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fritz posted:About twenty years ago I read a series about a super-special ops dude working for an immortal space emperor and in the middle of one of the books there was a rant about lyndon johnson. That owns. TOOT BOOT posted:What was hard to understand about it? Robert's eldest son would be king after he died, but since Joffrey isn't really his son, it would have passed to his eldest brother Stannis. Well, what you found hard to understand was the word "arbitrary". It's a problem because arbitrariness is the kiss of death to meaning in a story, and a double problem in a secondary world because the author isn't just creating the characters but also their world - fish, stars, customs, colours, words and laws. When an author unthinkingly expects readers to go along with their assumptions, it's poor craft besides. I don't mind patrilineal inheritance or Joffrey being disinherited because of his hair colour, but it's sloppy to build a novel on such a weak foundation.
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Mar 29, 2016 08:06
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Counterpoint to it being surprising that Ned bit it. Sean Bean was cast as him. That's an automatic death sentence in any media.
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Mar 29, 2016 09:14
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A Proper Uppercut posted:The Takeshi Kovacs books, maybe? It's less space opera and more Sci fi noir maybe, but I think you might like them. Reeeally digging Altered Carbon so far. Thank you everyone for recommending it. edit: whoa, looks like netflix bought the rights to the book and are making a 10 episode series about it. AEMINAL fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 29, 2016 09:22
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House Louse posted:That owns. Um... no, in a fantasy novel you can pretty much expect basic stuff to be the same unless explicitly told otherwise. You don't get an explanation about what knights and squires are, for example. It's assumed you're roughly familiar with that, and it's assumed you're familiar with the idea that the heir to the throne must be a legitimate child and the process favours male descendants, because that's how it worked in the real world. (Fun fact: the British only changed the law to make ascension to the throne gender-neutral in 2011.) And it's been a while since I've read it but this is a fantasy book we're talking about, so I'm pretty sure there was at least some basic exposition around Ned's detective work and an explicit statement that if Ned's kids aren't really his, the line of succession is thrown into contest.
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Mar 29, 2016 10:02
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House Louse posted:Well, what you found hard to understand was the word "arbitrary". It's a problem because arbitrariness is the kiss of death to meaning in a story, and a double problem in a secondary world because the author isn't just creating the characters but also their world - fish, stars, customs, colours, words and laws. When an author unthinkingly expects readers to go along with their assumptions, it's poor craft besides. I don't mind patrilineal inheritance or Joffrey being disinherited because of his hair colour, but it's sloppy to build a novel on such a weak foundation. I think you just missed a lot when reading, as there's tons of talk about inheritance and ruling families (though I don't remember what is said in the first book specifically). You don't have to go along with your assumptions unthinking, because GRRM spends pages telling you about the structures and histories of the main families and how power passed down the lines. It is not at all subtle. Sanderson might be more to your liking. He's about the only author I can think of that is more explicit about his worlds than GRRM is about his world's dynasties. Edit: Also holy poo poo is that a bad post. sourdough fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 29, 2016 11:20
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AEMINAL posted:Reeeally digging Altered Carbon so far. Thank you everyone for recommending it. That could be pretty cool. I personally hope they cut out some of the (to my mind) jarringly out of place explicit sex. I get that Morgan has a hard-on for that stuff in his books but it's always so loving awkward.
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Mar 29, 2016 14:15
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I thought the explicit sex fit perfectly with all the explicit violence myself.
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Mar 29, 2016 14:21
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House Louse posted:Well, what you found hard to understand was the word "arbitrary". It's a problem because arbitrariness is the kiss of death to meaning in a story, and a double problem in a secondary world because the author isn't just creating the characters but also their world - fish, stars, customs, colours, words and laws. When an author unthinkingly expects readers to go along with their assumptions, it's poor craft besides. I don't mind patrilineal inheritance or Joffrey being disinherited because of his hair colour, but it's sloppy to build a novel on such a weak foundation. If you think it's arbitrary you weren't reading the books very carefully.
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Mar 29, 2016 14:47
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bonds0097 posted:That could be pretty cool. he thinks he's some kind of genius for doing it confronting us with it as well so it's not likely to change.
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Mar 29, 2016 15:00
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I like the absurd gonzo sex in the Kovacs books because it's exactly as weird and pornographic as the violence. I haven't thought about this opinion for more than five seconds so please don't force me to back it up.
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Mar 29, 2016 18:04
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General Battuta posted:I like the absurd gonzo sex in the Kovacs books because it's exactly as weird and pornographic as the violence. I haven't thought about this opinion for more than five seconds so please don't force me to back it up. 
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Mar 29, 2016 18:09
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How is it that we're almost 400 pages into the fantasy book thread and someone hasn't heard of agnatic primogeniture.
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Mar 29, 2016 18:12
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mcustic posted:Everyone looking for mil-SF, if you can stand the fact that the protagonists wear smart black uniforms with silver piping and skull amblems on their hats, Death's Head is a decent series that is heavily combat oriented. I really enjoyed Grimwood's Assassini books so might have to check this out even if it does sound a little janky.
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Mar 29, 2016 18:32
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General Battuta posted:I like the absurd gonzo sex in the Kovacs books because it's exactly as weird and pornographic as the violence. I haven't thought about this opinion for more than five seconds so please don't force me to back it up.
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Mar 29, 2016 18:42
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General Battuta posted:I like the absurd gonzo sex in the Kovacs books because it's exactly as weird and pornographic as the violence. I haven't thought about this opinion for more than five seconds so please don't force me to back it up. later on i began to just assume every woman introduced would immediately jump on kovacs' dick, despite him being a taciturn sociopath with little in the way of charm, and the assumption was often correct
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Mar 29, 2016 19:32
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Ah! That's brilliant. the_homemaster fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 29, 2016 19:38
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Neurosis posted:later on i began to just assume every woman introduced would immediately jump on kovacs' dick, despite him being a taciturn sociopath with little in the way of charm, and the assumption was often correct No, his Envoy Training makes him irresistible, even if his body is 93 years old and 930 kg. Ex-Envoys are prohibited by law from holding political, military, or prostitutional offices on most worlds, as the existing power structures fear their destabilising influence.
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Mar 29, 2016 19:44
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I had an internet NERD explain to me how any trade between planets is unrealistic because colonies would have to be entirely self sufficient to begin with and the cost of putting poo poo on a rocket to take to Planet X would never be worth it except in the most dire of circumstances. Like, you'd never need to export 2 million tons of grandfather clocks to Venus. It kind of spoiled a lot of sci-fi for me, but is this guy's theory misinformed or am I thinking too hard about stupid bullshit?
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Mar 29, 2016 20:26
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MrSlam posted:I had an internet NERD explain to me how any trade between planets is unrealistic because colonies would have to be entirely self sufficient to begin with and the cost of putting poo poo on a rocket to take to Planet X would never be worth it except in the most dire of circumstances. I mean, he's not really wrong. It's one of those things where you have to turn your brain off for space opera to work.
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Mar 29, 2016 20:46
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Depends, even if you just have Earth and Mars, at some point (when travel is very well developed) rich people are going to want to buy Genuine Earth Tobacco or whatever. E: And come to think of it, what's even the point of founding anything bigger than a science lab if there are no resources to send back? And what loser would ever head back down a gravity well once they got to space anyway? :culture: Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 29, 2016 20:49
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The easiest and cheapest trade good to move is information: art, religion, philosophy, technology, science (those last two most of all). It stands to reason that if interstellar war every breaks out, it'll be over mutually exclusive conflicting memes - ideas that one civilization or another believes are too dangerous to be allowed to spread.
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Mar 29, 2016 20:59
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Doesn't Alistair Reynolds or Niven write about that? (or maybe both!). Assuming slower than light travel, all human colonies could practically trade are ideas. But that's interstellar trade. Interplanetary is probably more doable, provided they have something Earth wants (which is doubtful). The asteroid belt certainly though, lots of easily accessible minerals and no pesky gravity well to get in the way of export. That's where the new gold rush will happen... except probably not gold, because gold is worthless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6QdY6YDfj0&t=26s
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Mar 29, 2016 21:09
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Khizan posted:I can go with that on Ned's death. It was the first death of its kind of the series. He was cast as the central protagonist. He had all kinds of plot hooks that seemed set to pull him to the Wall. Jon. Benjen. The most honorable lord of the North choosing between his oaths and his loyalties. So I was absolutely loving shocked when he died. I first read GOT when it was pretty new (it was either shortly before or shortly after the second book was out, because I didn't have to wait long to read that, but did have to wait what seemed like a long time for #3, oh how much we had yet to learn about waiting, then) and the series hadn't built the kind of reputation or fanbase it would later have. And yes, it was Ned's death that sealed its status as something extraordinary; up until then it had seemed like a competently-done large-scale fantasy with a whoooooole bunch of the common elements which we were used to seeing in such stories. Or to be more precise, it was the triple-punch: "So, Ned's going to be sent to the Wall... WTF? But, but... oh, well, way over here the Genghis Khan type is getting ready to kick some rear end, and... what in the double gently caress, he died too? Ah well, the author's going for a longer perspective, pregnant-girl will give birth to his heir who will also be the true heir to the throne of Westeros and... what in the triple gently caress? No, I gues not.... but dragons? Where's the next book?"
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Mar 29, 2016 21:42
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MrSlam posted:I had an internet NERD explain to me how any trade between planets is unrealistic because colonies would have to be entirely self sufficient to begin with and the cost of putting poo poo on a rocket to take to Planet X would never be worth it except in the most dire of circumstances. That's making some fairly serious assumptions about how your fictional spaceships work.
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Mar 29, 2016 22:02
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Yea, I mean drat, just because I live in a first world country doesn't mean I don't import poo poo from another country. Same thing if I was on another planet in a colony. Nothing says oranges can be grown on Mars so gently caress it, I'm importing oranges. I'll export martian artwork or alien fossils or some poo poo to another planet. Maybe Venus will want chocolate and that poo poo won't grow correctly on Venus so HEY WOW we gotta import it from Earth. Titanites (Titanians?) might have amazing artwork that they export to get coffee or something from another planet. Just because you can get to different places and have different poo poo doesn't mean you don't want something from somewhere else. We can't grow chocolate for poo poo in the US, so we import the gently caress out of it from other countries. Same thing, just on a galactic scale for different planets.
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Mar 29, 2016 23:11
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MrSlam posted:the cost of putting poo poo on a rocket to take to Planet X It's a pretty dumb assumption to assume that in, say, 500 years we're still going to be travelling into space by riding a chemical explosion.
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Mar 29, 2016 23:18
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MrSlam posted:I had an internet NERD explain to me how any trade between planets is unrealistic because colonies would have to be entirely self sufficient to begin with and the cost of putting poo poo on a rocket to take to Planet X would never be worth it except in the most dire of circumstances. I'm not exactly sure how that would be strong enough explanation to "spoil a lot of sci-fi" given that up until recently the most mainstream sci-fi series assumed that faster-than-light travel was relatively cheap and easy. The ones that don't make that assumption tend to address the idea of interstellar trade by basing it on culture/information or by not making it feasible at all.
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Mar 29, 2016 23:24
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Yea, I mean drat, just because I live in a first world country doesn't mean I don't import poo poo from another country. In fact, first-world countries are net importers. It's an uncomfortable truth that a depressingly large part of our lifestyles is built on third-world slave labour, and if interstellar travel gets cheap and easy enough, we might end up seeing insane poo poo like sweatshop planets pumping out designer goods for the rest of their empire. Economies of scale! 
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Mar 29, 2016 23:39
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So I was looking for short stories that I could put on my Hugo nominations ballot and I came across General Battuta's "Please Undo This Hurt". While I thought it was pretty great, I'm not convinced that it's actually a science fiction or fantasy story. Can I get a second opinion on that?
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Mar 30, 2016 00:09
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MrSlam posted:I had an internet NERD explain to me how any trade between planets is unrealistic because colonies would have to be entirely self sufficient to begin with and the cost of putting poo poo on a rocket to take to Planet X would never be worth it except in the most dire of circumstances. Also, Venus is a poor example because it does have resources in abundance which most other planets don't, and it has some serious drawbacks which would make producing many things (such as wooden clocks) pretty tough. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 01:24
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Solitair posted:So I was looking for short stories that I could put on my Hugo nominations ballot and I came across General Battuta's "Please Undo This Hurt". While I thought it was pretty great, I'm not convinced that it's actually a science fiction or fantasy story. Can I get a second opinion on that?
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Mar 30, 2016 01:28
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Yeah you all make a fair point. And I should've started the conversation by saying his argument was part of a larger argument about how space pirates would never exist "In the real world." Which is kind of a dumb sentence to begin with
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Mar 30, 2016 01:43
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Solitair posted:So I was looking for short stories that I could put on my Hugo nominations ballot and I came across General Battuta's "Please Undo This Hurt". While I thought it was pretty great, I'm not convinced that it's actually a science fiction or fantasy story. Can I get a second opinion on that? I think it counts! The story's about the psychological effects of finding a process to 'opt out' of life, retroactively erasing yourself and all the harm you've ever done. I think one of the core missions of SF/F is to reify and play with our abstract fears and hopes — and man, if you've ever been depressed, you've probably wanted this kind of out now and then! What would the universe be like if that possibility existed? Who would be most likely to use it, and who'd get left behind? Also it's about how bad Arkham Horror is so I hope the entirety of TG will vote for it. The maggot incident in the story actually happened to a friend of mine 
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Mar 30, 2016 01:51
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Many people contemplate suicide after playing their first game of Arkham Horror.
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Mar 30, 2016 02:26
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RoboCicero posted:I mean, the story strongly implies the existence of non-human people who either talk to bugs, are bugs, or control bugs specifically setting up a way for people to commit the Perfect Suicide where they're literally removed from history as a way to silently kill off all the good people in the world so I'd say the shoe fits. There's been more magical realism lately where stuff is not gunswords and cyberzepplins and it's all good. Okay, see, it took me a while to realize what bugs you were talking about, and even then I chalked that up to a lovely coincidence or some sort of symptom of the main character's mental illness. I didn't connect the proliferation of maggots with the super-suicide hotline. It's actually not my favorite short story I've found so far, anyway. That would either be Monkey King, Faerie Queen or Things You Can Buy for a Penny. General Battuta posted:Also it's about how bad Arkham Horror is so I hope the entirety of TG will vote for it. Fun fact: When my brother and I first played Arkham Horror, we won because we accidentally cheated. We misunderstood how the dice rolls worked, and by the time we figured out what we were doing wrong, we were already more than halfway to satisfying one win condition, so what else could we do but keep going? I actually kind of like that game, but I still laughed once I figured out what you were referencing.
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Mar 30, 2016 02:31
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Solitair posted:Okay, see, it took me a while to realize what bugs you were talking about, and even then I chalked that up to a lovely coincidence or some sort of symptom of the main character's mental illness. I didn't connect the proliferation of maggots with the super-suicide hotline. In one of the older boardgame threads, there would be this recurring thing every hundred pages or so where people would start talking about AH and realize they had been playing it wrong the whole time because they missed a rule somewhere, it was pretty great.
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Mar 30, 2016 02:50
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General, my girlfriend and I just finished your Baru Coromant book and it was quite excellent. Really good writing and we'll eagerly lap up your next endeavour. Just one thing that is maybe more of a personal dislike more than anything else is when there's a lot of weird unpronounceable names for the sake of it. Some of them were fine like Taranoke or Falcrest or whatever, but when it got down to some names (especially a lot of the Duchy stuff) it was just kind of a jumble of words and neither of us could come to an agreement of how we pronounced any of them and realized we didn't even actually bother and just sort of read them as a label. How did you come up with them and was there any logic to how you came up with the names for a lot of your characters?
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Mar 30, 2016 03:04
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Just pronounce 'x' as 'sh' and most of them will be pretty easy to sort out. For example 'Lyxaxu' looks like gibberish but 'Lyshashu' is pretty easy. 'Unuxekome' is bad but 'Unushecomb' is hopefully okay! The names are built out of pools of roots that refer to concepts important to each source culture, like 'brine' or 'phalanx' or whatever. The Tu Maia have a pool, the Stakhi have a pool, old Iolynic has a pool, so on, and where the cultures overlap there's crossover. So you can actually see some of the patterns of conquest and intermingling on the map. I wish I'd anglicized them all so they were easy to say and talk about. I was too hung up on trying to give each culture a distinct aesthetic on the page.
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Mar 30, 2016 04:46
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General Battuta posted:Just pronounce 'x' as 'sh' and most of them will be pretty easy to sort out. For example 'Lyxaxu' looks like gibberish but 'Lyshashu' is pretty easy. 'Unuxekome' is bad but 'Unushecomb' is hopefully okay! I might only be speaking for myself, but this is the sort of poo poo I absolutely eat up, and would have loved to see discussed by characters in-story, or even just included at the end in an Appendix or 'Guide to Pronunciation'.
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Mar 30, 2016 05:19
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Ok cool, thanks. Makes more sense that way and yeah that'd have been interesting to know. We were debating on how Xate was supposed to be pronounced and couldn't decide if it was like "Kate" or "Zayte" or "Za-tay" or other variations. But yeah Unuxekome was probably the one we had the biggest problem for us since we were just like  the whole time. Most were fine/interesting and worked well though--I think it was just the Aurdwynn stuff that was really just like whaaat??, and maybe on a re-read those would click better.
Xaris fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 06:47
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