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Regarding The Nightmare Stacks: In Lockhart's defense, I don't think anyone will actually get upset at Scorpion Stare accidentally massacring a bunch anime fans. It seems pretty easy to sweep under the rug, their parents were probably a bit relieved to find out what happened.
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Jun 30, 2016 22:52
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I started rereading the laundry files and is it just me or are all of bobs managers villains except for angleton?
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Jul 1, 2016 09:40
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Azuth0667 posted:I started rereading the laundry files and is it just me or are all of bobs managers villains except for angleton?
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Jul 1, 2016 11:30
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anilEhilated posted:Laundry: in a world of eldritch horror, the true evil is HR. The thing I like most about "urban fantasy" as a genre is the realism.
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Jul 1, 2016 15:15
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Mars4523 posted:That makes no sense. They can order armed troops into a reconnaissance in force on British soil on the word of a 24 year old math geek who has been with the organization for 6 months, but that's not enough to close down the airspace and roads? Hell, you'd think that shutting down civilian traffic would be the prerequisite to sending a military force in to an area, on the grounds that they use the same roads. Nevermind that the Laundry is well aware that anything that can rip a dimensional portal into existence would also be incredibly lethal to un-warded civilians. I think it's easier and lower impact to get military assets rolling on a road than to shut down civil air traffic that has international implications and attracts international press attention that you can't shut down. And weren't the civilian roads actually being shut down around the same time? Obviously you call the military first so they can start spinning up and recalling people, then call to the police to clear roads and that coordination happens later. I don't quite see a way to issue wards or low level magic toys to soldiers. The Laundry seems to plan for two scales of conflict: (1) low level incursions handled by individual agents or small teams with potential OCCULUS support, and (2) large scale CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN type scenarios that they're going to fight with interdimensional nukes and huge basilisk gun networks (plus whatever else hasn't been revealed) and probably die anyway. Issuing wards to the Army won't help against CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, but will arguably blow the Laundry's secret cover and make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN more likely as people ask what the wards are (or steal and reverse engineer one) and then find out magic is real and start summoning eaters for fun and profit. Then that poo poo ends up on a wiki before you can take it down and you're done. So they have this capabilities gap in the middle that the military is apparently supposed to fill with conventional means with some backup from Laundry assets rather than full augmentation to Laundry capabilities across the board. What I want to know about wards is what the difference is between the different classes and what the risk/resource investment constraint is that keeps everyone from using the best available. I think Bob's standard wards tended to be something like class 2 or 3, the wards they picked up in this book en masse were class 6 (but Pinky was wearing a class 8 later?), and Angleton had those very special class 10 stickers in a book. Woke but broke fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jul 1, 2016 |
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Jul 1, 2016 20:26
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Woke but broke posted:I think it's easier and lower impact to get military assets rolling on a road than to shut down civil air traffic that has international implications and attracts international press attention that you can't shut down. Yeah. Shutting down civilian air traffic over London is a major event that alerts the entire world.
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Jul 1, 2016 20:40
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Khizan posted:Yeah. Shutting down civilian air traffic over London is a major event that alerts the entire world. The alternative, losing multiple civilian aircraft to ground fire, would draw far more international press attention. Although ordering an armored cav platoon into an reconnaissance in force, losing a fighter to air to air conflict, and mobilizing Challengers are all things that draw attention from the international press. Maybe wards need to be refreshed or maintained, but we've seen them to be relatively portable and compact. So I could have seen a smarter Laundry keeping a supply of them around in a secure warehouse where, if the CASE NIGHTMARE RED balloon ever went up, they could be mates to the responding army units. And if the event is resolved you can just take them back, like with solders' rifles. It doesn't make sense to be that the Laundry would create a contingency plan where army soldiers would fight extra dimensional threats without provisioning them with the tools to fight (or even look at and target) those threats. Mars4523 fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Jul 1, 2016 |
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Jul 1, 2016 20:49
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Mars4523 posted:It would be trivially easy to do if you wanted to keep a "low" profile, on the scale of invasions by extra dimensional hominids. Just declare that there is evidence that a terrorist group has acquired surface to air missiles and is believed to be in the area of Leeds, and civil air traffic must be diverted from the airspace for safety's sake. That will still draw international attention, but it's a matter of safety and not letting Nazi elves shoot down civilian airliners. That's an absurd story if you need to clear all airspace, not just takeoffs and landings, though. Airliners at cruise altitude can't be hit by MANPADS, you need multimillion dollar systems that have huge missiles on a truck, a separate radar truck, and at least half a dozen technically trained personnel. Like the Russian guys who shot down the Dutch plane over the Ukraine. You either claim alien invasion (one that you don't know even HAS any anti-air capability until it's too late) or a Russian air attack. I don't blame you for finding this fantasy stuff weird and unbelievable, you appear to have some weird and unbelievable ideas about how this works in reality.
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Jul 1, 2016 21:16
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Mars4523 posted:It would be trivially easy to do if you wanted to keep a "low" profile, on the scale of invasions by extra dimensional hominids. Just declare that there is evidence that a terrorist group has acquired surface to air missiles and is believed to be in the area of Leeds, and civil air traffic must be diverted from the airspace for safety's sake. That will still draw international attention, but it's a matter of safety and not letting Nazi elves shoot down civilian airliners. Eh. The minute you drop the "terrorists with missiles" story you are committing to it 100% almost regardless of what else happens. The only way you can get out of it is if the event is SO big that you can say "Okay we were lying it was eldritch horrors" and everybody will believe it. And that's a story with ridiculously huge complications. How did the missiles get in the country? How did they get caught? Who were they? What's being done about it? You have to falsify all of that stuff. And THEN you have to deal with the other stuff, too. Fox News screaming "ISLAMIC MILITANTS PLOT AGAINST AIRLINES OBUMMER DOES NOTHING". The hassles caused by rerouting planes from all over the world. Other countries going on terrorism alert. All that stuff. And that's the best case false alarm scenario. I wouldn't have done it. Much easier to just lie after the fact when you know what you're trying to cover up and can integrate everything into one story.
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Jul 2, 2016 00:37
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Reading the 2nd book for the first time and holy poo poo murphy is just utterly retarded and slow. Is she written like that on purpose or am i actually supposed to be thinking hmm she has totally justified suspicions
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Jul 2, 2016 21:23
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Not Al-Qaeda posted:Reading the 2nd book for the first time and holy poo poo murphy is just utterly retarded and slow. Is she written like that on purpose or am i actually supposed to be thinking hmm she has totally justified suspicions The first two, maybe 3, books are not that well written is mostly the answer. Nothing intentional about it. She gets a lot better (and badass) as the books progress--and a pretty big leap writing wise starting around book 4 if i recall.
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Jul 2, 2016 21:31
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Xaris posted:The first two, maybe 3, books are not that well written is mostly the answer. Nothing intentional about it. She gets a lot better (and badass) as the books progress--and a pretty big leap writing wise starting around book 4 if i recall. I'm gonna put it this way: 1. Read Storm Front. 2a. If you like Storm Front, read Fool Moon. 2b. If you don't like Storm Front, read Grave Peril. 3. Continue with Summer Knight. While Summer Knight is when Butcher finally comes into his own as a writer, Grave Peril sets up the first bits of the overarching plot for the rest of the series. (Fool Moon isn't really that necessary, beyond introducing the Alphas.)
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Jul 2, 2016 23:11
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I'll sum up the entirety of the important bits of Fool Moon and save you the trouble. "Dresden saves some werewolf college students and they become his friends"
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Jul 3, 2016 00:10
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Which is the one he said he wrote as a good jumping-on point? I think it was either Death Masks or Dead Beat but can't recall which one.
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Jul 3, 2016 00:22
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I think it was Dead Beat because I remember hearing the name and going "yeah the T-Rex scene is a good way to suck in new readers"
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Jul 3, 2016 01:23
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Wheat Loaf posted:Which is the one he said he wrote as a good jumping-on point? I think it was either Death Masks or Dead Beat but can't recall which one. I thought that was Grave Peril, what with the audio book introduction going on about it.
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Jul 3, 2016 10:22
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Is there any "Rural Fantasy"? I mean with settings in like the fens or the cotswalds with the protagonist dealing with harvest spirits that have been mechanised due to modern agriculture or something.
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Jul 3, 2016 17:42
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Geokinesis posted:Is there any "Rural Fantasy"? Silver John, and a lot of the other Manly Wade Wellman stories
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Jul 3, 2016 17:57
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Geokinesis posted:Is there any "Rural Fantasy"? I'd never even thought of this but this sounds totally like my poo poo.
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Jul 3, 2016 19:18
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Supernaturally is pretty rural fantasy in some of the early episodes
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Jul 3, 2016 20:59
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Geokinesis posted:Is there any "Rural Fantasy"? The Matthew Swift series is pretty much a universe where you would literally have that very thing happen with harvest spirits, and it even teases the possibilities of a rural setting briefly (literally the cotswalds iirc) in one book before leaving and never coming back, because magic, and magical beings, are shaped by a place and the people that live in it and their behaviors and beliefs, and the MC uses the magic of London which is as far from a rural countryside as you could imagine. I remember being disappointed we never got to see rural magic considering how interesting the weird city magic/folklore/creatures were in that series. That was honestly one of the more original urban fantasy series I've ever read. Edit : huh, I just discovered this author is a pseudonym for Claire North, the author who wrote The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, I'll have to actually read that. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jul 3, 2016 |
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Jul 3, 2016 22:06
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The latest Rivers of London was out in the sticks of rural England and pretty interesting for it, but it's only one book after like 5 London centered ones.
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Jul 3, 2016 23:20
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Weirdly, when I think rural contemporary fantasy what springs immediately to mind is more horror stuff like Stephen King. That may be a side effect of having grown up in rural Maine myself and interpreting those books less as outright horror and more King visiting supernatural vengeance on the most grating and obnoxious stereotypes of rural dwellers. Off the top of my head, Tom Deitz wrote a trilogy called the Soul Smith Tales in the 90s that dealt with a family in rural Georgia who had strange powers that mutated and changed from generation to generation. Kind of strange Appalachian folk magic influenced by European hedge witches and the cunning folk tradition that immigrants brought over with them. I haven't read it since I was a young teenager and I can't promise that it's held up well at all though. Charles de Lint is about half an half rural and urban. I know he's most popular for the Newford books and anthologies but quite a few of those take place outside of the city proper. Moonwood and Spiritwalk are about refugees from Ireland bringing hints of their magic along with them when they fled their homeland, and that power interacting strangely with the native energies already entrenched in the forests around Ottawa. They're some of the few books I've seen that approach Native American folklore with respect and a delicate touch, IIRC de Lint worked closely with actual First Nations scholars and elders when he was fleshing out how the magic of the setting worked. Not something you saw a lot of in the 80s and early 90s. More recently but in a similar vein Alex Bledsoe's Tufa novels have been overall pretty good. Incredibly insular Tennessee town where the inhabitants may or may not harbor supernatural powers and serve as the guardians of the darkest places in the wilderness, and one of their number returns from deployment in Iraq and finds herself having a harder time settling back in to the old ways than she did exploring the newer world outside of the mountain town. The series has a few weak points but overall it was quite good and the first novel (The Hum and the Shiver) served well enough as a standalone.
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Jul 4, 2016 01:24
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Mandragora posted:Off the top of my head, Tom Deitz wrote a trilogy called the Soul Smith Tales in the 90s that dealt with a family in rural Georgia who had strange powers that mutated and changed from generation to generation. Kind of strange Appalachian folk magic influenced by European hedge witches and the cunning folk tradition that immigrants brought over with them. I haven't read it since I was a young teenager and I can't promise that it's held up well at all though. Are those the books where one of the guys in the family used the first three songs he heard on the radio every day as a sort of Tarot? I loved Tom Deitz when I was in my teens, but like you, I have no idea how his stuff holds up.
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Jul 4, 2016 01:35
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docbeard posted:Are those the books where one of the guys in the family used the first three songs he heard on the radio every day as a sort of Tarot? Yeah, I think that was from that trilogy. The guy in the battered old truck who'd tune in at sunrise and plan his daily routine around the secret meaning of the songs. There was a lot of strange music/bardic stuff in there, if I remember right.
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Jul 4, 2016 03:02
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Not novels, but Ursula Vernon writes some rural fantasy/folk magic stuff as T. Kingfisher (http://tkingfisher.com/?page_id=86). Specifically "Pocosin", "The Jackalope Wives", and "The Tomato Thief" come to mind.
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Jul 4, 2016 08:38
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Geokinesis posted:Is there any "Rural Fantasy"? The most recent rivers of london book is set in the country and has a city boy fish out of water thing going on. Foxglove Summer.
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Jul 5, 2016 01:27
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Geokinesis posted:Is there any "Rural Fantasy"? Not exactly fantasy because they're aliens, but Zenna Henderson's "The People" stories are about country-folk with strange powers. Dated as hell but still cool.
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Jul 5, 2016 01:44
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navyjack posted:Not exactly fantasy because they're aliens, but Zenna Henderson's "The People" stories are about country-folk with strange powers. Dated as hell but still cool. 
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Jul 5, 2016 02:01
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I'm from Ottawa and I'm a huge Charles De Lint fan. I really recommend checking his stuff out. The Jack the Giant Killer stories have all been assembled into a novel now, I think, and that's a great place to start!
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Jul 5, 2016 17:10
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Blasphemeral posted:Yes. Do not listen to it, though. It's all-captials BAD. I've been listening to the Worm audiobook and have enjoyed it so far. It's certainly not professional grade, but the main two guys do a good job, as well as a couple of the one-offs. There was one segment I listened to recently that was just god awful though.
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Jul 5, 2016 20:13
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Louis L'amore, of all people, wrote a contemporary fantasy novel called Haunted Mesa. Its very rural. Almost desolate, really, as it's set in the American southwest. It's one of my favorite novels. It's got a lot of Western tropes, sure. But don't let that stop you. It builds a feeling of dread and mystery that few authors can match.
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Jul 6, 2016 02:45
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ConfusedUs posted:Louis L'amore, of all people, wrote a contemporary fantasy novel called Haunted Mesa. Its very rural. Almost desolate, really, as it's set in the American southwest. Yeah, I bought a hardback of this a year or so ago because I still remembered reading it as a child. It's a weird but solid book.
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Jul 6, 2016 17:43
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navyjack posted:Not exactly fantasy because they're aliens, but Zenna Henderson's "The People" stories are about country-folk with strange powers. Dated as hell but still cool. Tuck Everlasting is a classic too.
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Jul 7, 2016 02:51
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mastajake posted:I've been listening to the Worm audiobook and have enjoyed it so far. It's certainly not professional grade, but the main two guys do a good job, as well as a couple of the one-offs... The reason I always tell people to skip the audio book, is because everyone I've met that says it's "not bad" or "pretty listenable" already read and really enjoyed Worm. So they already know the story, they already know what they're getting. I seriously suspect that the few flaws in Worm will be compounded by hearing it for the first time while listening to Amateur Hour at Local Radio perform it in single-take. And I say this as someone who read for amateur hour at local radio while back in University. Like, I love audio books, and I think my love of the Dresden Files was taken to even greater heights by listening to James Marsters read it my second time through, but audios can be a double-edged sword. mastajake posted:... There was one segment I listened to recently that was just god awful though. Imagine if someone was on the fence about it and then heard of of these chapters. Would they bother going to the website and trying to figure out what chapter they were on and then start consuming in a different format? Or would they just put it down, do you think? And when they put it down, do you think they would have positive things to say to their friends about it? Just read it, folks. Really. It's a great series. Blasphemeral fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Jul 7, 2016 |
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Jul 7, 2016 14:10
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I just finished Worm too though not nearly as quickly. It was good though I'm wondering a bit why Contessa went with Teacher at the end. Maybe she's a follower not a leader? Really hope the author can get it edited and published soon cus there are some parts that could be quite a bit better
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Jul 17, 2016 05:19
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I picked up Harmony Black by Craig Schafer. Where does it take place in the Daniel Faust cannon?
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Jul 17, 2016 14:21
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After the most recent installment.
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Jul 17, 2016 14:27
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owl milk posted:I just finished Worm too though not nearly as quickly. It was good though I'm wondering a bit why Contessa went with Teacher at the end. Maybe she's a follower not a leader? This is it exactly Contessa got completely hosed up mentally when she got her shard. Any time that she's not using it or get countered by it, she gets wracked by indecision. Hence when all of her plans went tits up when the Irregulars attacked Cauldron, she jumped on board the first person to offer her stability, even if it wasn't healthy for her. berenzen fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Jul 18, 2016 |
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Jul 18, 2016 02:05
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Quote is not edit.
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Jul 18, 2016 02:08
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