|
Brass Key posted:I can't remember what the first one was, but the other two were King Rat and Germinal. Made weirder by the one being an ~exotic~ chieftain's daughter that he sneaks out of a prison camp to sleep with and the other being an underfed coal-mine worker who dresses like a boy (and yet he can see her "womanly softness" through her clothes or something?). I loved Shogun (even with it's problems), and I've got a couple more of Clavell's so-called "Asian Saga" on the shelf. Glad King Rat isn't one of them, but now I do't know even if I should bother.
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 16:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 00:34 |
|
|
I was home for holidays and enjoyed a lot of rubbish fantasy - first, books by Paul S. Kemp from Forgotten Realms series about resurrection of Lolth. I remember this series being the best of the Forgotten Realms ones, but it's all so cringeworthy. Main characters constantly cast the most powerful spells they have, don't trust anybody and don't turn their back to anyone. This is made additionally hilarious with the entire D&D system not being translatable to polish, where bugbears and umber hulks are translated, but beholders are not (and for very good reason, as it sounds just stupid). But there are these constant moments where main heroes have these internal monologues about - oh, this [name] bring so powerful, it's not possible to defeat them, oh they are actually not that powerful, oh, they are actually very powerful, oh, they're not. Even more stupid were MtG books, though I don't remember them at all to ridicule. The other one I read was by polish author - Andrzej Pilipiuk. I constantly had a feeling of deja vu, as if his stories were inspired by other. For example - there is this story where main character tries to find an origin of a book-box, which evoked strong comparison to Gibsons Spook Country, or the story about vampires in the arctic, similar to Dead Snow. But the infuriating thing about the stories was that they didn't lead anywhere. The main character finds a perpetuum-mobile and destroys it, nothing happens. The main character finds a mechanisms, renovates it, it turns out to be a music box, nothing happens. Main character helps students that awoke said vampires, nothing happens. There's no resolution, no reasoning behind the story. Also, one story is about salami made of special breed of donkeys, that turns out to be reimagination of Pinokio, which ends to be a tragical clash of ideas. I hate-read his books, but my brother loves them and always recommends one when I come to visit.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 16:07
|
|
|
canis minor posted:But the infuriating thing about the stories was that they didn't lead anywhere Does anyone else remember that book of ghost stories that some goon picked up in a small town in Japan years ago, and all the stories were like that? There was this whole thread about it. Every single one would be like "there is a box in this man's house that has never been opened... The end. OOoooOooo!"
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 17:28
|
|
|
WeaponGradeSadness posted:I'm not a big sci-fi fan at all but from my fairly limited experience with the genre, unnecessary weird sex scenes and asides about how bad religion is that have nothing to do with anything both seem to be staples of the genre. It's a fault with genre fiction generally, where strange foibles and fetishes are ignored or even expected by fans, who will defend prosaic writing with "oh but the characters are interesting" or "the world is so fascinating" or even worse "but the story has potential". Fans of genre - be it SF, horror or crime - want the literary equivalent of comfort food. I once heard it described as "commodity fiction", it's like bread, they're going to buy it anyway.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 18:05
|
|
|
By default the worst book I've read lately is an art book called Pre-Raphaelites by K.E. Sullivan (in the obscure Discovering Art series). It's the worst because the author has also written the ominously-titled Alternate Remedies (impossible to track down), so I feel queasy with this innocuous book. e: This was actually be supposed to go in Book Barn but eh BravestOfTheLamps has a new favorite as of 21:38 on Jul 24, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 18:36
|
|
|
Action Tortoise posted:is this what garth mahrengi is supposed to be mocking? Partially, though he's as much of a Guy N. Smith parody as he is a Stephen King parody, which a lot of people miss.  Speaking of, someone should read Guy N. Smith's prodigious output and see if it's all as funny as that one book about killer crabs.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 18:59
|
|
|
Smith wrote multiple crab books, I'll have you know.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 19:09
|
|
|
Speaking of killer crab books, I read the three Clickers books. The basic idea is that they're B-Movies in book form, and the first two are enjoyable enough. The first one is by J.F. Gonzalez and Mark Williams, and starts with a storm in a small, East Coast town that brings up these killer crab/lobster things that attack. Their claws can tear a person apart and they have these stingers like a scorpion except the venom will melt the victims into goo. That's the first half. Then it turns out that the Clickers are basically the advance force of the "Dark Ones," basically the Deep Ones from Lovecraft. Much like the types of movies it's inspired by, it introduces a lot of characters who die shortly thereafter. However, the movies will generally eventually get down to a handful of characters and focus. In Clickers, there's one bit that stands out to me because the final characters are all trapped in a freezer in a grocery store, and then it spends a chapter focusing on this lesbian couple and their kids on a trip? Then the book jumps back to the characters in the grocery store, the new characters drive into town and are immediately killed by the Dark Ones and Clickers. That's it, they don't affect the story at all and this is a handful of chapters from the end. It's still a reasonably entertaining book, but it's not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, like a half-well made Syfy Channel movie. It was J.F. Gonzalez's first book so you kinda give it some slack, because with a bit more polish you could see it being a surprisingly good Syfy Channel movie. The second one is by J.F. Gonzalez and Brian Keene (Mark Williams died in-between books) and is about the Dark Ones launching a full scale assault on the surface world with these huge-rear end Clickers that can shoot acid. It turns out that the government has covered up the events of the first book and the survivors are in hiding. Also the president is a religious nutjob (it was published in 2007, and has several references to Hurricane Katrina). It introduces several new characters, like the low-level mobsters and the Secret Service agent. The book's weird. The main male character of the first book is back and gets raped by a guy and during the scene has an internal monologue about how he has gay friends who aren't rapists? I'm not sure how these collaborative novels are made, but it feels like one of the authors tossed it in, and the other guy was like "huh, that could come across as somewhat offensive, let's try to soften it a bit" instead of trying to cut it? At the end one of the mobsters is dead, the Secret Service agent murders the president, but other than that everyone makes it and the invasion is repelled. Like I said, it's a weird novel but it kinda feels like the authors are warming up to each other, almost like it's more of a test run and that their next novel together will be much better. Unfortunately the next one is Clickers III: Dagon Rising and it is poop. Like, the previous two were never going to be on a list of great novels, but there was something to enjoy there in-between the weirdness and clunky storytelling, you can definitely call them guilty pleasures. Here, again, it's J.F. Gonzalez and Brian Keene, except this time it's like they wanted to do a low-budget Lovecraft knock-off instead of a killer crab book but weren't allowed to. There's two parts to the story. Part of it takes place on a South Pacific island, with the female survivor of the first book (mentioned but unseen in the second) is with some research group. Turns out that this island is a sacred site for the Dark Ones, and the local populace worships them. The Dark Ones are planning on opening up a portal deep below the island to awaken their god and destroy humanity. After the Dark Ones attack, the surviving scientists are helped out by some of the helpful natives and they attempt to escape. Meanwhile, the Secret Service agent from the last book is in hiding because his wife is having an affair with a senator or something that knows he killed the president and is trying to open an investigation. He and the surviving mobster from the second book are captured by magical Men in Black to go to the island and stop the Dark Ones' ritual because the mobster has some kind of magical powers or something? I honestly forget. That doesn't sound like too bad of a setup, honestly. Unfortunately, nothing happens. The mobster and the agent? About a quarter of the book is before they get their mission from the magical MIB, half of it is on a plane to the island, and the final quarter actually on the island. The other characters are running around in dark tunnels the entire time just barely dodging Dark One patrols but it somehow manages to make the entire thing boring. A couple characters get caught, I think there's a heroic sacrifice but I can't remember, and it's all so... dull. I honestly have no idea how it could have happened, it's like they published an early draft and anything exciting was supposed to get added in later. Closing the portal at the end is done within a couple pages and is so anticlimactic that you'd think it was a fake-out if it weren't so close to the end. The mobster and the female lead hook up? There's barely any reasoning to it, it just gets mentioned at the end when the main character of the first two books shows up for denouement exposition and suggests that there are giant ants attacking the Southwest. Honestly, I would have preferred to read about that instead, the series is at its best when it's a bloody monster book. Instead we got a poor mashup of that and the worst of the Lovecraft pastiches. Brian Keene has a series called The Rising, which I guess is an Evil Dead-styled zombie novel, and there's a fourth Clickers book that's a crossover with it in an alternate universe where the Dark Ones are never mentioned. I have to admit, I'm tempted to pick it up because surely it must be more interesting than the third one but gently caress, I'm sure there's better things to spend my money on.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 21:29
|
|
|
Mouse Dresser posted:Edit: Have you ever Spite-Read a book? Like, you have to finish it to know if you correctly predicted the loving stupid ending? I Hate-Read this book. Every other page turn was met with "Are you loving KIDDING me?" The Everything Box by Richard Kadrey. I realized I hated it about 200 pages in when the gritty noir cop and the gritty noir PI argued about how Daffy Duck was a Warner Brothers property, not Disney. It's supposed to be comedy but it didn't land for me at all. Most of the dialogue just sounded like that frequently-quoted part of Ready Player One where the two nerds talk about laserdiscs of Ladyhawke. I finished it in the hope that I would start to "get it" and start to find the characters funny. I didn't.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 02:04
|
|
|
I had a pretty spiteful weekend when a friend forced me to read her favorite new book, The Hunger Games.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 02:30
|
|
|
Sham bam bamina! posted:I had a pretty spiteful weekend when a friend forced me to read her favorite new book, The Hunger Games. I liked the movie but the book was badly written enough that I couldn't get past the first few pages.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 02:35
|
|
|
It seriously reads like the first draft of something on FictionPress.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 02:40
|
|
|
Domus posted:Eh, he may not have committed, but it's a key trope of the western. At least he took out the part where she was going to get gang raped, but kill all her rapists because she took poison that made having sex with her fatal. Kushiel Series, Sherwood Smith's Satorias-deles books, or Nightrunner Series. The first probably veers closer to idealized than you want, but all of them do what stuff like Firefly tends to fail at: make sex work a respectable profession you can take pride in by setting it in the context of a culture with different sexual mores than what we have now. Mal and most of the rest of the crew hold pretty standard views on prostitution for our time, regardless of how legal or prevalent it is in their world. Back on topic. I'm reading Mona Lisa Awakening by Sunny for a book group. The writer was mentored by Laurel K. Hamilton and Anne Bishop (wrote the Black Jewels series) It's about a secret race of Moon people living on earth who are ruled by queens and have magic powers like glowing when they gently caress. It is full of lines like this quote:So do you not see that the slower one's heart beats, the longer one lives? A hummingbird's heart beats more than three hundred times per minute and they live briefly, gloriously, for one year. A turtle, on the other hand, possesses a rhythm closer to mine. It is not unusual for them to see two hundred, sometimes even three hundred years of life.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 03:34
|
|
|
quote:A hummingbird's heart beats more than three hundred times per minute and they live briefly, gloriously, for one year.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 05:31
|
|
|
What about lobsters?
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 05:44
|
|
|
spite house posted:1.4 seconds on Wikipedia reveals that this isn't even sort of true. Jesus. None of it's true. No turtle has ever lived to 300 years. No vertebrate has ever lived that long. Also the correlation between heart rate and lifespan is superficial at best, and totally inapplicable to humans since we are extreme outliers on the trend. Buried in in this novel is a much better book about moon-people who live 300+ years because they have similarly enhanced their lifespans via artificial means AND they live in very cold places and hibernate a lot.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 06:23
|
|
|
HopperUK posted:I can't remember if I've bitched about this before in this thread but nothing ruins an otherwise-decent scifi book for me more than the author's dick just slapping itself all over the page. It's not even that egregious, it's just something that annoys me to no end. I tried to read the Uplift trilogy and then the first time a woman appears, on like page four or something, the book immediately drools all over the swimsuit she's wearing like, gently caress offffff outlier posted:It's a fault with
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 06:26
|
|
|
Tiggum posted:FTFY. are you trying to be clever
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 08:29
|
|
|
Tiggum posted:FTFY. Sorry someone pointed out that your favourite kind of fiction gets away with a lot of lovely writing
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 08:38
|
|
|
It's not "genre fiction" that's bad, it's bad fiction that's bad. Some of it is "genre fiction", some of it isn't.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 09:12
|
|
|
canis minor posted:The other one I read was by polish author - Andrzej Pilipiuk. I constantly had a feeling of deja vu, as if his stories were inspired by other. For example - there is this story where main character tries to find an origin of a book-box, which evoked strong comparison to Gibsons Spook Country, or the story about vampires in the arctic, similar to Dead Snow. But the infuriating thing about the stories was that they didn't lead anywhere. The main character finds a perpetuum-mobile and destroys it, nothing happens. The main character finds a mechanisms, renovates it, it turns out to be a music box, nothing happens. Main character helps students that awoke said vampires, nothing happens. There's no resolution, no reasoning behind the story. Also, one story is about salami made of special breed of donkeys, that turns out to be reimagination of Pinokio, which ends to be a tragical clash of ideas. Is he also the dude that wrote a short story that is a beat by beat retelling of a Silent Hill plot, down to the title being just a polish translation of Silent Hill? I feel like polish sci-fi has recently degenerated into endlessly regurgitating vidya game plots and steampunk. The entire business model of Fabryka Słów publishing house seems to be to poo poo as many of these turds out a year as humanly possible.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 09:15
|
|
|
Somfin posted:Sorry someone pointed out that your favourite kind of fiction gets away with a lot of lovely writing If there's any place at which genre fiction and literary fiction meet, it's over-praised old men subjecting audiences to weird stuff about sex and women.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 09:48
|
|
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:Partially, though he's as much of a Guy N. Smith parody as he is a Stephen King parody, which a lot of people miss. This looks so stupid I know what to read next
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 09:54
|
|
|
Tiggum posted:It's not "genre fiction" that's bad, it's bad fiction that's bad. Some of it is "genre fiction", some of it isn't.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 09:59
|
|
|
hackbunny posted:This looks so stupid I know what to read next
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 10:12
|
|
|
Sham bam bamina! posted:Outlier's post was about the specific fan bias that lets SF get away with particularly revolting sexuality, but you're welcome to eliminate all but the coarsest distinction of "bad" and "not bad" if you want. How many people here read The Iron Dream? It's the Mein Kampf as a sci-fi novel, written by a Hitler who stopped "dabbling in radical politics" to became a pulp magazine illustrator, and later writer, in the USA. In the frame narrative, Lord of The Swastika is a successful, award-winning sci-fi novel, and hordes of adoring fans don't bat an eye at the book's politics and incredible unintentional gayness. A little unsubtle right? except The Iron Dream then gets published in the real world, and it gets unironic fans. The author adds a fictional literary analysis that points out all the inconsistencies, the bad writing, the creepy racism and the deep-seated sexual hang-ups of the author, and it's still not obvious enough: in Germany, the book is banned, and in America, the Nazi Party adds it to their reading list
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 10:55
|
|
|
Ambitious Spider posted:I loved Shogun (even with it's problems), and I've got a couple more of Clavell's so-called "Asian Saga" on the shelf. Glad King Rat isn't one of them, but now I do't know even if I should bother. Rest of the Asian saga are hit and miss. Shogun is the best of the lot. Gai-Jin is so horrible you have to wonder what what going on there. Highlights include a rapist becoming obsessed with his victim. Her luring him in for a second rape and getting him killed when after the rape she screams for help. This takes place after the abortion of the first rape-baby...yeah. Darkhold has a new favorite as of 11:05 on Jul 25, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 11:03
|
|
|
Darkhold posted:You're doing it a disservice. Rat King is excellent it's a horrific look into some of the worst camps in the Pacific theatre and the brutality of life there. Since Clavell lived it you can ignore the parts that are his sloppy love of capitalism and the parts of the story you don't like and just feel the rest of the world. King Rat is very good, but then again I'm a big camp novels fan. I liked Tai Pan too, haven't read other stuff from him, but Shogun is on my reading list.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 19:39
|
|
|
grate deceiver posted:Is he also the dude that wrote a short story that is a beat by beat retelling of a Silent Hill plot, down to the title being just a polish translation of Silent Hill? I feel like polish sci-fi has recently degenerated into endlessly regurgitating vidya game plots and steampunk. The entire business model of Fabryka Słów publishing house seems to be to poo poo as many of these turds out a year as humanly possible. Sorry, doesn't ring any bells - I've only read some of his short stories though (2586 steps and this one - Liberty Bell), Jakub Wędrowycz chronicles, Cousins and parts of Deer's Eye, and at least to me his writing is insufferable. If we're talking about Fabryka Słów then Andrzej Ziemiański comes to mind with his Achaja or Toy Wars (both hilariously terrible), but I don't have any of those books near me, so I can't even quote some excerpts. hackbunny posted:This looks so stupid I know what to read next   To be fair he also predicted this 
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 20:28
|
|
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:Partially, though he's as much of a Guy N. Smith parody as he is a Stephen King parody, which a lot of people miss. Always thought he was a full on Shaun Hutson parody. website   With a touch of James Herbert thrown in.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 21:33
|
|
|
The Saddest Rhino posted:are you trying to be clever He's not wrong. 90% of everything is crap, and it seems like 95% of readers eat it up with a fork.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 23:51
|
|
|
canis minor posted:Sorry, doesn't ring any bells - I've only read some of his short stories though (2586 steps and this one - Liberty Bell), Jakub Wędrowycz chronicles, Cousins and parts of Deer's Eye, and at least to me his writing is insufferable. If we're talking about Fabryka Słów then Andrzej Ziemiański comes to mind with his Achaja or Toy Wars (both hilariously terrible), but I don't have any of those books near me, so I can't even quote some excerpts. I can't say these look good, but they do look delightfully schlocky. Like, movies of them would probably make good MST3K fodder.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 23:54
|
|
|
Senior Woodchuck posted:He's not wrong. 90% of everything is crap, and it seems like 95% of readers eat it up with a fork.
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2016 02:03
|
|
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:Partially, though he's as much of a Guy N. Smith parody as he is a Stephen King parody, which a lot of people miss. The first line of his wikipedia page: quote:Guy Newman Smith (born 1939, Hopwas, Staffordshire) is a prolific English writer best known for his pulp fiction-style horror fiction, though he has also written non-fiction, soft-porn, and children's literature
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2016 15:13
|
|
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:Partially, though he's as much of a Guy N. Smith parody as he is a Stephen King parody, which a lot of people miss. I have read a lot of his books and most of them aren't bad, in a kind of heavily cliched way. He can write though, when he wants to. It's a guilty pleasure of mine, like the Sven Hessel books.
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2016 20:15
|
|
|
I'm relistening to the I don't Even Own a Television episode and seriously thinking about getting a copy of Night of the Crabs to read on holiday...
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2016 21:35
|
|
|
Over the past two pages I kept thinking you guys were talking about Mieville's King Rat and was a little confused.
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2016 21:59
|
|
|
OldMemes posted:I'm relistening to the I don't Even Own a Television episode and seriously thinking about getting a copy of Night of the Crabs to read on holiday...
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2016 23:54
|
|
|
Ryoshi posted:Over the past two pages I kept thinking you guys were talking about Mieville's King Rat and was a little confused. "drum and bass will help us destroy capitalism!" E: maybe not as silly as Enders Game's "using reddit will make me president." The Saddest Rhino has a new favorite as of 01:01 on Jul 27, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 27, 2016 00:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 00:34 |
|
|
The Saddest Rhino posted:"drum and bass will help us destroy capitalism!" It depends on whether you think reddit not existing when Ender's Game was written makes that plot point more or less silly. King Rat is a reaaallly rough first novel, but to Mieville's credit he got better pretty quick
|
|
#
?
Jul 27, 2016 02:03
|
|