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Arcsquad12 posted:The short story Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88, by Kevin J. Anderson. Given the fairly gross Star Wars self-inserts and fiction wars from "professionals" discussed upthread I don't see how what I'm guessing is some robot navelgazing from the skinny robot in the Rogue Squadron games could be worse. ...it's worse, isn't it.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:02
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I read hol in roughly one sitting on a weekend away and it had basically 0 impression on me. It was completely ok
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Dec 7, 2015 22:59
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Arcsquad12 posted:Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88, by Kevin J. Anderson. ed: haha welp Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 23:10 on Dec 7, 2015 |
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Dec 7, 2015 23:07
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catlord posted:Really? I read the first one, didn't like it, and I haven't read any of the others because every one I know says the series picks up with The Wasteland and I don't want to slog through The Drawing of the Three to get there. I know its an odd series, but for me it was the perfect storm of timing and influences. When I was growing up Stephen King was my favorite author. I read all of his books many times, and started noticing that they all reference each other in small ways. Cujo is buried at the pet cemetery, for example. (obviously the real pet cemetery in the front, not the micmac burial ground in the back. ) it was never anything major, just little nods here and there. Sheriff Pangborne remembering the mess at Derry from IT, Salem's lot being the boogieman of towns in other books, that sort of thing. I read the first three when I was an early teen, and then had to wait four years for Wizard and Glass to come out. That was when he really started showing what he was doing with the series, Randall Flagg makes a cameo who was the preivous bad guy in both Eyes of the Dragon and The Stand. It also had all the imagery that appealed to a young me. I just re-read all the books as the new ones came out, (along with all the books tied to it that came out in between Dark Tower books) and I just kind of enjoyed the massive world building with all fantasy genres bleeding together as a general question of fiction and archtypes. I guess what I'm saying is I thought it was drat near perfect, even with the massive changes in tone that occurred after his car accident. All that being said, I can easily understand why ANYONE wouldn't like it, and it's a book series I never recommend to anyone.
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Dec 7, 2015 23:18
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Their flashing tongues, spitting out blood and poison.
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Stephen King's stuff is all connected in pretty weird ways. The dimension Pennywise comes from is the same place the government opens a hole to in The Mist, and probably the same place in From a Buick 8. For a really weird connection, there's a line in The Shining that seems to indicate Cthulhu is behind it all. Danny has a vision of something gigantic, with tentacles for a face, reaching out over the Overlook. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line, but it's definitely in there. Then of course The Author Stephen King gets hit by a van and a bunch of characters have to drop everything to save him. I have a very love/hate relationship with Stephen King.
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Dec 7, 2015 23:26
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My favorite bit of Stephen King goofiness is casting this guy as a major villain. 
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Dec 8, 2015 00:08
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:Given the fairly gross Star Wars self-inserts and fiction wars from "professionals" discussed upthread I don't see how what I'm guessing is some robot navelgazing from the skinny robot in the Rogue Squadron games could be worse. Mostly it's just bad fanfic
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Dec 8, 2015 00:17
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The worst book is, of course, the Bible 
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Dec 8, 2015 00:18
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Sham bam bamina! posted:This is just a Penny Arcade punchline, right? Not a real, published piece of fiction? the linked wiki entry because it hurt me so i hurt back posted:The IG Series Prototype Project was the visualization of Imperial Supervisor Gurdun to manufacture the ultimate assassin droid. The IG-88 prototype was activated at the Holowan Laboratories sometime prior to the year of 15 BBY.[source?] Due to the sentient programming of one of the particular assassin droids, it immediately developed a sense of independence. After dispatching the laboratory personnel, IG-88A infused his programming into three identical counterparts. The four quickly commandeered a starship and made liftoff. Traveling to Mechis III, they developed a stratagem to seize command over the galaxy. And, because it's a fandom wiki, assume every made-up word and proper noun links to its own page.
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Dec 8, 2015 00:35
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lenoon posted:Hey, it's a good book. But really, out of everything, all books, your favourite is a fairly adequate post-modern-but-not-in-a-challenging-way book of fairly middling quality in all respects? Great if it's your favourite, I'm just wondering why. There's better versions of the same thing, they just tend to be a bit less accessible. I said "tell us what books to read" not "defend your position", good job with the reading comprehension
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Dec 8, 2015 00:41
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If "read more books" means "read finnagan's wake" I guess I'm not going to read more books e: like if someone needed to "learn more math" I'd figure out what level they're on, probably calculus or a little above that, and go from there, I wouldn't shove an Algebraic Topology text in their face and expect them to start telling me about cohomology's and manifolds. Hemingway To Go! has a new favorite as of 00:50 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 00:47
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Sobatchja Morda posted:Pale Fire knockoff It's interesting that you invoke Pale Fire here, because (to digress onto the subject of a really good book for a second) Pale Fire is interesting as a "puzzle" novel in that the actual organization of the text is completely straightforward; you can read it straight through, maybe going back to look at the referenced lines at points in the annotation, although you don't really have to (since the whole point is that the annotation is nigh-completely disconnected from the poem it's allegedly commenting on). The puzzle elements of the book are based on the content, not the structure, which I feel like is a thing that HoL and other puzzle books frequently get wrong. Like I said, I lost patience with HoL kind of early on, but I didn't get the feeling anything novel or interesting was on its way -- unlike Pale Fire, where even the bits that aren't puzzly are well worth your time to read. I know comparing anyone to Nabokov is setting a high bar, but still, Pale Fire kind of spoils the rest of its pseudo-genre by existing. I have read the Fifty Year Sword, and it was... okay. Not terrible, but it felt kind of hollow? It was like solving a puzzle box with nothing inside.
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Dec 8, 2015 02:04
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queserasera posted:And, because it's a fandom wiki, assume every made-up word and proper noun links to its own page. I remember this loving story. Congrulations on taking a giant mash up Star wars, sky-net, and Claptrap's robot revolution and making it poo poo Kevin Anderson. 
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Dec 8, 2015 02:25
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When I was a tween who cared about Star Wars, the fact that the droids lived under a system of legal slavery that no one, good guy or bad guy, ever questioned, always bugged me. Mind you, that story is hilarious garbage.
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Dec 8, 2015 03:25
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The Saddest Rhino posted:I said "tell us what books to read" not "defend your position", good job with the reading comprehension There's a cool thread in The Book Barn that will help you.
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Dec 8, 2015 05:26
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I want his recommendations.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:06
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The Saddest Rhino posted:I want his recommendations. I actually already recommended two books in a similar vein in my first post, something along the lines of "it's like fineganns wake or the naked lunch but for edgy teens". So, there's two. If your ability to interpret text is so poor though, I think you'd struggle with either one. Perhaps something a bit easier? The hypnerotomachia maybe? Edit: I mean if you're going for the king of all pretentious masturbatory exercises that fall far short of their acolytes expectations, you may as well go for the original and best right lenoon has a new favorite as of 09:49 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 09:45
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Ah, actually I misread and thought you meant "It's like Finnegan's Wake and A Soft Machine, which are for edgy teens", sorry about that E: tbh I just had a conversation previously in another avenue where someone said "read more" and absolutely cannot deliver when I asked them "what", so I thought it was a repetition of the pattern.
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Dec 8, 2015 10:30
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Ah then sorry for being an rear end about it. Tbh most of the time when someone says "this is my favourite book" my response is "read more books", having "a" favourite is a pretty weird concept to me.
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Dec 8, 2015 10:40
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lenoon posted:I mean if you're going for the king of all pretentious masturbatory exercises that fall far short of their acolytes expectations, you may as well go for ...The Skull in the Box quartet, a pulp fever dream written by a logorrheic madman from Chicago, and I freely admit I find myself unable to face volume 2. Short-story doses of Harry Stephen Keeler are enough for most (he also has almost Lovecraftian problems with race). But bizarro authors can only dream of being as naturally weird as this man. http://site.xavier.edu/polt/keeler/story.html http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3805070 In defence of Keeler, he always attempts to wrap up his unbelievably convoluted plots, and sometimes even succeeds. He also pioneered a curious method of showing the construction of a plot by means of diagrams: http://spinelessbooks.com/keeler/mechanics/index.html
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Dec 8, 2015 13:12
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What is it about Sci-Fi that makes authors loose their minds? I picked up a book awhile back - Hunting Party by Elizabeth Moon. It isn't amazing, but it certainly isn't terrible. The plots pretty generic but Moon handles the characters pretty well I think. One of them is a rich girl who it seems like is going to turn out to be the helpless 'oh save me, anyone!' type who trips and breaks her ankle at random but it turns out to pretty much be an act she's been forced into because she's supposed to be the simpering rich idiot, not the pretty smart and resourceful woman she is. There's acceptable character development, the bad guy looses in the end, the good guys win, happy endings all around. Like I said, not amazing, but not terrible. I spotted the fifth book in the series, Rules of Engagement, in a charity shop last week and snagged it. Kinda wishing I'd saved that ten pence now because after a few chapters all I could think was 'maybe the author got hit in the head? like really, really hard.' I don't know if it happened in the intervening books or what, but all the characters are basically two dimensional caricatures now. The rich girl I mentioned has gone from an actual character to what may as well be a bipedal sign that reads 'I'M RICH YOUR NOT SO I HATE YOU BECAUSE YOU HATE ME' The really, really awful part about the book though, is what actually happens. The rich girl (her name is Brun) is talking about casual relationships and making fun of another female character because she's a bit shy and not into them and the author feels the need to drop a little flashback into the scene where Brun says being raped wouldn't be an utterly nightmarish thing because it's just sex and anyway she's got an implant to keep her from getting pregnant. It's not so much the author setting the scene as it is her using one of those giant WW2 air raid sirens while fireworks spell out SEXHAVER PUNISHMENT TIME SOON It takes about thirty pages before yup, gangraped pregnant. Also Brun's name is now slut. Literally, that's what her captors tell her her new name is. I really, really want to throw the book away but at the same time I'm really morbidly curious just what's going to happen. I suspect it'll end with Brun deciding to keep her rape baby and settle down and be a mom, giving up any thoughts of a career or life of her own, probably with an as yet unintroduced male character who rescues her or who happens to be one of her captors only he isn't as bad as the rest of them and oh, yeah, did I mention she's been rendered mute? because that's a thing that happens. I genuinely regret picking this book up because it's retroactively ruined the first book as well, it's that bad. King Doom has a new favorite as of 20:50 on Dec 9, 2015 |
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Dec 9, 2015 17:15
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King Doom posted:Elizabeth Moon
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Dec 10, 2015 01:44
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lenoon posted:Tbh most of the time when someone says "this is my favourite book" my response is "read more books", having "a" favourite is a pretty weird concept to me. Idg what someone having a favorite book has to do with how many books they've read. Sounds awful assumptive. It is ok for a favorite book to be something fun or comforting instead of challenging and avant-garde. Anyway my contribution is For Such a Time by Kate Breslin. It's a Christian romance novel about a Jewish woman during WWII, who falls in love with a Nazi who runs a concentration camp. A lot of people might find that gross as gently caress, but the Nazi guy totally has hidden depth! Nazi guy acts like he's Christian Grey with a racism problem, but it's not his fault, honest. He really likes the heroine because she has blonde hair and blue eyes, not like those other grody Jews who look all ethnic and poo poo. Also when he's trying to get in her pants he likes to threaten to send her back to Dachau. But geez he's so sensitive and misunderstood, he just accidentally got caught up in this whole kill-all-Jews thing. Also the heroine, despite being Jewish, gains her strength from uplifting New Testament passages. She eventually converts to Christianity, because of course she does. Needless to say this book horrified a whole bunch of Jewish people. Even if it weren't offensive it'd still be awful though. My best friend and I read it as a "ha ha this sucks" kind of thing (fun to do with lovely romance novels), but this one was lovely in all the wrong ways. I can't believe it has 4/5 stars on Goodreads. Legit Christian romance readers must have really, really low standards.
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Dec 10, 2015 03:11
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Telemaze posted:Legit Christian romance readers must have really, really low standards.
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Dec 10, 2015 03:34
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Telemaze posted:I can't believe it has 4/5 stars on Goodreads. Legit Christian romance readers must have really, really low standards.
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Dec 10, 2015 03:56
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Telemaze posted:Legit Christian [fiction] readers must have really, really low standards. Fixed. The long and short of it is that the people who read "Christian lit" literally do not evaluate art based on what we would call its quality, they evaluate it purely based on its assumed moral value. Every failing is excusable, or simply not considered at all, as long as it holds certain values. This is me speaking from personal experiences with these people.
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Dec 10, 2015 15:10
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Telemaze posted:Idg what someone having a favorite book has to do with how many books they've read. Sounds awful assumptive. It is ok for a favorite book to be something fun or comforting instead of challenging and avant-garde. I don't know really, it's more like "this is your favourite, are you sure, how can you tell?" sorry if it sounds assholeish.
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Dec 10, 2015 15:44
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Nah, it doesn't really sound assholeish to me, I just didn't understand what you were getting at.
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Dec 10, 2015 17:24
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Arcsquad12 posted:All you need to do is say that your novel/movie/tv show Science fiction fans in a nutshell, really.
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Dec 10, 2015 17:35
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This is one of those things, like Christian Rock, where there are many great books written by Christians dealing with Christian themes, but they aren't "Christian Literature", because that's all written by people who have never left a compound.
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Dec 10, 2015 17:39
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how can christian rock be a thing, rocks cannot be christian as they have no souls
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Dec 10, 2015 17:41
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Acne Rain posted:how can christian rock be a thing, rocks cannot be christian as they have no souls
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Dec 10, 2015 19:23
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Acne Rain posted:how can christian rock be a thing, rocks cannot be christian as they have no souls I have researched this matter and I can assure you that absolutely the whitest musical form ever constructed is Christian Blues, in the manner of Christian Rock.
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Dec 10, 2015 21:01
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So I read a book series that started strong but wow did it lose the plot. The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman. At best I'll say it really messes with the conventional fantasy tropes and is fairly unique but gets really....fanfiction-y after book 1.
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Dec 11, 2015 02:26
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King Doom posted:
I am happy to say that you are completely wrong about what Brun does in the rest of the book. She has played the bubble-headed rich girl for so long that she keeps slipping back into that persona, but she keeps trying to fix herself and be resourceful et c. It gets a little annoying, but she really is trying, and she makes a bit of progress in each book she appears in. . . rather like a real person. Not my favorite character in that series, but not the worst. The villains are all ubervillainous, though. So, don't give up on all the heavy-handed spaceship stories, I guess? IIRC, Elizabeth Moon was in the Marines, or maybe that was her dad. Her heroines are career women, not mommies.
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Dec 11, 2015 02:27
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pentyne posted:So I read a book series that started strong but wow did it lose the plot. The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman. At best I'll say it really messes with the conventional fantasy tropes and is fairly unique but gets really....fanfiction-y after book 1. Yeah, I liked the first one, but I couldn't make it though the second. I just sorta lost interest when he becomes super general.
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Dec 11, 2015 05:54
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Hello, I am pretty sure I have a favorite terrible book that many people have never heard of:  My Journey With Aristotle to the Anarchist Utopia by Graham Purchase A few years ago a friend of mine and I were browsing the local bookstore and this was just lying on a pile of books in the middle of nowhere. I had to have it. The story is both nuts and non-existent. As the back cover says, some Australian guy gets trapped in a mine and passes out. When he wakes up, the mine is no longer collapsed, and he wanders outside. There's an old dude with a cane just waiting, who basically says "Sup, dude, I'm Aristotle. You've been asleep for hundreds of years. Come with me to Bear City." Our main character does not question this. The rest of the book is basically a really long treatise on how an anarchist society would work. Cooking areas are entirely shared, clothes are grown out of plant fibers and after you wear them you eat them, and there's a bunch of people who are flabbergasted by the main dude's denim jeans and leather jacket. Everyone rides bikes everywhere. Oh yeah, weed is totally legal and everyone smokes it, including ancient Greek philosophers. Aristotle is literally just a mouthpiece for the author, and the book is a series of lectures while they walk around and look at weird anarchist boats. At some point Aristotle has to leave for unspecified reasons, and the author strains his storytelling skills by introducing us to a girl who our dude will be staying with. She is basically just Aristotle with boobs, in that all she does is lecture (she is literally a teacher) and look at more boats. At this point the author starts writing with one hand. quote:Jo, who was really very pretty, was wearing a small and quite revealing miniskirt which was made of shinny[sic] see-through material covered in small polka-dots. All the people of Bear City at least while they were in the city wore only the scantiest of clothing; small shorts, mini skirts and leggings. As she bent over the desk to look at some problem on Mikial's now deserted screen I couldn't help admiring a shapely thighs and bottom and the outline of her snug closely fitting knickers. She didn't seem to mind the fact that I was looking at her in this way and even seemed to adjust her position a little bit so that I might get a better view. Then they have sex, and behold the raw erotic power of Mr. Purchase's writing: quote:She sat on the desktop next to me and lifted her knees up to her chin so I could clearly see the dark outlines of her fanny through her translucent lingerie. [whole bunch of talking that I cut out] I was very much looking forward to spending the night with this beautiful young lady, who had by now made me feel extremely horny. [more talking] We rolled around together for a while until we became really horny. [more talking, big belt buckle is described in detail, she pulls out a condom and starts rattling on and on about how cool and anarchist this condom is, somehow our main character is still "really horny"] The condom was made of an unbelievably thin material which had to be rolled on very slowly and carefully. She opened her legs and said "The lingerie is entirely edible, the slight green color is the fresh mint flavoring which is kept naturally fresh in the material from which they are made. They taste really nice and fresh and you can just lick them away," as she invited me to do so by running her hand over her white mound, which was clearly visible through her thin translucent knickers. We hosed until it was quite dark outside. Atta boy, Graham. That's how you do it. Anyways my friend and I immediately went to a pub and read the stupidest passages we could find to each other while we shared a pitcher. When we got to the end, it turns out this publishing company rules. Their motto is "The only good lawyer is a dead lawyer", and they give you permission to quote the book freely if you are an anarchist zine. I guess we're an anarchist zine now. Someone named Brad Gravier wrote in sharpie on the inside cover Who reads this Crap? I do, Brad. I do. There are also some synopses of other books from the same publisher:   Oh yeah Plato also exists in the story but Aristotle has beef with him because instead of furthering society he just dresses up little kids as animals and makes them sing stupid songs. God bless you, Graham Purchase, and cheers. 
Samfucius has a new favorite as of 21:09 on Dec 12, 2015 |
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Dec 12, 2015 03:55
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I demand a Let's Read. You must report back with a link to it. I love how the book descriptions include the paper size. At 8.5 x 11 and that page count, I'm imagining a barely legible scrawl in one of those 5-subject spiral notebooks.
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Dec 12, 2015 04:12
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flosofl posted:I demand a Let's Read. You must report back with a link to it. I considered a Let's Read, and if there is interest I will do it, but even though the book is short it really drags at parts.
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Dec 12, 2015 04:15
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flosofl posted:that page count
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Dec 12, 2015 04:46
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