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General Battuta posted:It's the Shivans, actually. Definitely checking this out then. Thanks!
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Nov 14, 2015 03:07
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Blindsight is really good, yeah.
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Nov 14, 2015 03:11
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FWIW, Blindsight was also the very first thing I thought of when I read that paragraph. I think it's far more likely that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere in a cosmic sense, in the sense that sentience is emergent from sufficient complexity, but self-awareness and emotionality and what we would think of as Consciousness are not at all necessary, and they might be deeply troubling and self-defeating in exactly this way for beings that evolve to develop it.
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Nov 14, 2015 05:56
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Since we're talking about Cosmic Horror and Eskimos. I'm going to recommend Midnight Sun by Ramsey Campbell. A children's author returns to live his ancestral manor, Stargrave, with his family, after having suppressed for his whole life his father and grandfather's worship of dark cosmic beings from up north. Think Kubrick's The Shining if it was just the final scenes outside in the snow The Publisher's Weekly review on Amazon gives it away but plot ain't exactly the reason to read it. "Trees grow," wrote the dying Edward Sterling in the frozen earth of the forest in Stargrave, England, that became his burial ground. As his grandson Ben learns, in Campbell's beautifully poetic horror novel, the elder Sterling was answering a call from a primordial species of snow that devours humans. Ben becomes a conduit for the gluttony of this creeping arctic cold, slowly losing his reason with each victim that the entity claims, as he succumbs to its promise of immortality in exchange for the lives of his neighbors. This icy menace can succeed only through manipulating Ben's consciousness, and he cooperates--until it hunts his family. Campbell's artful use of metaphor paints a frightening portrait of a world tilting into chaos and the price that must be paid to save it. This absorbing novel again demonstrates the author's mastery of the horror genre. And Brian Evenson has a new collection out in early Feburary: http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Horses-Brian-Evenson/dp/1566894131 fez_machine fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Nov 14, 2015 |
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Nov 14, 2015 10:22
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fez_machine posted:Since we're talking about Cosmic Horror and Eskimos. I'm going to recommend Midnight Sun by Ramsey Campbell. Just recommend everything by Ramsey Campbell. He's spent 50 years writing the Mythos, among other things. Start with Cold Print and Demons By Daylight for the cosmic, then move on to The Parasite and The Doll Who Ate His Mother and go from there.
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Nov 14, 2015 18:43
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A Colder War also makes explicit mention of The Great Filter. Also thoroughly worth reading. Also a big fan of that Stephen King stuff, since reading On Writing I've had a real soft spot for that guy even if a lot of his writing isn't really my bag.
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Nov 16, 2015 10:59
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I honestly find King more enjoyable in talking about writing than actually writing. He's got this whole "let's build up a perfectly realized small town in Maine and then burn it to the ground" thing he does really well but the ideas often feel rather lacking.
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Nov 16, 2015 11:53
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Never been a fan of Ramsey Campbell, he's somehow more depressing than Liggotti, and I love Liggotti.
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Nov 16, 2015 17:12
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ravenkult posted:If you're not interpreting fish people as ''immigrants,'' racism doesn't show up in his stories too much either. Yeah if you deliberately try to ignore them then all the miscegenation themes, physical descriptions of black people, degenerate African cults, and the entire Horror at Red Hook are barely noticeable chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 23:39
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I mean, he was racist, and Poe was a pedophile. Plenty of poems about his dear 13 year old cousin were written.
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Nov 17, 2015 00:14
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ravenkult posted:I mean, he was racist, and Poe was a pedophile. Plenty of poems about his dear 13 year old cousin were written. It's considered bad form to move the goal posts without at least acknowledging that a goal was scored.
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Nov 17, 2015 02:50
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Goal scored!
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Nov 17, 2015 02:55
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ravenkult posted:
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Nov 17, 2015 03:12
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Goal scored!
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ravenkult posted:Never been a fan of Ramsey Campbell, he's somehow more depressing than Liggotti, and I love Liggotti. I think there's a lot to like in Cold Print but a good chunk of it's awfully obvious and predictable at times. In particular the story that introduces Glaaki is awfully clumsy about basically giving away that the people in the town work for Glaaki.
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Nov 21, 2015 04:23
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Would anybody recommend Michael Shea's The Color Out of Time (or any of his other novels for that matter)? A while back I read his short story The Autopsy and it absolutely blew me away. Since then I've gotten a few of his other shorts (all of Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales and a couple others from various anthologies), and while I enjoyed most of them, none of them come even remotely close to being as good as The Autopsy, sadly. The Color Out of Time is only like $5 on Amazon so I'll probably get it regardless, but I thought I'd see what the consensus is.
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Nov 21, 2015 14:35
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Vastarien posted:Would anybody recommend Michael Shea's The Color Out of Time (or any of his other novels for that matter)? A while back I read his short story The Autopsy and it absolutely blew me away. Since then I've gotten a few of his other shorts (all of Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales and a couple others from various anthologies), and while I enjoyed most of them, none of them come even remotely close to being as good as The Autopsy, sadly. The Colour Out of Time is Jaws meets the Colour Out of Space, complete with disbelieving Sheriffs department/holiday makers and intrepid hunters. It's very much the 70s/80s airport novel version of the Mythos. If you like the sound of that then go for it.
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Nov 21, 2015 22:56
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fez_machine posted:The Colour Out of Time is Jaws meets the Colour Out of Space, complete with disbelieving Sheriffs department/holiday makers and intrepid hunters. That sounds... oddly intriguing. Guess I'll give it a go. Thanks!
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Nov 22, 2015 00:35
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Pope Guilty posted:I think there's a lot to like in Cold Print but a good chunk of it's awfully obvious and predictable at times. In particular the story that introduces Glaaki is awfully clumsy about basically giving away that the people in the town work for Glaaki. In all fairness, I think he was about 17 when he wrote that.
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Nov 22, 2015 16:41
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Pistol_Pete posted:In all fairness, I think he was about 17 when he wrote that. Impressive if so, for sure-there's a reason HPL burned all his juvenalia.
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Nov 22, 2015 19:53
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Cold Print is indeed his collection of Lovecraftian juvenalia. It was at least printed, but really, reading it has been a bit of a struggle. It's very plainly an author developing his voice through indulging in all the great cliches of Lovecraftian fiction. If you're really interested in Campbell or in Mythos writing I'd say go for it. Otherwise I think it's a pass, unless the stories in the last half are going to get a lot better.
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Nov 23, 2015 05:38
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Also if you're into the rpg a surprising number of the monsters are from it.
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Nov 23, 2015 16:28
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Xotl posted:Cold Print is indeed his collection of Lovecraftian juvenalia. It was at least printed, but really, reading it has been a bit of a struggle. It's very plainly an author developing his voice through indulging in all the great cliches of Lovecraftian fiction. If you're really interested in Campbell or in Mythos writing I'd say go for it. Otherwise I think it's a pass, unless the stories in the last half are going to get a lot better. The title story still holds up from the juvenilia, (admittedly it was the last of them to be written) and his post-juvenilia Lovecraftiana are generally worthy stories- The Voice of the Beach, The Faces at Pine Dunes, The Franklyn Paragraphs.
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Nov 23, 2015 20:59
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The most horrific thing Campbell has ever written is "At the Back of My Mind" his autobiographical introduction to The Face That Must Die, a great novel but not Cosmic Horror/Weird Tales, about his childhood and his inability to deal with his mother's paranoid schizophrenia. It's incredibly traumatising and stayed with me for days.
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Nov 23, 2015 21:47
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How do I get The Autopsy onto my kindle?
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Nov 24, 2015 17:00
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Evfedu posted:How do I get The Autopsy onto my kindle? You can get it in the Kindle version of the April 2014 copy of Lightspeed Magazine. It's $4. You can find it in various anthologies, but that one is the cheapest that I know of.
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Nov 24, 2015 17:33
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Evfedu posted:How do I get The Autopsy onto my kindle? Get the forever essential The Weird anthology edited by Jeff and Anne VanderMeer: http://www.amazon.com/Weird-Compendium-Strange-Dark-Stories-ebook/dp/B006E1A68K/
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Nov 24, 2015 20:36
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anilEhilated posted:My main issue with that book is how little of it actually turns out to be relevant to anything; not to mention the POV switch to Mo seems really unnecessary and badly executed. A lot of people who liked her before that book apparently stopped. It was an interesting idea that would have worked much much better if we'd had a Mo POV book beforehand, so that the audience could get a real look at her character and thus appreciate what happened in this book more. Instead there's a POV shift in the sixth book of a series. And the story of that book is the protagonist's nervous breakdown. So in book six the only glimpses of the hero of the overall series (who is long established to be utterly devoted to Mo) that we get are filtered through a lens of disdain bordering on contempt while she active betrays their marriage. And because of that lack of baseline for Mo's POV, and because the writing is pretty ambiguous initially, unless you are paying close attention, you just keep hitting a wall of "wow, Mo is a complete poo poo of a person." Even when you know what's going on it is still awful to read given you pre-existing loyalty to Bob. I don't know if Stross was deliberately going for a response in the reader that echoed Bob's realisation in the last book that Mhari wasn't just a bunny-boiling she-hag after all, just someone with issues he couldn't see at the time. But if he was he ballsed it up. The relationship between Mo and Bob is one of the best things about the series, and Mo as a secondary character who you turned to when poo poo got real was always great. But because you have an emotional attachment to Bob built up over years (and yes the other stories are filtered through his unreliable narration), her behaviour is easily read as her just being a dreadful person. I don't blame readers who were confounded by that element of the book at all. That and the plot of the story is absolutely obvious from the moment it gets going, making the heroes seem stupid to the reader when they repeatedly fail to put two and two together. The Annihilation Score sorely needed the intent and identity of the enemy to be more opaque, and for Mo's motivation to be more thoughtfully handled. It feels like Stross botched the pay-off of a looming threat in the emotional core of the series that he was alluding to for years. Maybe I'll like it more on a re-read, but as it is I found it a thoroughly unsatisfying book. Lovely Joe Stalin fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Nov 29, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 11:08
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Where are you getting Mo coming off as a terrible person from?
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Nov 29, 2015 13:17
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I still hold the opinion that Stross should've combined the three books into one instead of three separate "oh look now theres a new threat (vampires/superheroes/orcs and elves) now lets spend 400 pages making a really bad joke about bureaucracy thats been tired since four books ago" books. I also think Stross should've done at least a short story from Mo's pov before so you could get a grasp on her personality because as it stands it would be really easy to read her as an extremely unpleasant person. I think there's a good, serious story in Mo's nervous breakdown but I felt the book dragged on and on whenever it got away from that and focused on wacky superhero hijinks to the point where I could not stand it anymore. If Stross combined all three then you'd have his lovecraftian singularity he's been dying to show you and maybe it wouldn't feel so low-key after The Apocalypse Codex.
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Nov 29, 2015 15:38
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I've decided that for me a huge part of the problem is that pop culture references, memes, etc. are a huge trap for Stross as a writer. His work always becomes way more annoying (to me) whenever he starts dropping them. The Venn diagram circle of what I enjoy in my weird fiction can be pretty big, but honest-to-god Pedobear references are usually outside it. And that's the problem with Annihilation Score--it simply goes too far into the zaniness and kitsch. The best parts of the novel are when we get the glimpses of the cosmic malevolence and the otherworldly environments, but they get vastly outshone by the parts that feel like the equivalent of a laugh track playing in the background. Note that by a laugh track, I don't mean humor per se--that's fine--I mean the parts that make me feel as though the author is constantly glancing over at me with a  face, reminding me that he thinks I ought to be laughing.I think that in light of these complaints of mine, it's interesting to use a couple of other books as points of comparison. First of all, Rhesus Chart. Obviously this could've been a trap to fall into with pop culture references, but it seems as though Stross navigates around it much better here. He lets vampirism be its own thing on the Laundry universe's terms, and while IIRC he does acknowledge poo poo like Twilight, it ends up being subverted and discarded as not useful. They're a symptom of "Everybody knows vampires don't exist," not the terms on which vampires do exist. The equivalent to Annihilation Score would be if Stross had decided that vampires do sparkle in his universe and repeatedly poked the reader with it. (I'm not misremembering, am I? Vampires don't sparkle in Rhesus Chart, right? I don't have my copy anywhere near me.) The other obvious point of comparison is Jennifer Morgue, which obviously is ultimately one big pop-culture reference, but also doesn't annoy me nearly as much as Annihilation Score (though I think it is still my second-least-favorite Laundry novel). Why? Well, first of all, it's much earlier in the series. I daresay I'd feel much less disappointed with Annihilation Score if the Laundry series hadn't hit its stride so drat well with Fuller Memorandum and Apocalypse Codex. Second of all, like The Rhesus Chart, it does a much better job of feeling like it's still playing on the setting's terms. Bob isn't literally a 00 agent by any stretch of the imagination; nobody (including himself) thinks he is one; it's just a quirk of magic that someone can use the shared understanding of James Bond novels to affect actions and events. It stays grounded in the tone of the series. The Annihilation Score could, I'm very sure, have been written with a similar approach, but instead it spends the bulk of its time sniffing superhero farts. As for Mo herself, I really didn't dislike her any more than I dislike any other flawed protagonist. I wouldn't want to be her husband, but there are plenty of good people whose husbands I wouldn't want to be.
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Nov 29, 2015 21:31
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I finally started reading The Night Land and am really liking it, so far. Granted I've read three chapters so it remains to be seen if I'll maintain that enthusiasm over 500 more pages. I think it bests fits in this thread; it's certainly horror. Any recommendations for other works that mix dying earth and horror? The two go hand-in-hand, I think.
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Nov 29, 2015 22:19
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Pope Guilty posted:Where are you getting Mo coming off as a terrible person from? Like I mentioned, mostly when Bob comes up she is dismissive if not contemptuous, without really having any established reason to be. At other times she just comes off as indifferent to being separated for about three months. As far as the reader knows Bob straight up adores her, while she appears to view him as a convenient bed-warmer. She starts an affair with with someone she sees as more conventionally successful than Bob. Someone who is not just her immediate work subordinate, which is dodgy in its own right, but also a suspect she has been warned about. There's also the nature of her relationship with Lecter, and the speed with which she chooses him over Bob despite Lecter trying to kill Bob. Whereas Bob in somewhat similar entanglement situations always (as far as we know from previous books) chooses Mo. As I said, I could see what Stross was trying to do, but he didn't give sufficient context for a lot of people to understand that A) this is aberrant behaviour on her part, and B) she's no more a reliable narrator than Bob, albeit for different reasons. So a lot of people who liked Mo and liked the unfortunately rare example of a relationship working (as opposed to falling apart for cheap drama), and who didn't spot immediately that Mo' was finally having her breakdown just saw it as her character being destroyed. There were also the usual misogynist types who just shat their pants when faced with a woman replacing the man as POV character, but gently caress those guys, obviously. The tone of the story is really jarring when set alongside what is going on in Mo's head/personal life. Also, how the gently caress did super powered people appearing everywhere not become known to a Laundry officer at Mo's tier? It really doesn't feel like it was integrated into the universe properly. There's a really interesting core to TAS, but it feels to me like Stross felt compelled to put in the wacky poo poo to balance out the serious story of a middle-aged woman's breakdown, and both elements suffered for it. Lovely Joe Stalin fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Nov 29, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 22:23
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Gapey Joe Stalin posted:The tone of the story is really jarring when set alongside what is going on in Mo's head/personal life. Also, how the gently caress did super powered people appearing everywhere not become known to a Laundry officer at Mo's tier? It really doesn't feel like it was integrated into the universe properly. There's a really interesting core to TAS, but it feels to me like Stross felt compelled to put in the wacky poo poo to balance out the serious story of a middle-aged woman's breakdown, and both elements suffered for it. I kind of agree with you here. Except that Mo is a Hitter, and just like Bob's relation with/status re: Eater of Souls (that's what Angleton ended up being, right?), would she/they have known? Its outside of Mo's bailiwick as a Hitter UNTIL she's pulled in to the events of TAS, so her knowing about them before hand is questionable. A comparison is the various desks in intelligence agencies, as shown in fiction; the Africa section may not know what the Mid-East section and vice versa, despite the chances of something happening in one region that has effects upon something in the other. So with Mo and Bob being in their separate areas, there's a question to how much exposure/knowledge they may or may not have about the Superhero question. Mhari's vampires used math that triggered alarms to bring them into Bob's purview, but there's no such alarms for independent power generation as seen with the superheroes.
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Nov 29, 2015 23:08
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Bob's not Bond in that book, though. But yeah, it would've worked better if we'd seen inside Mo's head before, getting a baseline for Agent CANDID before watching her go off the rails. One question I still have: how the gently caress do you actually kill Angleton? Is the Eater of Souls subject to death? Is it merely discorporate and looking to be invoked into something? If so, will it retain the loyalties it developed as Angleton?
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Nov 30, 2015 00:30
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Coffeehitler posted:I kind of agree with you here. Except that Mo is a Hitter, and just like Bob's relation with/status re: Eater of Souls (that's what Angleton ended up being, right?), would she/they have known? Its outside of Mo's bailiwick as a Hitter UNTIL she's pulled in to the events of TAS, so her knowing about them before hand is questionable. I'm fairly sure that the semi-spontaneous mass emergence of 'magical' powers among the general population is one of the long established "oh we are hosed" stages of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN though. Bob and Mo not knowing about it is akin to a fireman not noticing that the city is burning down even as people run flaming past his window. Pope Guilty posted:One question I still have: how the gently caress do you actually kill Angleton? Is the Eater of Souls subject to death? Is it merely discorporate and looking to be invoked into something? If so, will it retain the loyalties it developed as Angleton? I don't think it is discorporate. Bob's channelling the power of it to some degree, but I think the actual will of the Eater, or at least enough of it to function as a lifeboat/Plan B, is in Spooky. I don't think it is a coincidence that Angleton jovially triggered his own trap and that once Angleton was aware of the Laundry being compromised Bob was chosen by a stray with, at the very least, the apparent ability to sense and confound Lecter. Lovely Joe Stalin fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 01:40
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I'm not sure if someone already mentioned it, but Stross actually did a blog post only yesterday, in which he talks about the shifting perspective of this pair of Laundry books. He describes the next book's PoV-- Alex, one of the PHANGs-- as being a spiritual return to the early days of the series when Bob was a grunt in the trenches rather than a powered-up superman. That sounds really good to me, and it makes me think that one of the problems** with the Mo perspective was that it didn't actually address the issue of Bob's perspective spiraling out of control, it just replaced him with someone who for all intents and purposes was comparably powerful, but who wasn't similarly endeared to the long-time reader. Of course, then he lets us know that Bob will be returning to the first-person seat for the novel after that. We'll have to see how that works out. **Earlier I said I didn't hate Mo, but that's not the same thing as liking her equally as a PoV. I prefer Bob's PoV, definitely.
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Nov 30, 2015 03:05
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It's been awhile since I read it but I thought no one had been able to get close enough to see if Angleton or the vampire survived. For all we know the eater of souls is digesting a particularly large meal and well belch and wake up in a book or three.
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Nov 30, 2015 03:23
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I thought it was pretty unequivocal that Angleton is an ex-eater of souls now. Like a rather large, very black mark in the floor/wall where he was. And that's why Bob was off doing his thing all over the damned place in Apoc Score. Bob is next in line for Angleton's job, while putting out brushfires that Angleton didn't have time to prevent from occurring.
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Nov 30, 2015 06:30
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JerryLee posted:I've decided that for me a huge part of the problem is that pop culture references, memes, etc. are a huge trap for Stross as a writer. His work always becomes way more annoying (to me) whenever he starts dropping them. 
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Nov 30, 2015 19:30
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I don't follow Stross outside of reading his books, but I had a look at the TAS discussion thread on his blog when I finished it and he seemed, well, quite supercilious towards anyone who hadn't enjoyed it. That shirt isn't helping my goony view of him either.
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Nov 30, 2015 21:02
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