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 God's War wasn't even Jo Walton, it was Kameron Hurley. Not sure how I got them mixed up.
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Aug 4, 2016 01:27
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I've only read Tooth and Claw too, but it's good; not really Austen-ish with all the legal arguing, and doesn't it end with a fight? I can't remember...BravestOfTheLamps posted:It sounds worse than just reading Austen. Well, yes, but being worse than Austen is like being better than Piers Anthony, isn't it? Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 02:01
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House Louse posted:Well, yes, but being worse than Austen is like being worse than Piers Anthony, isn't it? No, no. I don't know if the English language has the ability to describe somebody who is worse than Piers Anthony. The phrase "John Ringo" does come close to it, but doesn't quite manage it.
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Aug 4, 2016 02:06
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 Fixed, thanks.e: Please, somebody, report that post. Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 02:14
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Khizan posted:No, no. Terry Goodkind?
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Aug 4, 2016 02:20
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Anyone have opinions on Swords v Cthulhu. Fun? Stupid? Stupid fun?
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Aug 4, 2016 04:08
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Reason posted:Anyone have opinions on Swords v Cthulhu. Fun? Stupid? Stupid fun? I imagine you already know whether you want to read it or not just from the title.
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Aug 4, 2016 08:04
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If you don't think Jane Austen is funny, I don't know what to tell you. You're just broken.
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Aug 4, 2016 08:13
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Hello TBB board. I found this really good video adaptation of one of the early chapters of Taggerung by Brian Jacques, part of the Redwall series. I did a forum search and found a lot of Redwall references itt so I think you guys would be really excited to see this like I was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmQKxyXPvno imo stuff like this is why those sites like gofundme exist
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Aug 4, 2016 20:54
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Love Stole the Day posted:Hello TBB board. (1) I wonder how much furry porn this guy draws on a daily basis (2) real subtle plug there
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Aug 5, 2016 03:54
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at the date posted:(1) I wonder how much furry porn this guy draws on a daily basis Not enough that you can't keep up if you keep jerking away with dedication.
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Aug 5, 2016 04:11
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House Louse posted:I've only read Tooth and Claw too, but it's good; not really Austen-ish with all the legal arguing, and doesn't it end with a fight? I can't remember... Austen is one of the best writers in the history of the english language and if you think she's bad, you need to LEARN UP. See http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3662001
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Aug 5, 2016 04:25
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Austen is one of the best writers in the history of the english language and if you think she's bad, you need to LEARN UP. I recently read Daniel Polansky, an author who is not in any position to talk poo poo about other authors, do just that with Austen.
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Aug 5, 2016 12:28
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I've been reading Blake Crouch's new book, Dark Matter and while I've been enjoying it there is the issue where I was able to figure out what was going on well before the main character did. The book is about a college physics professor who used to be an up and coming scientist before marriage and a kid derailed his research. One night while walking home from the store he is kidnapped, taken to an abandoned factory and knocked unconscious. When he awakens he finds himself in a world that is like his own but different.
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Aug 5, 2016 13:07
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Wasn't that the setup for his last series?
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Aug 5, 2016 14:05
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Solitair posted:I recently read Daniel Polansky, an author who is not in any position to talk poo poo about other authors, do just that with Austen. The core issue is that Austen is deceptively simple. On the surface her writing seems clear and straightforward - and it is, if you're a regency era British aristocrat -- but if you were born in the past century it takes more work to read Austen than to read Faulkner.
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Aug 5, 2016 14:17
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Austen is one of the best writers in the history of the english language and if you think she's bad, you need to LEARN UP. Pretty sure that's what House Louse was saying. "Worse than Austen" and "better than Anthony" are both useless statements, because, well, isn't pretty much everyone?
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Aug 5, 2016 14:19
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It's not even that I think Polansky is complete poo poo, but I read The Builders and it was just okay. I'll stop talking about this because bringing up other people's opinions to people who disagree is a bad habit I thought I'd broken.
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Aug 5, 2016 15:16
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How appropriate, a white knight in the fantasy thread  Hieronymous Alloy posted:Austen is one of the best writers in the history of the english language and if you think she's bad, you need to LEARN UP. I may have messed up my  the first time round but I'm going to quote this for truth anyway I didn't think Persuasion was that good, though. Not aristocratic, though.
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Aug 5, 2016 15:20
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I want Kovacs to stop talking about his dick.
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Aug 5, 2016 15:25
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apophenium posted:I want Kovacs to stop talking about Not gonna happen.
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Aug 5, 2016 15:38
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muscles like this? posted:I've been reading Blake Crouch's new book, Dark Matter and while I've been enjoying it there is the issue where I was able to figure out what was going on well before the main character did. The book is about a college physics professor who used to be an up and coming scientist before marriage and a kid derailed his research. One night while walking home from the store he is kidnapped, taken to an abandoned factory and knocked unconscious. When he awakens he finds himself in a world that is like his own but different. I read the AVClub review where they mention that's it's expected the reader realises pretty early what's going on. Either that or they just did a big spoiler.
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Aug 5, 2016 15:49
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Junkenstein posted:I read the AVClub review where they mention that's it's expected the reader realises pretty early what's going on. Either that or they just did a big spoiler. Crouch definitely expects the reader to figure it out before the main character because he includes a couple of interlude chapters with the alternate version of the main character pretending to be him. It's just kind of annoying waiting for him to play catch up.
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Aug 5, 2016 16:18
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apophenium posted:I want Kovacs to stop talking about his dick. bad news. honestly morgan overdoes the sex poo poo in everything he writes. he flipped out at a reviewer who didnt like black man because in Morgan's estimation the reviewer didn't like it because he couldn't handle a strong violent black protagonist, instead of the book just being unpleasant. Given its prevalence, im sure he thinks his sex poo poo is some master artistic statement too and we're simply troglodytes who can't fathom his genius.
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Aug 5, 2016 16:38
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The sex scenes are less frequent but about as detailed as the scenes of violence.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:26
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If we're talking bad sex scenes, look no further than Peter F. Hamilton.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:52
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I pretty much agree with Morgan that gratuitous violence being acceptable (if not ubiquitous) in media while sex is forbidden is one of our more silly societal beliefs. If it bugs you move past it or read something else. For every scene involving licking drugs off someone's breasts, there's another describing chopping off of a head followed by excision of the base of the spinal cord. I feel like the wrong one of those is innocuous.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:53
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Solitair posted:I recently read Daniel Polansky, an author who is not in any position to talk poo poo about other authors, do just that with Austen. I mean, you're allowed to not like particular classics, whether you're a Twain-caliber author or not. Not everything's for everyone.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:57
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Velius posted:I pretty much agree with Morgan that gratuitous violence being acceptable (if not ubiquitous) in media while sex is forbidden is one of our more silly societal beliefs. If it bugs you move past it or read something else. For every scene involving licking drugs off someone's breasts, there's another describing chopping off of a head followed by excision of the base of the spinal cord. I feel like the wrong one of those is innocuous. One of those moves the plot forward, while the other is gratuitous.
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Aug 5, 2016 18:07
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Aside from Kovacs mentioning blood rushing to the tip of his sleeve's penis all the time, Altered Carbon is the book I didn't know I wanted to read. I love detective/mystery stories a lot and the sci-fi trappings give it an interesting bit of flavor. Are the rest of the books in the trilogy on par?
apophenium fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 18:28
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apophenium posted:Aside from Kovacs mentioning blood rushing to the tip of his sleeve's penis Altered Carbon is the book I didn't know I wanted to read. I love detective/mystery stories a lot and the sci-fi trappings give it an interesting bit of flavor. Are the rest of the books in the trilogy on par? They're really different. Broken Angels is about Kovacs working as a mercenary pacifying an uprising on a non-earth planet, while there are mysteries it's much less noir. Woken Furies is back on his home planet and there's a lot of dealing with his past and trying to protect someone. All three are good, but I'm probably least attached to the third one. Alastair Reynolds has a bit of mystery to some of his stuff. People here don't like it much but Century Rain is half noir, half sci-fi. Chasm City is great book with a mystery but it's more straight sci-fi.
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Aug 5, 2016 18:36
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Violence and sex in fiction are, like, fine, but from what I've read him say about it, Morgan is a bit of a pretentious twat about how deep and edgy and envelope pushing he is.
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Aug 5, 2016 18:36
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Number Ten Cocks posted:One of those moves the plot forward, while the other is gratuitous. Which one's which, though? You can write both violence and sex in summary — "we hooked up", "we assaulted the airship and made it to the crime lord's cabin." This moves the plot forward and gets you to where you need to be. But stories aren't all plot. Interior experience can be important and revealing. The way Kovacs approaches the act of killing or loving speaks to the relationship between uploaded mind and physical body. It's interesting when a basic physical response, arousal in the sexual or combative sense, clashes with Kovacs' conditioning and experience. It lets the story examine how much of human experience can be detached from the 'sleeve', stored, and moved around — and how much of us arises from older, more fundamental systems of the body. At worst I think Morgan's sex scenes are super goofy. But he's writing about a setting in which dualism has become a fact of economics — minds can be bought, sold, salvaged, stolen. Bodies are armatures, easily customized for specific purposes. His core question is the relationship between mind and flesh, and sex and violence are two of the obvious places to explore that question.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:13
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I guess, put more succinctly, the sex scenes in Altered Carbon are exactly as lurid, ridiculous, and gratuitous as the violence — and both are equally successful, or unsuccessful, at moving the plot forward.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:16
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holocaust bloopers posted:If we're talking bad sex scenes, look no further than Peter F. Hamilton. Yeah. I finished the second book in his Void trilogy and the word to sum it up is 'juvenile'. I mean half the story is the most cut and dried mary sue fantasy plot with a hero who has one flaw in that he's too honest for politics. But okay, it emerges that he's living in a constructed universe which literally has the purpose of wish fulfilment, and there's a cool scene where someone in the real universe (where mary sue is seen as a messiah) furiously points out that people have built a religion out of teenage daydream grade dreck. But then the other half of the story is all invincible interchangeable superspies, and every other character seems to have some cloned harem (are these people cloned slaves? if so why does nobody else care? why do they not care? or are they paid bodyguards, or live in escorts? are they even sentient? it's never explored). It also takes place in the space empire's designated 'capitalist primitives' zone, except there seems to be no scarcity or want for anything, and even the characters who aren't invincible superspies seem to live like millionaire urbanites while not having an actual job. It's also full of evil sex women who will sex you into being evil. I don't want to be all negative all the time but I've wanted to rant about that for a while 
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Aug 5, 2016 19:48
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Megazver posted:I mean, you're allowed to not like particular classics, whether you're a Twain-caliber author or not. Not everything's for everyone. I just started looking up what Twain said about Austen. It's hilarious because he somehow managed to both get it and miss the point at the same time, like when people complain that Evangelion sucks because of how mopey and depressed Shinji is.
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Aug 5, 2016 20:48
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johnsonrod posted:How's the rest of The Academy series by Jack McDevitt hold up after The Engines of God? I enjoyed the first one but I'm halfway through the 2nd book Deepsix and it's not really doing it for me so far. It's not bad really, it just seems to be following the exact same formula of Engines without any of the cool mystery elements. I was going to post about both "main" McDevitt's series, so replying to you is a good beginning point. As for the Academy series, the books are good in average, with some variance. For my taste (and of course, everyone is entitled to one and so and so...), the really good books are (in this order): - Chindi - Engines of God - Omega - Deepsix Cauldron is so-so. Odyssey is bad. Starhawk is cancer. Do not read Starhawk (or regard it as a book in a different series, just with a protagonist with the same name and a very similar Universe). As for Deepsix, the pace goes in crescendo and the ending is really epic. Keep reading. Chindi contains one of the most spectacular and beatiful scenery setups I've read in science fiction. Read it by all means. Let's go to Alex Benedict. This is more mystery oriented. The main characters are an antiquarian (think selfish Indiana Jones) and his pilot/assistant, who are something like Sherlock and Watson. They solve misteries, which usually involve understanding some ancient artifact. The heaviest criticism is the books look very similar: an old "thing" appears, with a mistery attached. Benedict, for different reasons, wants to solve that mistery. He and Chase (the pilot/assistant) suffer one or more assassination attempts, usually involving the sabotage of a vehicle of some kind and they finally find a satisfactory (or not) solution for the quizz. The good thing is the narration does not cheat the reader. That is, the reader gets the same information as the protagonists and can, thinking a little bit, solve the mistery by him or herself. I liked most of the books in that series. The ones I rate as good (in my personal order): - Polaris - The Devill's Eye - A Talent for War The ones I found so-so: - Firebird - Coming Home I didn't like Echo, even considering the "mistery" in this one is probably the most intriguing one. All the books are a light read, overly optimistic and with a good smell of "classic" science fiction. Specially recommended after reading one of those dark stories we all seem to enjoy.
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Aug 5, 2016 21:11
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Velius posted:They're really different. Broken Angels is about Kovacs working as a mercenary pacifying an uprising on a non-earth planet, while there are mysteries it's much less noir. Woken Furies is back on his home planet and there's a lot of dealing with his past and trying to protect someone. All three are good, but I'm probably least attached to the third one. This is kind of a crappy description of Broken Angels because he stops being a mercenary working to pacify the uprising in the first chapter of the book. I'd say it's about a black ops xenoarcheology mission. He gets a team together and tries to get access to an ancient alien artifact before some other corporation on the planet can lay claim to it, all while maintaining a low enough profile to not draw the attention of the civil war happening in the area.
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Aug 5, 2016 22:16
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I was trying to not ruin the setup. 🙁
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Aug 6, 2016 00:32
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Velius posted:I pretty much agree with Morgan that gratuitous violence being acceptable (if not ubiquitous) in media while sex is forbidden is one of our more silly societal beliefs. If it bugs you move past it or read something else. For every scene involving licking drugs off someone's breasts, there's another describing chopping off of a head followed by excision of the base of the spinal cord. I feel like the wrong one of those is innocuous. i get the point he's trying to make, but for better or worse the sex scenes grate on me worse than the violence does. except for in land fit for heroes where details like the description of the faint waft of poo poo accompanying the gay sex was so gratuitous it was funny.
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Aug 6, 2016 02:13
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