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remigious posted: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. Pretty much everything by Jeremy Robert Johnson is the tops. Guy has imagination to spare and really lively prose. Dunno so much about his contemporaries.
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Dec 3, 2015 00:06
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The Mongols brought guns to Europe in the 1240's. That's pretty drat medieval. Swordfights continued to be a thing for several centuries after that. If I recall correctly the oldest sword fighting manual we know about is from the 1390's. People were still writing detailed treatises on how to best stab dudes with swords well into the 18th century. The existence of guns didn't really stop people from fighting with swords even if it was mostly in the form of duels and what not. I guess what I'm saying is that you can totally have guns, canons and grenades in the same story as cool swordfights and still have it be firmly medieval.
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Dec 3, 2015 00:22
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Stephen King wrote the Dark Tower, an entire fantasy saga about Roland Deschain, a wild-westish knight descended from King Arthur, armed with twin revolvers whose barrels were cast from the blade of Excalibur. The few gunfights are, almost always, brutal affairs with no honor, but that's just the tone of the story. When there is honor (the significance of using the gun of your father, for example), it doesn't feel forced either, so fantasy with guns and knights can totally be done
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Dec 3, 2015 01:04
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The Muffinlord posted: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. So, he just rewrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court?
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Dec 3, 2015 02:45
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Tiggum posted:So, he just rewrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? Basically, if instead of a yankee it were a guy with the ultra-specific skills to build working plumbing, piezoelectric radios, and submachine guns. It has its' moments, but everyone but the main character spends most of their time looking like drooling idiots.
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Dec 3, 2015 03:19
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The Muffinlord posted:Basically, if instead of a yankee it were a guy with the ultra-specific skills to build working plumbing, piezoelectric radios, and submachine guns. It has its' moments, but everyone but the main character spends most of their time looking like drooling idiots.
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Dec 3, 2015 12:20
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And in the end, the Yankee looks like an idiot too. It's a not-very-thinly-veiled allegory for imperialism.
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Dec 3, 2015 14:24
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I mean, this is the terrible book thread, I don't know how else I can tell you that they're not the best books you're going to read. I loved the Conrad Stargard series as a youth but time makes fools of us all.
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Dec 3, 2015 15:16
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If I ever acquire a time machine, the first thing I'm going to do is go back and tell Mark Twain not to publish Connecticut Yankee in order to spare the world from all the knockoff authors that somehow never realized Mark Twain was writing satirically. E: If you actually took Connecticut Yankee at its face it would easily beat out most of the candidates in this thread for terribleness. It's hilarious because Twain is basically shitposting about all the social trends that annoy him, but as an actual story it is unimaginably bad. the holy poopacy has a new favorite as of 16:22 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 16:18
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What I remember most about that book was reading a dinky library copy as a kid and feeling horror and betrayal on running into the original fully-illustrated version at Borders a month or so later. Editions of Twain books without the illustrations are a goddamn crime. ed: I also have the library to thank for introducing me to the distinction between a real 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea translation (which I fell in love with, Anthony Bonner's if anyone's curious) and a public-domain Victorian one (which went down like a razorbladed apple when I checked it out from a different branch to re-read). Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 16:51 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 16:44
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hackbunny posted: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 This perhaps helps explain some of the really terrible authors presented in this thread. If their driving force in their writing is greed and some socially-unacceptable perversion, with an added drive to justify same, they have plenty to go of. For a terrible book, I present Steel Beneath the Skin, with the blurb: quote:The idea was simple enough for the alien race who took Aneka Jansen from Earth in 2011. Take a human, make her into a perfect tool to observe humanity from the inside, and so determine how best to advance this young race into their future. Unfortunately for them, and her, their plans went awry, and Aneka became the only survivor on a dead ship marooned in deep space.
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Dec 3, 2015 16:51
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Maimgara posted:Aneka Jansen Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 17:07 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 16:53
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Didn't even know that terrible book is bad fanfiction. There's seven books in the series, perfect for anyone wanting a marathon session with bad Star Trek erotic fanfiction. http://brunching.com/images/geekchartbig.gif edit: rapidly approaching the bottom here. Maimgara has a new favorite as of 17:08 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 17:05
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Maimgara posted:I love Gibsons early work, Neuromancer and the Burning Chrome short story collection, but yes - his more recent work is very much not as impressive. In interviews, he has said he lived exclusively off vodka and "animal terror" while writing Neuromancer. I wonder if he is one of those authors that write one really big book and a few related titles, then exhausts their driving passion and writes passable, unexciting books afterwards. I read the cyberpunk trilogy in the wrong order. First I read was the third one, Mona Lisa Overdrive. It's like disjointed fragments aspiring to be filmed. Neuromancer and Count Zero are at least a bit like books. Burning Chrome was suitable background to the trilogy. But yeah, he so should have stopped there. OTOH, it beats a day job.
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Dec 3, 2015 19:25
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hackbunny posted:armed with twin revolvers whose barrels were cast from the blade of Excalibur.
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Dec 3, 2015 19:37
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remigious posted:Whoa, is this true? I have read the series like 4 time and somehow missed that detail. I've checked, it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line in the last book, in the scene with the demons who take the form of Stephen King's ego, id and superego (this is a thing that actually literally happens in the book) hackbunny has a new favorite as of 15:54 on Dec 4, 2015 |
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Dec 4, 2015 15:51
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hackbunny posted:I've checked, it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line in the last book, in the scene with the demons who take the form of Stephen King's ego, id and superego (this is a thing that actually literally happens in the book)
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Dec 4, 2015 17:03
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:okay I remember the guns being Excalibur but... what? Come on! it's even one of the illustrations! 
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Dec 4, 2015 18:39
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Man, I love the Dark Tower series but there are some pretty unfortunate moments in the later books 
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Dec 4, 2015 20:32
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hackbunny posted:Come on! it's even one of the illustrations! What? Did you read the comics or the novels?
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Dec 4, 2015 20:51
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Cumslut1895 posted:What? Did you read the comics or the novels? The novels have illustrations. At least the hardcover and trade paperbacks did. I remember being especially disturbed by an illustration in the book with the train (the 3rd one, I think).
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Dec 4, 2015 20:56
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hackbunny posted:Come on! it's even one of the illustrations! I would hang out with the Stephen King Peacoat Squad.
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Dec 4, 2015 21:42
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Every visual novel.
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Dec 4, 2015 22:31
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What's the deal with visual novels? They're still a mystery and a "young people these days" thing to me, but I get the impression that they're a big deal
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Dec 4, 2015 23:09
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Nanomashoes posted:Every visual novel. It ain't a book unless I can kill a spider with it.
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Dec 4, 2015 23:26
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divabot posted:I read the cyberpunk trilogy in the wrong order. First I read was the third one, Mona Lisa Overdrive. It's like disjointed fragments aspiring to be filmed. Neuromancer and Count Zero are at least a bit like books. Burning Chrome was suitable background to the trilogy. But yeah, he so should have stopped there. OTOH, it beats a day job. Mona Lisa Overdrive started the grand tradition of the third book of every Gibson trilogy fizzling out. It, All Tomorrow's Parties and Zero History all have that vague feel of a panicked author delivering a contractually obligated book. Disjointed action, murky plot, opaque motivations, bringing together all the old characters for a big send off, "everyone lived happily ever after". Now, the Gibson who wrote Burning Chrome? I'd like to see more work by him.
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Dec 4, 2015 23:35
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The vast majority of visual novels have porn. This is not necessarily because the authors wanted to make porn. This is because the majority of their customers won't buy a visual novel if it doesn't have porn. This might be a clue as to why they suck. For a more serious answer: One of the big issues is that visual novels are generally from a first-person perspective. In books, that's fine. But in a visual novel, the character you play as essentially acts as your self-insert, and the writers know this. The writers have to balance how much personality they give the main character with how much that personality would conflict with the players. Doing that takes a considerable amount of skill. There are ways around that. You can make something funny or ridiculous like Phoenix Wright or that pigeon dating sim so that you avoid that problem altogether. Alternatively, you could play with that concept in the story itself; Ever17 had a really clever take on this w.r.t. the identity of the protagonists. That being said, visual novels target the Y.A. market. The Y.A. market is stupid. Nobody is going to spend the money on quality writers when the writing isn't even the focus of the product.
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Dec 4, 2015 23:36
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PS: why has there not been more talk about Matthew Reilly? I mean, A terrible book by William Gibson is mainly just disappointing, but Reilly? His books are entertaining fiascos ...
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Dec 4, 2015 23:37
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remigious posted:Man, I love the Dark Tower series but there are some pretty unfortunate moments in the later books He needs to slow down and take his time doing some research instead of churning a book a year. He needs to broaden his horizons a little instead of the pure navel-gazing that was Dark Tower. He has admitted to hating research and IIRC only seriously researched stuff twice, for Langoliers and 11/22/63, but he should try to do it more often because it makes a huge difference. I never realized how samey and generic his settings are until I interrupted my King binge with some Gibson. Gibson can pack huge amounts of incidental information in each and every page and make it look effortless, I don't think I've ever read a King book with a fraction of the variety of settings and character skills/jobs I've seen so far in Pattern Recognition (Gibson's characters are really flat though) Come on King, you finally grew out of your interminable adolescence, you seem to have finally gotten over whatever hell you were put through by a real or imagined greaser bully driving a muscle car with a noisy exhaust and lifted back, better yet you seem to have finally left Bachman behind (don't kid yourself, Bachman wrote like half of your books, no matter what it said on the cover), you aren't so insecure about your skill to use the trope of "writing skill as a literal superpower" anymore, make this final step
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Dec 4, 2015 23:40
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outlier posted:Mona Lisa Overdrive started the grand tradition of the third book of every Gibson trilogy fizzling out. It, All Tomorrow's Parties and Zero History all have that vague feel of a panicked author delivering a contractually obligated book. Disjointed action, murky plot, opaque motivations, bringing together all the old characters for a big send off, "everyone lived happily ever after". I thought Zero History was the best of the three, though I was kind of hoping there'd be some better Bigend wrap up.
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Dec 4, 2015 23:46
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dpbjinc posted:The vast majority of visual novels have porn. dpbjinc posted:That being said, visual novels target the Y.A. market.
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Dec 5, 2015 00:34
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dpbjinc posted:The vast majority of visual novels have porn. This is not necessarily because the authors wanted to make porn. This is because the majority of their customers won't buy a visual novel if it doesn't have porn. This might be a clue as to why they suck. Actually, it's because their writing is terrible.
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Dec 5, 2015 02:44
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Nanomashoes posted:Actually, it's because their writing is terrible. Games have this thing where they need to be of a certain length to justify a certain price point. Since the only thing visual novels have for 'gameplay' is choices made by the player, there's only two ways to stretch out the timeline to give players 'enough' to justify asking for any money at all- make the stretches between choices take a long time, or make lots of choices and lots of branching and merging paths. One of these takes a lot of work and a lot of thought, the other one lets writers churn out page after page of overwritten shite.
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Dec 5, 2015 03:39
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video games are not books
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Dec 5, 2015 04:13
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:I thought Zero History was the best of the three, though I was kind of hoping there'd be some better Bigend wrap up. I loved how there was the plot that I barely remember with some sort of military uniform pants or something, but there was also another plot about jeans. I'm not even being ironic when I say I like it. A popular brand of expensive jeans is something that an actual, real billionaire mogul would be interested in getting his hands on. It doesn't have to be all cargo containers full of cash or experimental technology.
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Dec 5, 2015 04:56
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hackbunny posted:What's the deal with visual novels? They're still a mystery and a "young people these days" thing to me, but I get the impression that they're a big deal idk visual novels. i mean books have had illustrations since they were even a thing. Not all of them, but a good part anyway. "Graphic novel"s are for children who are just slightly too old to read about superheroes, but not old enough to not read comic books.
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Dec 5, 2015 05:18
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The Saddest Rhino posted:video games are not books Tell that to the people who write VNs E: To contribute to the thread, R. A. Salvatore's work is this for me- he's one of my favourite authors because his fight scenes are some of the best in the business and his better books are basically a series of excuses to get to those fight scenes. Every fight is described such that you know where everyone is, what they're doing, and why they're doing it, with a brisk style that I just love. Unfortunately, there's the rest of the books, and those sections always have the feeling of being things that the author really, really doesn't want to write, but he doesn't know how to get out of writing them. Somfin has a new favorite as of 11:26 on Dec 5, 2015 |
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Dec 5, 2015 11:20
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Whoever drew that picture of Stephen Kingx3 was very kind.
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Dec 5, 2015 13:01
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Somfin posted:Tell that to the people who write VNs I have to give a honorable mention to the translation of one of the Drizz't books I read as a kid. I assume that the word "evil" was translated as "mean".
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Dec 5, 2015 13:12
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:I thought Zero History was the best of the three, though I was kind of hoping there'd be some better Bigend wrap up. Yoiu're not alone - amongst my circle, everyone else seemed to love Zero History. I thought the London flavour sounded really fake and it turned out he wrote it up from notes provided by Cory Doctorow. But then, I live in London so maybe I'm being unfair.
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Dec 5, 2015 14:26
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