|
Actually, that kind of worked on me? Murder on Mystery Manor sounds so completely incompetent that I sort of want to read it.
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 04:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 06:23 |
|
|
lenoon posted:Don't Jubal and Valentine get it on in SiaSL? I feel like Valentine at least doesn't make any distinction between homosexual and heterosexual sex. Thinky Whale posted:And the part early on where all Jubal's secretaries line up so Valentine can kiss then all in turn, and he asks about kissing guys too, and they say nah, don't do that, it's weird. lenoon posted:I've only ever really liked Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and even that has an extremely tedious self-insert libertarian character in it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 04:52
|
|
|
Traviss did the same poo poo with the Halo novels. She didn't like the character of Dr. Halsey from previous novels, so her Halo books were about 2/3s actually kinda decent stuff as far as "books based on a sci-fi video game franchise" goes, 1/3 Halsey being sad and miserable and everyone telling her what a piece of poo poo she is and Halsey thinking about how bad she feels for being a big piece of poo poo. Characters will change personalities to more easily hate on Halsey, like the man who was involved in the same child-kidnapping supersoldier program that Traviss hates the fictional character of Halsey for leading and tases one of the children in his first appearance in the first novel but makes sure to tell her what a bad person she is. A character who became mute as a result of post-traumatic stress from watching her friends die and was explicitly stated to never again say another word in her life learns to speak again just to yell at Halsey. It's very fan-fictiony.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 04:56
|
|
|
pentyne posted:Her biggest problem was taking internal issues and complaints and publicly raging about them online everywhere she could. The Denning-Traviss book flame wars could've been stopped by the editorial staff but no one at the SW EU gave a gently caress. She's probably burned every bridge/inroad she made after getting the SW books (a good deal for a mediocre author) and has tumbled down the list to writing video game novels, then comic book novels and now has to write her own original fiction. So I'm a Karen Traviss apologist? Her Legacy of the Force stuff is loving poo poo, and I will call her out for her bad crap. I just happen to think the first three Republic Commando books are pretty fun, self contained stories.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 05:48
|
|
|
lenoon posted:Don't Jubal and Valentine get it on in SiaSL? I feel like Valentine at least doesn't make any distinction between homosexual and heterosexual sex. No; Jubal hooks up with Patty, the tattooed snake lady [or was it Dawn Ardent? Someone in the cult compound.]. At one point, Mike gets all kind of sexy fanmail pictures and Jill makes him throw our the dude ones and tells him that homosexuality is bad. At another point, I think he sees some gay dudes and "groks a wrongness." If I remember correctly, Jubal just says "Eh, people are people" to the idea of homosexuality.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 05:50
|
|
|
Senior Woodchuck posted:This is the flap copy (or digital equivalent)? Like, he's trying to sell us the book with this? Yup, that's the publisher description! Even has a sequel--takes place at an island resort.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 05:58
|
|
|
WeaponGradeSadness posted:Traviss did the same poo poo with the Halo novels. She didn't like the character of Dr. Halsey from previous novels, so her Halo books were about 2/3s actually kinda decent stuff as far as "books based on a sci-fi video game franchise" goes, 1/3 Halsey being sad and miserable and everyone telling her what a piece of poo poo she is and Halsey thinking about how bad she feels for being a big piece of poo poo. Characters will change personalities to more easily hate on Halsey, like the man who was involved in the same child-kidnapping supersoldier program that Traviss hates the fictional character of Halsey for leading and tases one of the children in his first appearance in the first novel but makes sure to tell her what a bad person she is. A character who became mute as a result of post-traumatic stress from watching her friends die and was explicitly stated to never again say another word in her life learns to speak again just to yell at Halsey. It's very fan-fictiony. So, and preemptive sorry for the reference, in Traviss' mind, Halsey is the Meg Griffin of the Halo universe?
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 06:01
|
|
|
Postal Parcel posted:So, and preemptive sorry for the reference, in Traviss' mind, Halsey is the Meg Griffin of the Halo universe? Traviss has very strong opinions on child soldiers and will not hesitate to change details in a franchise to allow her the chance to soapbox.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 06:42
|
|
|
queserasera posted:Pretty longwinded for a backhanded compliment. Is this a novelization of that whodunit style reality game show from a couple years back?
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 06:53
|
|
|
Huh. So it is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whodunnit%3F_(2013_U.S._TV_series) And Zuiker is the brainchild behind the CSI franchise. Enough money to hire a ghostwriter, enough ego to believe it unnecessary.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 08:11
|
|
|
bringmyfishback posted:No; Jubal hooks up with Patty, the tattooed snake lady [or was it Dawn Ardent? Someone in the cult compound.]. I don't think Jubal gets into the sex cult. I think that was Ben the lawyer dude. My recollection is that early in the book Jubal and Jill are talking about the dirty pictures as part of a discussion of the fanmail Mike has been getting (Jill is throwing out all the nudes regardless of gender because she thinks they would confuse Mike), and Jubal either says or speculates internally that he thinks Mike would sense a "wrongness" to any gay man that propositioned him in person. So it's Jubal's old-fashioned sensibilities talking. Of course since Jubal is one of Heinlein's "wise and cynical elder" mouthpieces it's hard to determine where the author's and the character's opinions differ. I'm not convinced that all of the mouthpieces across Heinlein's work are perfect reflections of his own beliefs, but there are enough common threads (eg, incest) that I'm never sure. I'm certainly not going to reread Stranger any time soon to try and puzzle it out.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 08:55
|
|
|
flosofl posted:The only EU books worth a poo poo are the Thrawn novels by Zahn. The X-Wing novels were fun fighter pilot military fiction. I've probably still got a few of them in storage. Looking it up, apparently they came out with a tenth one in 2012. Maybe it's time to go to the library and then buy a new bottle of whiskey. It's called "Mercy Kill" too. Sounds like a Clive Cussler title. 22 Eargesplitten has a new favorite as of 09:30 on Nov 28, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 09:27
|
|
|
Posting about EU material is cheating, it's all terrible.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 09:46
|
|
|
WeaponGradeSadness posted:like the man who was involved in the same child-kidnapping supersoldier program that Traviss hates the fictional character of Halsey for leading and tases one of the children in his first appearance in the first novel but makes sure to tell her what a bad person she is. 
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 10:19
|
|
|
Only in pop sci fi would 'child soldiers are bad' be a point of debate. Seriously, I swear half these people only really care about setting up the world so that their favourite brand of fascism is the only way to save mankind.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 15:30
|
|
|
Strategic Tea posted:Only in pop sci fi would 'child soldiers are bad' be a point of debate. That comment is uncomfortably on the loving nose about far too much Sci-Fi.  I mean, the Powder Mage stuck out for me as having the French revolution as a thing that happened, rather then an unquestionably bad thing that happened. Also, worker Unions are a thing, rather then a bad thing.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 15:53
|
|
|
flosofl posted:The only EU books worth a poo poo are the Thrawn novels by Zahn. And they're a bunch of poo poo as well. Traviss was given, for some reason, IDW's G.I. Joe comic. Say what you will about the silliness of G.I. Joe, but the basic premise has always been, "Bad Guys attack, and only G.I. Joe can stop them!". So of course, her storyline is the Joes committing covert assassinations of foreign leaders. Oh, and over half the book is about the teenage son of some minor Cobra character living in a rebel camp. It was supposed to be for twelve issues, IDW ended it after 9. The book hasn't returned. Meanwhile, IDW's other Joe book, written by Larry Hama, is still going on.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 16:01
|
|
|
electrohead posted:Another, ominously titled "The Barn," involves a parallel-universe explorer from Earth-Prime or whatever. The alternate he's going to investigate today apparently hasn't had any ruminants or whatever since the stone age yet they still drink milk so he's gonna get a job at a dairy to see what's up. What's apparently up is that the cows are apparently all human women with animal-level intelligence and enormous, milk-dripping mammaries. They are apparently well cared for and treated with kindness but it's still pretty gross. “In The Barn” is hosed up, but it is in fact well written and of literary value and deserves its place in Again, Dangerous Visions (where it’s only one of the weirdest pieces). I took the fetishistic weirdness as psychological horror, and it didn’t actually register that it was a collection of Anthony’s fabulously shameworthy kinks even when the author insert literally tries to gently caress the female object. And fails. (The structural similarity to bottom-of-the-barrel erotic fanfic is retrospectively obvious.) I didn’t seek out any more because I heard the rest of his work wasn’t nearly as good and I’ve never been into extruded fantasy product; looks like I dodged a bullet dipped in some questionable fluids. Piers Anthony as DM.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 16:36
|
|
|
22 Eargesplitten posted:The X-Wing novels were fun fighter pilot military fiction. I've probably still got a few of them in storage. Looking it up, apparently they came out with a tenth one in 2012. Maybe it's time to go to the library and then buy a new bottle of whiskey. It's called "Mercy Kill" too. Sounds like a Clive Cussler title. Seconding the X-Wing books as being cool and good. Corran Horn became little Gary Stu-ish by the time of the Yuuzhan Vong arc, but that's really more because the EU ended up with a Yuuzhan Vong arc in the first place.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2015 17:30
|
|
|
I think the reason that weird and/or wrong sexual material keeps showing up in sci-fi is that a lot of intellectual types who don't have a good grasp on social skills confuse that the more 'unusual' a sexual act or sexuality is, the more 'enlightened' it is. Also, I'm somewhat glad that types like Karen Traviss exist: they're a very good blueprint reference for what NOT to do.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 10:37
|
|
|
It was also a big thing for "New Wave" sci-fi to challenge cultural assumptions and taboos for the sake of challenging them. That plus the passage of time means what seemed "edgy" in the 1970s to be just quaint* or gross in 2015. *The quaint stuff is usually along the lines of "god is just a cranky alien man has outgrown".
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 14:45
|
|
|
Cornwind Evil posted:I think the reason that weird and/or wrong sexual material keeps showing up in sci-fi is that a lot of intellectual types who don't have a good grasp on social skills confuse that the more 'unusual' a sexual act or sexuality is, the more 'enlightened' it is. I think it's more that when you speculate on the future of humanity, you always look at the past to see how things develop, and then try to extrapolate from there. And we have seen Homosexuality and interracial relationships (to name just two) go from horrible immoral perversions against all that is good and just to sort of mental illnesses that can be cured or at least managed with the right therapy to socially accepted but kinda frowned upon by some people , with full acceptance more likely every year. Pedophilia was one an immoral perversion but is increasingly moved into the mental illness sector. Clearly this means that a century in the future, loving children will be widely accepted, and people will look back at today's opinion with disgust and horror.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 17:29
|
|
|
Klaus88 posted:That comment is uncomfortably on the loving nose about far too much Sci-Fi. Man, that book was so much wasted potential. It is so rare in Anglo-american to see a non-evil version of the French revolution and the concept of the powder mages was cool as hell to, not mention how incredible few fantasy novels are set in any but some vague medieval age, but the book does almost nothing with it. It basically just inverts the quantity vs. quality warfare from other books and focus way to much on its bland characters. And while idea that divine rule is actually a real concept was pretty neat, the execution was pretty lame as well.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 18:31
|
|
|
e X posted:Man, that book was so much wasted potential. It is so rare in Anglo-american to see a non-evil version of the French revolution and the concept of the powder mages was cool as hell to, not mention how incredible few fantasy novels are set in any but some vague medieval age, but the book does almost nothing with it. It basically just inverts the quantity vs. quality warfare from other books and focus way to much on its bland characters. And while idea that divine rule is actually a real concept was pretty neat, the execution was pretty lame as well. I am now reminded of the Dies the Fire series by S. M. Stirling which uses magic to basically undo several hundred years of human technological achievement and basically shut down black powder completely.  Is there some reason that fantasy writers hate black powder?
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 18:59
|
|
|
Klaus88 posted:I am now reminded of the Dies the Fire series by S. M. Stirling which uses magic to basically undo several hundred years of human technological achievement and basically shut down black powder completely. Blah blah blah, technological stagnation, status quo. Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms extrapolates that the Gonne (gun) is a perversion of magical order and needs to be destroyed or it would upset the balance of things.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 19:27
|
|
|
Urrgh my husband is a writer and he just got published by the same publisher that is responsible for Assgoblins. It is problematic because everyone in the "bizarro" scene is super loving nice and I love them, but my husband is actually a good writer and I want him to set his sights a little higher. There are good Bizarro books, of course, but goddamn are they few and far between.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 20:56
|
|
|
remigious posted:Urrgh my husband is a writer and he just got published by the same publisher that is responsible for Assgoblins. It is problematic because everyone in the "bizarro" scene is super loving nice and I love them, but my husband is actually a good writer and I want him to set his sights a little higher. There are good Bizarro books, of course, but goddamn are they few and far between. Mind sharing some of the good ones? I recently read Person and enjoyed it after I got into the rhythm of all those tiny paragraphs.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 21:05
|
|
|
I liked Angel Dust Apocalypse by Jeremy Robert Johnson, A God of Hungry Walls by Garrett Cook, and Cameron Pierce's Our Love Will Go the way of the Salmon. None of then masterpieces, of course, but all enjoyable in their own way. Urgh I feel like such a bitch whenever I talk about books because I'm so snobby about it, but I try to be honest.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 21:17
|
|
|
Klaus88 posted:Is there some reason that fantasy writers hate black powder? I think it just boils down to "swordfights are cool."
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 21:41
|
|
|
Dies the Fire is even stupider because not even steam works anymore.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 21:54
|
|
|
Klaus88 posted:Is there some reason that fantasy writers hate black powder? Tolkien I guess  Blame romanticism in general, for all the stereotypes about the middle ages that still endure today. Some of those stereotypes are relatively accurate and they are incompatible with gunpowder, for example castles used to be built like this:  (... and romanticized like this:  )and after gunpowder (well, after cannons, which you'll remember from playing Civilization are a later stage), they have to be built like this:  Knights in armor, on the other hand: it took a long time for guns to be powerful enough to make them obsolete. Until then, armors could be and were specifically designed to be bulletproof:  (and until cartridges and magazines, guns really were just history repeating, as the world already went through it with crossbows, the previous "dishonorable weapon") Nothing that would make the stories less interesting or less fantastical, really, but we tend to try to recapture/recreate the things we liked as kids and writers are no exception. Early fantasy writers/wargamers grew up on a diet of romantic literature, and so they wrote books/roleplaying settings set in an idealized middle ages, with idealized castles, knights and all that jazz. Later writers build on these works, and so on, and the vague middle ages setting keeps replicating, acritically ("I'm just telling a story!"), generation after generation
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2015 23:28
|
|
|
I kind of want to see somebody try putting your typical Tolkien fantasy creatures in a more modern setting. It would probably be bad but at least it would be different. Note that I don't actually read fantasy and the deluge of examples I'm about to get are probably going to prove it's a bad idea.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2015 03:29
|
|
|
hackbunny posted:Nothing that would make the stories less interesting or less fantastical, really, but we tend to try to recapture/recreate the things we liked as kids and writers are no exception. Early fantasy writers/wargamers grew up on a diet of romantic literature, and so they wrote books/roleplaying settings set in an idealized middle ages, with idealized castles, knights and all that jazz. Later writers build on these works, and so on, and the vague middle ages setting keeps replicating, acritically ("I'm just telling a story!"), generation after generation And when people try and play it more realistically, we get stuff like A Song Of Ice And Fire, which ends up being a flamethrower used to light a firecracker.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2015 06:48
|
|
|
Henchman of Santa posted:I kind of want to see somebody try putting your typical Tolkien fantasy creatures in a more modern setting. It would probably be bad but at least it would be different. Shadowrun does this, although "modern" setting is debatable
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2015 09:52
|
|
|
Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco did a comic called Arrowsmith, which is set in WWI but with magic instead of tech. There's trolls and pixies and other such things. It's pretty dope.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2015 14:41
|
|
|
Senior Woodchuck posted:Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco did a comic called Arrowsmith, which is set in WWI but with magic instead of tech. There's trolls and pixies and other such things. It's pretty dope. There's also the Milkweed books by Ian Tregillis. WWII and the Cold War fought with magic and alchemy.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2015 14:48
|
|
|
ArchangeI posted:I think it's more that when you speculate on the future of humanity, you always look at the past to see how things develop, and then try to extrapolate from there. And we have seen Homosexuality and interracial relationships (to name just two) go from horrible immoral perversions against all that is good and just to sort of mental illnesses that can be cured or at least managed with the right therapy to socially accepted but kinda frowned upon by some people , with full acceptance more likely every year. Pedophilia was one an immoral perversion but is increasingly moved into the mental illness sector. Clearly this means that a century in the future, loving children will be widely accepted, and people will look back at today's opinion with disgust and horror. So human history is cyclical then?
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2015 16:52
|
|
|
Heath posted:Shadowrun does this, although "modern" setting is debatable Shadowrun is a really cool setting for how balls-out ridiculous it is but the actual novels set in the universe are godawful trash even by licensed genre fiction standards. But still - a dragon was elected president and then immediately assassinated by a wizard outside of his limo. That owns.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2015 17:35
|
|
|
I want to thank Ryoshi for bringing up the worst books by my favorite author of all time in the OP. We miss you, Arthur. But since that happened, I now have to talk about my second favorite, but first worst, author. I have a weird relationship with the works of Leo Frankowski as I feel like I might be the only person who was ever actually aware of his works. If ever there were an author who was skilled at taking a great idea and then loving it up entirely with his personal beliefs, it was poor Leo, who had terrible luck with women, to the point where he moved to Russia in a weird reverse mail-order-bride situation and lived in a castle. I am extremely familiar with most of his body of work, because I was even more terrible when I was younger, so here's a quick rundown: Copernick's Rebellion: an aging bioengineer supergenius lives in a city made of trees and goes to war against the entire world, who is Not Ready For His Ideas. Oh, and he uses a super-science potion to make a beautiful young lady fall in love with him by making her think he's a super-hunk. The Conrad Stargard Series: a Polish engineer(there's a trend here) gets involuntarily time-travelled back to 13th century Poland, ten years before the Mongol hordes invade. It's up to him to basically jumpstart the industrial revolution, and, through a series of amazing lucky breaks, manages to basically become the most powerful person of the Middle Ages. Has some cool set-pieces but the protagonist is more or less infallible, and as it turns out the guy who owned the time machine feels Really Bad and is also his cousin so he sends him all sorts of ridiculous-rear end plot devices to help him on his quest to gently caress every girl in the 1280s and completely win this real-life game of Civ 4. Falls apart really loving hard after the Mongols are defeated. The Fata Morgana: turns out the isle of Avalon is real or some poo poo. Main character has a line where he shouts about how he's not a "loving queer!" at the poor girl he's sleeping with. Oh, and he's an engineer from Detroit, and his best friend is a big Polish engineer from Hamtramck because of course. The New Kashubia series: in the far future, earth sends everyone who isn't anglo-saxon into space because reasons, and the main character lives on Slavic Rock Hell World underground until they find a factory that was making super-intelligent tanks out of the rock world. They liberate themselves with violence and weird VR world holo-loving. Then they go to war with Earth for More Freedoms and it turns out their tanks are even cooler now because they found a huge diamond to use for super-circuits. And then there's aliens! A whole book of them! The aliens use their own juveniles as a food source and nuke planets into sterility to colonize them! How evil! But there's one cool alien who is the first to discover that when you put male aliens and female aliens in a room, you get baby aliens. This goes absolutely nowhere, as the book where they were supposed to fight got shitcanned or something. Wikipedia lists a book called The Two-Space War but I've never read it. I'm guessing the protagonist is either Polish or an engineer, or probably a Polish engineer who's super-handsome and smarter than everyone. Wikipedia also notes that "he claimed his detractors consist of 'feminists, liberals, and homosexuals'", so, y'know, a really pleasant guy. It's a shame, too, because there's some really strong ideas in his novels, but they're just kind of... gross. I own nearly everything he's written and I can't bear to give them away, partly because I feel like at least someone should know about him, but also because every time I've tried to give someone one of his books to read, they've refused to finish it. Here's to you, Leo, forever in our hearts.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2015 20:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 06:23 |
|
|
outlier posted:* Pattern Recognition: a cool hunter tries to track down the creator of a series of mysterious videos, her super-rich boss makes lots of portentous statement. Probably doesn't bear examination, but reads fairly well with lots of nice observations of people and places. Take a drink every time you read "mirror-world", finish your drink for every use of "archaic", die of alcohol poisoning. I just reached the point where the protagonist gets dissed by a French waiter for ordering in bad French and mutters "All right, be French" at her back and I'm still trying to understand how many levels of irony are required to read the scene after the protagonist's several-a-page unspoken passive-aggressive put-downs of England. It's a hard, hard read right after finishing Burning Chrome There's this short story collected in Burning Chrome, The Gernsback Continuum, where a photographer goes on an assignment on American futuristic design of the 50s, and ends up being infected by it, hallucinating scenes out of Amazing Stories covers. He cures himself with news and pornography, i.e. overdosing on the present, the actual future, to purge the idealized future from his mind. It's like Gibson is doing the same thing to his own writing, getting uglier and meaner because the present has overtaken his future and made it look naive
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2015 23:47
|
|