gradenko_2000 posted:

This was me, except with the Star Wars EU.

Mammals that can suppress the force
A literal clone of Luke Skywalker
A Jedi that got so good at the force that she was able to extract poisonous nanites from Mon Mothma
A warrior-assassin race that served Darth Vader out of gratitude for keeping their planet barely alive, except the robots that were "fertilizing" the soil were actually keeping it deader than it should have been
A new superweapon that could destroy entire star systems by detonating stars, hidden inside a secret base in the middle of a cluster of black holes

All very cool to younger me, until I got older and got to the Yuuzhan Vong and went "hey, they're not even really fighting the Empire anymore, what gives?"

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Let's look at the comments for the story, shall we?

Max posted:

You should all be aware that Chuck Tingle is now an official Hugo Award Finalist for Best Short Story, "Space Raptor Butt Invasion."

http://midamericon2.org/home/hugo-awards-and-wsfs/2016-hugo-finalists/

Antivehicular posted:

I just read this story, and oh my God, how are people this angry about this? It's just tribalism, right? Nobody is legitimately arguing in good faith that this story is bad enough to destroy fantasy fiction, right?

Antivehicular posted:

I just read this story, and oh my God, how are people this angry about this? It's just tribalism, right? Nobody is legitimately arguing in good faith that this story is bad enough to destroy fantasy fiction, right?

DStecks posted:

I thought the Hugo nomination process was supposed to have been fixed so this couldn't happen again?

James Garfield posted:

I like how they are saying "gin-soaked" is racist.
Since when does the stereotypical blue-collar white dude drink gin?

Tracula posted:

Nerds get mad about everything.

James Garfield posted:

I like how they are saying "gin-soaked" is racist.
Since when does the stereotypical blue-collar white dude drink gin?

Tracula posted:

Nerds are also mad about Fury Road because it focuses on a one armed woman, sex slaves and badass battle grannies with the help of just two kinda useful men literally destroying the patriarchy.

Kulkasha posted:

I'd argue that they were more than "kinda" useful, and that everyone who isn't Immortan Joe is getting shat on; the movie is more about how power structures utilize a patriarchic image to co-opt lower class males into suppressing themselves and women against their own obvious interests, which makes the nerd-rage over femnazis that much more hilarious, because they are implicitly falling for Immortan Joe's lies. This seems to be endemic of MRAs - they would rather chew off their own feet than admit that it is, in fact, the old rich men who are loving them and not the opposite sex.

Kulkasha posted:

I'd argue that they were more than "kinda" useful, and that everyone who isn't Immortan Joe is getting shat on; the movie is more about how power structures utilize a patriarchic image to co-opt lower class males into suppressing themselves and women against their own obvious interests, which makes the nerd-rage over femnazis that much more hilarious, because they are implicitly falling for Immortan Joe's lies. This seems to be endemic of MRAs - they would rather chew off their own feet than admit that it is, in fact, the old rich men who are loving them and not the opposite sex.

Lamprey Cannon posted:

Oh god yes. To quote the OP (and myself):



This isn't even including the fact that the finale, the climactic sendoff to the thousand pages of Gentry Lee's writing, the payoff to the mystery of the builders of the cylinders and their true purpose, is literally 'God did it'. No pussyfooting around the issue, just 'God did it. Here's a video recording of the Big Bang, and of this station (where the cylinders were built and are coordinated from) popping into existence a microsecond later. Hope you enjoyed!'.

grittyreboot posted:

I finished Ready Player One about a week ago. Read most of it in two big sit downs. The whole thing reads like a YA novel with f-bombs thrown in to make it seem more adult.

What I don't think anyone else touched on is that the stated moral of the story is that you shouldn't rely on escapist fantasies. This is thrown in at the very end after the main character wins billions of dollars based on his encyclopedic knowledge of escapist fantasy. The darker implications of everyone in the world relying on a virtual world to live their life is so lightly grazed upon that I feel it was a publisher note that Cline begrudgingly added in as an afterthought.

Really, Ernest Cline wrote a Tumblr-esque treatise on why fandom is the most important aspect of any person's life. No one is rewarded for having an original thought. No one in the book ever makes anything of their own, they just steal from the people that had the imagination and drive to create something unique. I once laughed out loud because the main character ironically criticized the bad guys as having no imagination. Pot, meet kettle.

gradenko_2000 posted:

This was me, except with the Star Wars EU.
Mammals that can suppress the force
A literal clone of Luke Skywalker

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Named Luuke.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71VFzClEoG0

Davros1 posted:

These are from what are considered to be the "best" EU novels, which included an admiral who could determined his opponent's battle strategies by studying their art.


Most of the EU read like rejected SF novels that simply used search and replace to turn characters and things into SW characters and object.

Page 76 posted:

The moronic sentries began to brawl their way to their concealed spot. Luckily, they tackled each other away before coming too close. Alas, Thargon walloped his opponent away into a cluster of waiting sentries, knocking him unconscious against a wall of scales. When it was clear that the amphiptere was not going to rise, the spectators rallied and stomped on the defeated unit, shattering the little glory it once had. All the while, their animalistic grunts drew forth yet another visitor.

A vast shadow swept over the hovering water like an eclipse of draconic form. The dark umbra of Drekkenoth soared to the center of the gathering, lightless as it was haunting. Silence befell the inhabitants as they watched the sable flames flare across the sky, neutral and ghastly in their heat's aloof lordliness. The king descended from above, reflecting his blackened fires against the rippling surface of the airborne body of water. Ebony light streamed over all the sentries of Drakemight.

Page 131 posted:

"You're not taking damage," said Dennagon perplexed.

"The Elemental will not harm us lest we wield our weapons," answered Ballaxior.

A silver flame breezed across them. Mingled with it were infernos of red, blue and green.

"Another oddity. My head is beginning to spin. How can these fires be induced without any substance to ignite them?"

"Who says anything requires an origin?"

"Science," he declared mightily. "Causality is the base of all things, so everything requires an origin. Everything has a meaning." He furrowed his scaly brow. "If you are so sagacious, shouldn't you know these things already?"

Ballaxior chuckled wholeheartedly.

"There are many things in life that 'shouldn't' be, but exist nonetheless."

Page 252 posted:

A plasma shot was fired, busting straight through Gorgash's robo-head and detonating it in a computerized explosion. The behemoth skull erupted into cyborg parts that integrated both brains and CPUs, flinging cerebellum fragments everywhere. Decapitated, the colossal carcass of sinew and hulky steel fell onto the floor, crushing all the corpses beneath it in an immense quake. All fifty tons of the cadaver became cold and still, twitching only with the remnants of cybernetic code that tried to find a purpose for existing.

Drekkenoth squinted his eyes, not out of anger, but of indifferent strategic planning. Without even saying a word, he sent the Technoknights to inundate the draconic target. Lyconel wrathfully hurtled her weapon at them with what little energy she had left albeit she knew she could not defeat them. Expeditiously, they flooded her in a tide of humanity, stabbing her a hundred times with their swords so as only to injure her. Her blood was a menial addition to the gore-blanketed courtyard, but it was enough to drain her of her consciousness. She fell as motionless as the creature she had valorously slain, life still beating through her hacked and mangled body.

Great blurb or greatest blurb? posted:

During the eon that most classify as the Middle Ages, rifts in time allowed the vile humans to tap into temporal flow and summon future technologies and prehistoric beasts. Desiring control over the World, evil dragon king Drekkenoth operated under the hominids to corrupt the minds of all dragons with the venom of knowledge. The only thing that stood in his way was the one true source of omniscience - the tome called the Lexicon.

Dennagon, a draconic sentry, has spent his lifetime in search of wisdom for the purpose of answering one question: Is the Lexicon real? So great is his ability to collect knowledge that he is ostracized from his collective and forced to join a band of dissident dragons that are hunted by mechanized cyborg Technodragons of the 25th century enhanced. After destroying several of the enemy human cohorts, Dennagon faces off against the bizarre robotic serpents and gradually learns that time is not as stable as he thought. Along with his comrades, he battles through many adversaries and enigmatic challenges in the everlasting quest for omniscience. Little does he suspect, however, that there is more to life than knowledge, and mysteries beyond that which omniscience can answer.

posted:

Dennagon nonchalantly dropped down from his perched position to the ground. Without even taking his eyes off his book, he casually thrust his fist out, punching a hole straight through the head of one of his enemies as it charged. The decapitated body still hanging off his forearm, he merely shifted his fist to the side so that the others could run into it. Expectedly, they did, blasting apart their own skulls against his scaly knuckles.

posted:

The Technorealm Mainframe was a tremendous cylindrical tower that scraped the limitless heavens of total darkness. An enormous screen wrapped around its radius, founded upon a prodigious control panel that was studded with keypads and buttons. Dennagon had no idea what to make of it, what with all its alien symbols like "Alt", "Ctrl" and "F5", yet he surmised that its familiar icons of the alphabet were used to cast spells. Perhaps finally, those spells would allow him to understand what this mysterious "technology" really meant in the tides of his reality so that he could make sense of everything that was going on. Standing on the edge of the panel, he awaited Shevinoth's speech, still locked in disbelief that the draconic legend was still alive, let alone in his presence at the moment. Maybe if it were a dream, it would be more acceptable to his rationale...

Shevinoth pressed a switch next to Dennagon. A smaller control panel rose from the smooth, glossy floor, positioning itself in front of his skeletal claws. Rattling the bony digits across the tinier keypad, he caused the keys on the grander control panel to move. He then touched a button marked with an emblem composed of a zero spliced with a one, activating the mainframe screen. It displayed the words "Starting: Windows 1200 AD".

posted:

Yet, there were explosives everywhere. Dennagon only saw one option. Stolidly thinking, he contemplated the factors of his situation as variables that could be translated into pure mathematics. Judging by the heat, the wavelength of the light was about 5 × 10^-7 meters and its frequency was 4 × 10¹⁴ Hertz. However, it was moving through the prism at a slower speed, and he estimated by the degree of the heat that the velocity was 2 × 10⁸ meters per second inside the glass. That meant that the index of refraction was about 1.5, and that if he wanted to bring the light together, he would need an index of 1.

quote:

Astinor: A gargantuan terrabiological organism that posits itself upon the World's surface. It acts like living terrain, consisting of mountainous fangs, hairy plains, and fleshy forests. Feeding off the World's wisdom, it helps to maintain a balance between the consumption and processing of data, and is usually harmless to smaller organisms like dragons, thunderbirds, krakens, and humans. No one knows why it exists, but some scribes theorize that an extraterrestrial consciousness might have been at hand.

quote:

Dragon: Dragons are the most superior of all races in the mediaeval realm. As hated as they are mighty, they are often portrayed in myths as mindless beasts meant to be slain by knights, thunderbirds, and such; however, in reality, they have made the most accomplishments in terms of aesthetics, sorcery, warfare and philosophy in the World. No one truly knows of their origins, but many scribes declare that they were forged by the one without a name in a time beyond reckoning. At the "present time" they are primarily amassed in the kingdom Drakemight in a social order known as the collective. The king Drekkenoth is the leader of this collective, although there are still others who dissent from his command.

quote:

Humans: Sometimes portrayed as mighty, other times depicted as evil, the humans are a species of dual nature. However, their vileness spans much farther than the stereotypical descriptions of many fantasy novels in the mediaeval realm. They are the diadems of avarice, the heralds of doom to all intelligent species. It is they who intend to destroy all knowledge of the World and secure total control over time for the sake of fulfilling all their horrid desires. To help accomplish this task, they have been breeding a new weapon called the sapiens.

quote:

Mediaeval, Daemonhand: A skeleton warrior whose legend is so timeless that it has no bounds in eon or age. Once a human knight, he fought to keep the Gateway to time shut, but was slain and reborn as an undead 100 billion years into the future. Afterwards, he found the living sword known as Demonsword and battled against the Black Technoknight Uther Penn Sapien to prevent humanity from seizing total control of the World. According to myth, there was no end for him, but rather his journey itself became an everlasting conclusion to his existence. "The purpose of one's life journey is not the end. It is the journey itself."

quote:

Scribe: A cloaked, faceless scrivener that wanders the World spreading vile poetry and telling morbid tales of a coming apocalypse. He believes that because a multiverse is the only realm that must always exist by decree of logic, the pursuit of perfection must be the meaning of life. Thus does he spend his eons trying to craft stories that are ideal - ones that elicit ultimate bliss for a main character via the strategic placement of events, conflicts, characters and emotions along space and time (spacetime being the fabric of a story, which can be viewed as a worldline). Some say that he can travel through a multiverse and that his myths are actually created from the fragments of different realities, but no one truly knows what this cryptic wordsmith really wants. All they know is that everything he says revolves around one concept: "The attainment of perfection will be the end of all life."

Sham bam bamina! posted:

...the tome called the Lexicon.

flosofl posted:

So... a dictionary?

quote:

I have already received about 10 racist remarks in the past three months and I have only been out of my home a handful of times.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

I had thought that this had been posted already, but I guess not. Well, better late than never. My all-time favorite terrible book:

Tiggum posted:

I kind of want to read this, but I'm not sure it would stay as funny for the length of an entire book.

AlphaKretin posted:

Does that comma mean what I think it means? Is that skeleton warrior named Daemonhand Mediaeval?

pages 266-7 posted:

Drekkenoth clenched his fist again, wrapping his claws smoothly around his palm in a balled set of knuckles. The transient fiery diagram of the World evanesced and in its place, the image of a human skeleton warrior took shape. It was equipped with plates of tattered gold armor, pieces of the uniform that it had seemingly worn through countless ages of battle. A sword dangled in its undead hands that used to be encased in a carbon-based sac of human flesh, resting beside a shield that was locked onto its double-pronged bone forearm. A helm guarded its face, yet it didn't matter, for there was no face on its exposed skull to protect and no identity that could be drawn from its visage to place it in danger. Not even Lyconel, who was a whelp familiar with the countless heroes of the World's myths and histories, could recognize the being. Somehow, though, it did carry an air of importance.

"Have you ever heard the tale of Sir Daemonhand Mediaeval?" inquired Drekkenoth. "The human that aforesaid his mortality for the sake of omnikind?"

quote:

... a carbon-based sac of human flesh

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Mr. Chainsaw posted:

The worst book I've read is Exquisite Corpse. I bought it on a whim after someone I knew said it was their favorite. Not sure what I expected when the premise is "serial killer romance", but I put it down when I realized it wasn't going to be anything beyond fanfiction-tier gay erotica between edgy torture scenes. I thought about donating the book but I don't want to inflict it on anyone else honestly, so its still on my shelf.

dirksteadfast posted:

Isn't "exquisite corpse" the name of a sort of improv exercise between writers/artists adding onto each other's work? I wonder if that factors into how the book was written.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

what the hell are you doing in this thread?

John Big Booty posted:

Not very likely. What factored most into the writing of the book was "can I write something more homoerotic and grossly goth than Anne Rice?"

It's not a complete dealbreaker, but if you see Poppy Z. Brite on someone's bookshelf, definitely consider that a factor."