in use by Mixon is such that you yourself are probably technically a harasser, just from making fun of some trashy book. Someone willfully posting on a website where a person told someone their poison womb was making heaven too crowded should drat you by association as well. I don't care about any of this, at all. The reason I know about all the requireshate drama at all is because I actually read the requireshate blog. Reading someone tear into another piece of work is fun. I brought it up when I recognised Winterfox in the essay, because I read about all the poo poo requireshate did (or apparently didn't do?) from the Mixon essay. I was curious if it was the same Winterfox, and if it was related. Your final point about MZB i'm not sure I understand. I haven't read anything about her and her husband not getting nominated and not sure how this is related at all. I have heard that they were accused of child molestation though. EDIT: I am totally in favor of child molesters not getting nominated for any awards at all, even if their work literally cures cancer and brings democracy to North Korea. MrFlibble fucked around with this message at 11:04 on Sep 23, 2015 |
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Sep 23, 2015 11:02
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MrFlibble posted:I don't care about any of this, at all. The reason I know about all the requireshate drama at all is because I actually read the requireshate blog. Reading someone tear into another piece of work is fun. I brought it up when I recognised Winterfox in the essay, because I read about all the poo poo requireshate did (or apparently didn't do?) from the Mixon essay. I was curious if it was the same Winterfox, and if it was related. The "accusations" were the result of several of their (MZB and her husband) victims deciding to come forward and tell their story. This was completely ignored in the nominations for Best Fan Writer. If you didn't care, it would have been nicer to indicate that from the beginning, instead of writing what you did, which implied some desire to know.
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Sep 23, 2015 11:08
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Effectronica posted:The "accusations" were the result of several of their (MZB and her husband) victims deciding to come forward and tell their story. This was completely ignored in the nominations for Best Fan Writer. I cared whether the Winterfox mentioned in limyaaels rant was the same Winterfox (Requireshate) and whether them being friends was connected to limyaael disappearing. I don't care if some bitchy authors were having a go at each other, I brought it up to provide the context for the above. EDIT: OH someone wrote an expose on MZB and her husband and it didn't win / get nominated? I mean, that probably deserved an award more than the requires hate essay but all awards are some form of bullshit so why should you get mad over it? EDIT 2: Yeah actually I did want to know, I see what your saying. Its just you dropped a "SA can't talk poo poo about a poo poo talker" and didn't explain yourself. If you had posted what you had about it at the time I wouldn't have brought it up. MrFlibble fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Sep 23, 2015 |
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Sep 23, 2015 11:16
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MrFlibble and Effectronica please shut the gently caress up and take your stupid "requireshate" chat to some irc channel or something. No one but you gives a poo poo about a stupid blog from 2010. On actual Sci FI talk, Red Rising and Golden Son are great books and you should all read them.
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Sep 23, 2015 12:04
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johnsonrod posted:MrFlibble and Effectronica please shut the gently caress up and take your stupid "requireshate" chat to some irc channel or something. No one but you gives a poo poo about a stupid blog from 2010
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Sep 23, 2015 12:16
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angel opportunity posted:MrFlibble and Effectronica please shut the gently caress up and take your stupid "requireshate" chat to some irc channel or something. No one but you gives a poo poo about a stupid blog from 2010 Why not make it 3 times  ?
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Sep 23, 2015 12:19
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johnsonrod posted:MrFlibble and Effectronica please shut the gently caress up and take your stupid "requireshate" chat to some irc channel or something. No one but you gives a poo poo about a stupid blog from 2010. On the other hand, I found Sriduangkaew's debut novel, Scale-Bright, a pretty good Valente-style piece of fantasy, and since there's increasing evidence that she got monstered by a cabal of established, racist SFF authors, it might be worth your time to pick it up and give her some support.
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Sep 23, 2015 12:24
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Effectronica posted:riduangkaew is an rear end in a top hat who said some unkind things to people, but nobody's engaging in this kind of campaign against the hundreds or thousands of people who called for other people to "die in a fire" over the last decade, only one against a nonwhite lesbian, with a campaign dedicated to implying she's neither of those things, supported largely by white people. I've not read Mixon's essay, I just read a few blog entries when it was running and looked over her clashes with a couple of authors. RH was a penny dreadful performance troll who tried to seamlessly re-brand herself into a Sweet and Lovely author but got caught doing it and that's funny. It should go without saying that in spite of this I hope she isn't getting the kind of harassment people like Sarkeesian or Quinn have to deal with.
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Sep 23, 2015 12:30
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Darth Walrus posted:On the other hand, I found Sriduangkaew's debut novel, Scale-Bright, a pretty good Valente-style piece of fantasy, and since there's increasing evidence that she got monstered by a cabal of established, racist SFF authors, it might be worth your time to pick it up and give her some support. Oh shut the gently caress up. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 23, 2015 13:07
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Darth Walrus posted:Sriduangkaew Which Culture novel does this drone appear in, I must have missed reading one.
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Sep 23, 2015 13:12
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i get no joy at all from reading SFF, i just like to read about petty squabbles between fringe people in the SFF convention scene who have blogs that look like livejournals hosted on geocities
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Sep 23, 2015 13:14
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That'll explain why you don't like Abercrombie.
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Sep 23, 2015 13:21
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Evfedu posted:That'll explain why you don't like Abercrombie. I tried The Blade Itself - I got almost half way through and it just didn't click for me. For some reason it never felt like a cohesive world, which would have been ok but none of the characters were doing anything particularly interesting and didn't grab me either, except the old barbarian ninefingers. I've heard it gets really good later on and I might try it again at some point, but i'm waiting for The Traitor
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Sep 23, 2015 13:27
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johnsonrod posted:MrFlibble and Effectronica please shut the gently caress up and take your stupid "requireshate" chat to some irc channel or something. No one but you gives a poo poo about a stupid blog from 2010. Well, frankly, I'd rather be the kind of wretched hellspawn that "derails" than a goddamn liar, which is what anyone who says you should read genre fiction is, by definition.
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Sep 23, 2015 13:40
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MrFlibble posted:She harassed people (women and women of colour predominantly, which is weird), sending them death threats and directing her friends and fans to do the same. Hows dem grounds? You do realize you're arguing with somebody who constantly gets probated for sending people death threats, right?
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Sep 23, 2015 13:45
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Megazver posted:Oh shut the gently caress up. You seen Caitlin Kiernan and company's Twitter conversations? The Sriduangkaew thing was never about fighting harassment, it was about sinking an author who'd dared to call them out on racism. Once. In a broadly positive review. And then there was the whole Shadowboxer thing, which was just hilariously pathetic. The more you read up on the whole thing, the more you discover that Kiernan, Tricia Sullivan, and Liz Williams are giant, petty pieces of poo poo who've done far more damage to the community than one performance-ragey reviewer.
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Sep 23, 2015 13:46
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can someone just go ahead and make the thread in the book barn that is like "Racism, Dog Whistling, , Gaslighting, Lampshading, Petty Feuds and other problematic issues in the SFF writer community," and then this thread can be for talking about books?
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Sep 23, 2015 13:52
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angel opportunity posted:can someone just go ahead and make the thread in the book barn that is like "Racism, Dog Whistling, , Gaslighting, Lampshading, Petty Feuds and other problematic issues in the SFF writer community," and then this thread can be for talking about books? That could honestly be a pretty fun thread. Artist drama is best drama.
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Sep 23, 2015 13:54
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