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Ryoshi posted:Over the past two pages I kept thinking you guys were talking about Mieville's King Rat and was a little confused. The Vosgian Beast posted:King Rat is a reaaallly rough first novel, but to Mieville's credit he got better pretty quick
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Jul 27, 2016 21:20
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I feel like China Mieville has an edge in fantasy/sci-fi/etc authors in that most of the popular ones look like ubergoons (see: Patrick Rothfuss, GRRM) or dad-like doughboys (Jim Butcher, Brandon Sanderson), but China Mieville instead looks like someone who could smash a bottle across your face in a pub.
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Jul 28, 2016 01:58
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 I can almost forgive him for words like "Walpurgian" and "Retroeschatonaut" 
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Jul 28, 2016 02:14
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^  It keeps coming up in the PYF Dark Enlightenment Thinker thread that the loathsome turbonerds of the neoreactionary internet never know what quite to make of Miéville, because he is also a turbonerd (good) and a sci-fi/fantasy author (good) but a Marxist (bad?) and a total ubermensch of the variety that they all desperately wish they were (oh Daddy please beat me some more), so they just quietly defer beta-ishly. It's pretty drat amusing. But his books are not terrible (except for "King Rat" which is only kinda terrible) so he doesn't really belong here. Thank you for not writing icky sex scenes with 14-year-olds, China.
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Jul 28, 2016 02:15
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:
Isn't this guy an NPC in Deus Ex?
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Jul 28, 2016 04:07
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no.
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Jul 28, 2016 05:24
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What a shame.
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Jul 28, 2016 06:12
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We're allowed to discuss terrible authors, right? Because this nobody hack is suddenly getting so much attention that it crashed his blog. He's become one of the most reviled people in fiction basically overnight. https://intheinbox.wordpress.com/2016/07/27/how-to-get-yourself-blacklisted/
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Jul 28, 2016 11:44
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Thank you for posting China Mieville. I recently tried to read a book I grabbed for 75p at a charity shop, 'Seeds of Earth' by Michael Cobley. I was in the mood for some basic scifi. It's not horrific, it's just - really badly written. The prose is clunky and tin-eared and the dialogue is poor and-- it reminds me of when I tried to read 'The Da Vinci Code'. I know these things are successful because a lot of people don't give a poo poo about prose quality, and I'm not saying they should or anything. It's just kind of sad.
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Jul 28, 2016 11:53
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:We're allowed to discuss terrible authors, right? Because this nobody hack is suddenly getting so much attention that it crashed his blog. He's become one of the most reviled people in fiction basically overnight. Wow, dude just fire bombed his career.
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Jul 28, 2016 11:54
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I like how the sexism comes creeping across in that post. Goodness, the professional women weren't looking very pretty when you talked to them, heaven forfend.
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Jul 28, 2016 12:01
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Burning books is wrong. So we had it taken out and shot.
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Jul 28, 2016 12:50
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TK8325 posted:Wow, dude just fire bombed his career. This is amazing. You can practically see him tip his fedora at the end.
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Jul 28, 2016 13:54
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Davros1 posted:This is amazing. You can practically see him tip his fedora at the end. M'nooovel Also: "my wife, Hotlips" Antivehicular has a new favorite as of 14:09 on Jul 28, 2016 |
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Jul 28, 2016 14:06
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:We're allowed to discuss terrible authors, right? Because this nobody hack is suddenly getting so much attention that it crashed his blog. He's become one of the most reviled people in fiction basically overnight. drat, those monks that self-immolate ain't got poo poo on this guy
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Jul 28, 2016 14:18
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No, no, no. You don't shoot a book. You get a hydraulic press! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmvKlnhMjUw
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Jul 28, 2016 15:41
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:We're allowed to discuss terrible authors, right? Because this nobody hack is suddenly getting so much attention that it crashed his blog. He's become one of the most reviled people in fiction basically overnight. I can see this guy's corkboard with the yarn leading from the picture of her face to various things that he stalked her to find out about. "Ah yesss I see you are a fan of *looks at stenography sheet* dance!! This has nothing to do with my book but I must take an aside to have you know that I have once brushed with the likes of Baryshnikov on the tokyo stage" "uh huh (what is this what is going on i like jazz dancing)" RE: Mieville -- I read Perdido Street Station once; it wasn't bad but I thought it was about 400 pages too long.
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Jul 28, 2016 15:45
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I loved the setting and prose in Perdido Street Station but thought the ending was really bleak for no reason other than to emphasize what we already know about the characters and their flaws. The Scar, on the other hand, is one of my all time favorite books and I need to get my copy back from whoever I lent it to 
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Jul 28, 2016 16:34
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Electric Lady posted:I can see this guy's corkboard with the yarn leading from the picture of her face to various things that he stalked her to find out about. That's the best. He goes from not caring anything about dance besides pandering to her interests straight to condescending down to her about not enjoying the right kind of dance (e.g. the ones he deemed highbrow and intellectual enough after five minutes on Wikipedia) in an instant. One thing I can say about his writing, though the blog post is meandering and overly verbose, it still manages to encapsulate what a creep he is pretty succinctly.
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Jul 28, 2016 17:03
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:We're allowed to discuss terrible authors, right? Because this nobody hack is suddenly getting so much attention that it crashed his blog. He's become one of the most reviled people in fiction basically overnight.
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Jul 28, 2016 17:18
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I'm excited to see how this is going to play out. He's gone way too far to claim he "got hacked," and if he goes for the puppetmaster defense, I will lose my poo poo. "I was drunk" isn't even a viable excuse because it's (more or less) coherent throughout. "I'm trying to be edgy to get publishers' attention," maybe? Seems like a stretch in a profession where bad attention is actually bad attention. Or is he going to double down and run with "I'm a tortured genius and you tubby plebs just can't understand my work?" fake edit: oh god he hasn't even taken it down yet what a maroon
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Jul 28, 2016 17:46
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:We're allowed to discuss terrible authors, right? Because this nobody hack is suddenly getting so much attention that it crashed his blog. He's become one of the most reviled people in fiction basically overnight. Lol this guy is loving terrible. I read a few samples and it's all either that stiff, overly wordy, stick up the rear end style, or trying way to hard to be quirky (most of his characters have names like Aggie Aldenderfer). He also wrote a dark, gritty murder novel where the main character is a dog, and he's really upset that no one recognizes its unique genius. He pitched it to several romance genre agents and got mad when they said "sorry, but this isn't really our thing." Here are some samples for your reading pleasure! This first one is from a novel where a lady tries to seduce a guy by becoming a big fan of the same football team he likes. Here she is seeing tailgating for the first time. quote:… “Say, honey! C’mere once!” Yes, that is meant to be one paragraph. Also I had to google "c'mere once" because I have no idea about Wisconsin slang and it was confusing the hell out of me. This next one is from a book about three guys who each have an epiphany while getting a lap dance from a stripper, and then decide to kill their wives. One of the strippers is named Simba. quote:Neither of the two Las Vegas excursionists would ever again see Krystal or Shalimar. But more than most of the women they had known in their lives, with the possible exception of their mothers, the two lapdancers altered for Garretson and Hochuli their perspective on life itself. Simply by doing their job without a hint of imagination or a flicker of enthusiasm, without even feigning orgasm, Krystal and Shalimar transformed the idea of sex — in the minds of Garretson and Hochuli — into a spiritual ceremony performed in slow-motion, requiring sacred music, murmured incantations, ritual gyrations beneath devotional lights, a whiff of incense and the mysterious transubstantiation of flesh and hocus-pocus into gibbering ecstasy. Did anyone mention yet that his latest novel has over 300 rejections? He repeatedly compares himself to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, btw. He's still convinced the problem is the awful, discriminatory agents (especially the feeeeemales!) and not his lovely murder dog book. Between that and the constant word salad, I'm starting to think he might actually be crazy.
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Jul 28, 2016 18:36
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Dude would fit right in the Dark Enlightenment thread. He's that mix of totally convinced he's the best and most intelligent but totally tone-deaf socially so thinks there's some kind of flowchart or checklist you need to go through and then you get the results you want (like the PUA poo poo). A cursory look at a topic is enough to convince him he knows all about it. He never feels he could ever be in the wrong. Perfect.
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Jul 28, 2016 18:38
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Telemaze posted:The scene was so rich, complicated and populous that Trish couldn’t begin to discern the source of this summons, or even if it referred to her. Never mind the trainwreck that follows, one sentence in and my eyes were sliding away from this horrible prose in self defence. If there's such a thing as anti-talent, this guy's got it. Either that or he hosed a thesaurus and this is what fell out.
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Jul 28, 2016 18:50
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Is "c'mere once" actually regional slang? I assumed "dialogue from someone who has no idea how people talk," in classic literary shitshow tradition. Also, man, that tailgate food list is clearly the dude trying to rip off the "station wagons" opening paragraph from White Noise, except immeasurably worse. White Noise is pretty bad and the opening in particular has aged poorly, but holy balls, this is beyond any complaint I could have about it. Also also, is this guy seriously querying agents who don't even represent his genre and still getting stroppy about rejections? I guess that's about par for someone who expects agents at a convention to haul home tons of unsolicited manuscripts and sketchy USB drives because MY ART MUST BE SEEN!
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Jul 28, 2016 18:54
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Writing in slang and affectation is almost always terrible because more often than not the author is just writing what he thinks these people sound like and not what people actually sound like.
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Jul 28, 2016 19:12
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God, that picnic... thing. Don DeLillo has a lot to answer for.
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Jul 28, 2016 21:40
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As someone who lived in Wisconsin for over twenty years in various parts of the state, let me confirm for you that I have never heard anyone say "c'mere once" in any context or recognizable variation.
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Jul 28, 2016 21:55
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:We're allowed to discuss terrible authors, right? Because this nobody hack is suddenly getting so much attention that it crashed his blog. He's become one of the most reviled people in fiction basically overnight. This is beautiful. He started burning his bridge as he was starting to cross it, tried to pee it out, and the fire then spread to every other bridge off his sad little island.
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Jul 28, 2016 23:23
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HopperUK posted:Thank you for posting China Mieville. I read this and yeah it wasn't awful but after 200 pages of heavu handed "there was a third ship but nobody knew where it went and the elite guard are very mysterious aliens and nobody knows what they look like you had to just assume the protagonists were retarded if they couldn't work out what was going on. Also i think it had space monk yoda ripoffs and one good idea which was analogue obsessed aliens that would take trade in ACDC tapes or something.
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Jul 29, 2016 00:09
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spite house posted:If nothing else -- and there's a lot of else here -- this goober revealed that he knows nothing about the publishing industry. It's a very small world and publishing folks love two things above all else: gossip in general, and gossip about terrible books/authors in particular. This must have felt like Christmas morning. I wonder if Jenny Trout will do a "Don't Do This Ever" blog post about this guy. She's documented multiple instances of authors getting caught plagiarizing or making a bigoted comment and every time these people backpedal with all sorts of excuses. I don't think I've ever seen a "professional" have a fandom brat meltdown quite like this guy though. Which reminds me: Stephenie Meyer announced her new book: quote:“’The Chemist’ is the love child created from the union of my romantic sensibilities and my obsession with Jason Bourne/Aaron Cross,” Meyer wrote in a statement. “I very much enjoyed spending time with a different kind of action hero, one whose primary weapon isn’t a gun or a knife or bulging muscles, but rather her brain.”  As someone who has spite-read the majority of her work, this will be about as brainy as a Bourne-knockoff usually is. Unfair to call an unreleased book terrible? Maybe, but I have no hope for a writer whose popularity have inspired even worse imitations and glorified abuse as the romance standard.
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Jul 29, 2016 14:22
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Did she ever go back and put out that version of Twilight from Edward's point of view or did she stick by her guns and keep it pulled?
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Jul 29, 2016 15:13
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Telemaze posted:He also wrote a dark, gritty murder novel where the main character is a dog, and he's really upset that no one recognizes its unique genius. He pitched it to several romance genre agents and got mad when they said "sorry, but this isn't really our thing." I didn't see the sentence where you say what that passage is about, and I thought that it was a passage from the story with the dog main character. It would make totally sense for a dog to be that excited/overwhelmed about a tailgate, not an adult human. Also, that middle sentence was 224 words long. How the gently caress 
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Jul 29, 2016 17:32
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YeahTubaMike posted:I didn't see the sentence where you say what that passage is about, and I thought that it was a passage from the story with the dog main character. It would make totally sense for a dog to be that excited/overwhelmed about a tailgate, not an adult human. I am listing LOTS OF THINGS. This makes me a GOOD WRITER, just like listing famous ballet dancers makes me A FASCINATING CONVERSATIONALIST ON THE TOPIC OF DANCE. It kind of reminds me of otterguy's gimmick: There were Many Items of Food and Drink; these Included Watermelon; Pickles; Bratwurst; Knockwurst; Liverwurst; other Sausages;...
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Jul 29, 2016 23:49
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Gabriel Pope posted:I am listing LOTS OF THINGS. This makes me a GOOD WRITER, just like listing famous ballet dancers makes me A FASCINATING CONVERSATIONALIST ON THE TOPIC OF DANCE. You forgot that most words aren't bolded (say bold 10% of the words) & also a very few should be in italics or underlined. It's gotta resemble the cadence of speech you see...
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Jul 30, 2016 02:00
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muscles like this? posted:Did she ever go back and put out that version of Twilight from Edward's point of view or did she stick by her guns and keep it pulled? She's kept it pulled, thank God. There's some spite-fan theories that maintain she did it to punish all the fans that had turned on her by that time. A lot of Twi-hards HATED the last book: once Bella became a vampire, it was less a vague, tepid, teen romance to project onto and more obviously Meyer's self-insert. What I think a lot of people still don't realize is Breaking Dawn was originally the second of a two-parter. All of New Moon and possibly Eclipse (I can't quite remember now) was written afterwards, so in edition to losing fans for story reasons, the writing quality (HA) backslid as well because heaven forbid Meyer change a single word of her precious story. So sure, she stuck by her guns insomuch as she continued to pout over a leaked draft, nevermind that it wasn't the first time it had happened and she admitted to giving drafts of previous releases to close family and friends. I'm fond of the rumor that Pattinson leaked Midnight Sun to avoid being in another 3-4 films. Edit: unrelated but I wish she'd sued the poo poo out of E. L. James.
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Jul 30, 2016 05:16
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Snapchat A Titty posted:You forgot that most words aren't bolded (say bold 10% of the words) & also a very few should be in italics or underlined. It's gotta resemble the cadence of speech you see...
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Jul 31, 2016 15:08
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:The Young Woman was shaped like a Pear (Pyrus Communis). She was Exceptionally Rude. I attempted to Bond with her Socially by talking on the topic of Dance, which she indicated was a Hobby; however, her Knowledge was Limited; I suspect she was a Fake. Women are often Fake. My wife, Hotlips, is not Fake; for this I am Thankful. Wasn't that Enhydra lutris?  edit: ah, otterguy... i'm dumb canis minor has a new favorite as of 23:22 on Jul 31, 2016 |
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Jul 31, 2016 23:14
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So I just finished Armada. drat, I thought RPO was bad. Here are some random thoughts. -The main characters name is Zack Lightman. His father's name is, of all things, Xavier Ulysses Lightman. - I don't think Cline has ever met a minority before. He loves writing asian characters that fit into his weird perception of Asian culture. They all bow constantly and talk nonstop about honor. Michio Kaku shows up and I'm surprised that he didn't start referring to the MC as Zack-san. The best I can say is that it doesn't seem to be hateful, just ignorant. -Zack's inner monologue goes into detail about how hot he thinks his mom is. -Even in "heavier" scenes, characters frequently use inappropriate quotes from pop culture. Zack's mom confronts him about a fight that happened at school. She blocks the door to his room while yelling "You shall not pass!". The admiral of Earths defense quotes Top Gun with a smirk after Zack almost destroys the base and kills thousands. -The fact that the admiral likes Top Gun is foreshadowing for the twist that he's the secondary antagonist. Because he likes military stuff instead of sci-fi and video games. -Spacewar! The first videogame (after OXO and Tennis For Two). So, you know, not the first videogame. -After a previous freak out at school, his classmates were so afraid of him that they start calling him Zack Attack. This is apparently hurtful to him. -The titular videogame was created with the help of Chris Roberts, Richard Garriott, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Gabe Newell, ans Shigeru Miyamoto with help from James Cameron and Peter Jackson. The end product is a (even by Zack's admission) generic alien invasion simulator instead of a massive clusterfuck of clashing game design philosophies. -Zack's love interest is a goth/punk who is not only one of the top ranked gamers in the world, but also a super hacker who provides the story with about 6 or 7 deus ex machines. -He wins her instant love by having a conversation that consists entirely of context free pop culture references. -His teammate, who is your average obnoxious, slovenly, bearded, Mountain Dew guzzling gamer is also gay. I suppose I should give Cline a point for going against stereotype. I could probably find more things to bitch about, but I've already given this post more time and effort than this book deserves.
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Aug 4, 2016 10:19
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grittyreboot posted:-The main characters name is Zack Lightman. His father's name is, of all things, Xavier Ulysses Lightman. Xavier Ulysses Lightman = X.U.L. = L.U.X. backwards Coincidence????
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Aug 4, 2016 18:33
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