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Inescapable Duck posted:Dan Brown. drat this post owns
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Oct 4, 2017 23:33
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The Honor books are interminable. So many words devoted to nothing.
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Oct 4, 2017 23:56
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Inescapable Duck posted:Dan Brown. I was hoping for an unironic reference of Ishmael's whale taxonomy but this is just as good.
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Oct 5, 2017 00:20
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Schwarzwald posted:All but maybe one of the Demon Princes were nakedly petulant nerds desperate to sooth their egos, it was great. I've discussed this in the main Sci-Fi thread, but it's amazing how much more interesting the three human Demon Princes are than the alien and the vampire. Actually, I'd say only three of the Demon Princes were nakedly petulant nerds (and it's portrayed a lot more bluntly with Viole Falushe and Howard Alan Treesong than with Kokor Hekkus). Lars Larque was dealt a genuinely lovely hand in life (what we know of Darsh culture makes it likely he was sexually abused as a child, and he initially became an outlaw for "stealing" water from someone who was already dead), as opposed to Falushe and Treesong being really mad at people who made fun of them in high school. I'm not sure if Malagate is even human enough to be capable of being a nerd.
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Oct 5, 2017 00:54
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HIJK posted:The Honor books are interminable. So many words devoted to nothing. If BotL doesn't do a dunking on those I might.
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Oct 5, 2017 01:01
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Mel Mudkiper posted:One thing I never understood is why fantasy fans talk about a consistent magical system as a benefit. If magic has rules it's not magic, its physics. because many of them are extremely autistic and find rules soothing
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Oct 5, 2017 01:26
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HIJK posted:The Honor books are interminable. So many words devoted to nothing. My favorite is the original math Weber used would result in his massive kilometer long "ships o the line" having the density of cigar smoke. It's fun when authors decide to get super technical with their terms, but its hilarious when you realize they have no clue of the scope of the math they are writing about and just using numbers they think are big enough.
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Oct 5, 2017 01:31
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pentyne posted:I feel like the Honor Harrington series basically started at a time when hard-ish future military sci fi with ship battles in great detail was in short supply so it gained a large fanbase, but by book 20 you look back and realize that Webber is not a good writer and everything he writes is to fuel his jerk-off fantasies of Space UK dunking on everyone including Space Republic France, Space USA, and Space Illuminati. Even the first book annoys me because its like a shittier version of Beat to Quarters by C.S. Forester, I realize most people here enjoy Aubrey Martin more than Hornblower. However I have a soft spot for the Hornblower books even if they aren't as deep or detailed having been given an old set by my dad when I was in grade school.
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Oct 5, 2017 05:27
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I tried reading On Basilisk Station after wanting to read some mil sci fi starring women. I couldn't make it past the first chapter because, as HIJK, so many words devoted to nothing. It was somehow instantly boring. This was right after reading Trading In Danger by Elizabeth Moon, which is one of my favorite novels ever. Moon somehow made day to day starship admin absolutely enthralling, and that's on top of the main plot about mercenaries conscripting the protagonist's ship and FTL communication buoys getting sabotaged.
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Oct 5, 2017 21:12
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What is Honor Harrington even about. I keep getting her confused with Sassinak.
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Oct 5, 2017 21:16
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HIJK posted:What is Honor Harrington even about. I keep getting her confused with Sassinak. Horation Hornblower as a mary sue in space
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Oct 5, 2017 21:20
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Mel Mudkiper posted:example don delillo.
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Oct 6, 2017 00:43
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i'm hopelessly enmeshed in gormenghast and it's the best thing that's happened to me in a long time, i love it, i love botl
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Oct 6, 2017 03:26
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the old ceremony posted:i'm hopelessly enmeshed in gormenghast and it's the best thing that's happened to me in a long time, i love it, i love botl hope you have a version with peake's illustrations 
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Oct 6, 2017 04:15
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absolutely (tbh swelter is pretty benevolent compared to actual chefs i've worked with)
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Oct 6, 2017 04:20
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fuchsia is me
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Oct 6, 2017 07:48
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half-mad virgin who hates the elderly
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Oct 6, 2017 07:59
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I am a prune doctor
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Oct 6, 2017 09:36
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:I am a prune doctor
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Oct 6, 2017 11:56
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ulmont posted:Sanderson has been very explicit on this. In his mind, the less you explain the magic and the less consistent it is, the less the magic can be used by the main characters to actually do things in the world and drive the plot. This was a while ago, but it got me thinking. On the surface, that famous Sanderson rule seems to me pretty reasonable. The less you establish for the reader the capabilities and boundaries of magic in your story, the more likely it is that the reader's going to find the use of magic to solve problems unsatisfying, because it can't build on anything that they already know to be true. It's an attempt to avoid magic as deus ex machina, to use an admittedly-tired term. But I think that's a really narrow view, the more I turn it over in my head. Why do events necessarily have to be grounded in some sort of very physical, immutable logic to be narratively satisfying? (Hell, why do events have to be narratively satisfying at all? There's something to be said for the intentional anticlimax.) There are other routes to that end by making them thematically satisfying or linked to what we know of the characters, their experiences, and their world. I realize I'm inviting the utter destruction of a book I love by bringing this book up, but Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell contains some of the clearest examples of this that I can think of. Magic follows rules that are more poetic and instinctive than rigid or scientific. When Strange nearly kills a man in self-defense with magic in the middle of the book, we don't think, "Wait, what spell is he casting? Does magic work that way? How can he do that?" Instead, the focus is on how much fear he must be feeling, how desperate he must be, to use magic to kill. Often magic doesn't so much solve problems in the plot as provide the inciting events for the plot and for character development, or just background texture. And when it does solve problems, it's rooted in truths about the characters doing the magic that just happens to work through the magic--in the end, what saves the day is, in part, Strange and Norrell's shared ignorance, not their skill with magic. That book breaks that Sanderson rule like crazy. Magic drives the plot and the characters do magic all over the place, and we never learn any sort of "magic system," and yet it still works because that's not what's actually important. And, as a result, it feels a lot more magical than anything you'd see in a book with a "magic system."
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Oct 6, 2017 22:30
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The best way to realize Sanderson's rule is bullshit is to read a book of his. Any one will do.
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Oct 6, 2017 22:47
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Harrow posted:On the surface, that famous Sanderson rule seems to me pretty reasonable. The less you establish for the reader the capabilities and boundaries of magic in your story, the more likely it is that the reader's going to find the use of magic to solve problems unsatisfying, because it can't build on anything that they already know to be true. It's an attempt to avoid magic as deus ex machina, to use an admittedly-tired term. Yeah, that's exactly it. Harrow posted:And when it does solve problems, it's rooted in truths about the characters doing the magic that just happens to work through the magic--in the end, what saves the day is, in part, Strange and Norrell's shared ignorance, not their skill with magic. I can't decide whether or not this undercuts your argument completely, but I wanted to point it out here. Harrow posted:That book breaks that Sanderson rule like crazy. Magic drives the plot and the characters do magic all over the place, and we never learn any sort of "magic system," and yet it still works because that's not what's actually important. And, as a result, it feels a lot more magical than anything you'd see in a book with a "magic system." It's been a while (I suspect 13 years) since I read JS&MN, so I'd have to reread it to reasonably be able to respond.
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Oct 6, 2017 22:54
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ulmont posted:I can't decide whether or not this undercuts your argument completely, but I wanted to point it out here. I'm re-reading the sentence you quoted from my post and it's drat near word salad so I'm going to try to rephrase it. So, the way Strange & Norrell ends involves magic solving the problem, but the book never sets up how magic works, what the system behind it all is, or what its capabilities and limits are. We haven't seen the characters do magic of this type before, and we don't have a system to puzzle out to determine that, yes, this is a thing that magic can do in this world. But I think it still works and feels satisfying because the reason that magic works has nothing to do with a system, but because of who the characters are. Both Strange and Norrell are ultimately ignorant when it comes to magic. As powerful as they are, they're basically children playing around with tools they barely understand. When they cast a spell in the end to summon the Raven King to defeat a fairy, they gently caress up because they don't know the Raven King's real name and can't summon him by it, and the wording of the spell they cast ends up placing the Raven King's power in the hands someone completely different... who happens to be just the right person to wield that power and solve their problem. They succeed by failing, which is the most Strange and Norrell thing that could ever happen. It breaks Sanderson's rule because it doesn't build off of anything we know about a magic system. We never really see that magic has any boundaries at all. As far as we know, there's nothing magic can't do. Hell, resurrecting the dead is like the third act of magic we see in the entire book. The idea that an act of magic can be the thing that solves the characters' problem should be unsatisfying and cheap, but it isn't because the magic itself isn't the important part. I should note that there are some vague sort of rules involving English magic--specifically, that it draws from contracts the Raven King set up centuries ago, and that Norrell considers summoning fairies to be totally antithetical to English magic--so I suppose the argument could be made that that's enough. But I think it's vague enough that it doesn't really constitute a system of clear rules, and given how much magic is used in the story's action, it's a really shaky foundation for making any predictions about what magic can, or will, do. Harrow fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 23:07
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It really depends on the kind of book you're trying to write. JS&MR is, as you said, more poetic. It's concerned less with setting up and paying off a plot than it is with exploring characters, developing the world, and investigating English identity. The magic is comically powerful in some places, able to easily move cities from one continent to another in the blink of an eye, which would be catastrophic for the plot in a book like Sanderson's. But in Clarke's book it somehow works because of the poetic logic. The TV adaption actually toned down the magic considerably, probably because it couldn't attain that same level of poetic logic on screen (and to save on VFX). Ccs fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Oct 7, 2017 |
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Oct 7, 2017 00:51
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It's not like you can't make an interesting story about magic that people barely know how to use. That's where most interesting magic stories come from, even. I think it might be a negative influence from sci-fi or D&D fiction, that magic has to be something with rules that people understand. I rather like the authors that accept that magic can be an unknown, terrifying force that people don't really understand at all but try to use their their own purposes and occasionally succeed. There are a few settings (Discworld comes to mind) where magic is specifically pointed out as something unreal, which weakens the underpinnings of reality when overused and/or misused, and what humans can do with it is only a tiny fraction of what it really is. Then again, going back to old stories and folklore, magic is often something which is assumed to have specific rules and rituals, though they aren't always clearly written down. (or those writings haven't survived) Of course, magic and religion back in the day were more or less the same thing. The whole 'magic as science/engineering' thing seems like a recent take on it, or interpretation of it.
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Oct 7, 2017 11:28
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Jack Vance did magic the best in the Dying Earth stories the only rule is that a person can remember no more than 4 spells at once beyond that who cares, you know if a dude memorizes some spells he'll use em in the story later to get out of some jam then in his magician stories he just said gently caress it and gave em all godmode because all-powerful petty wizards rule
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Oct 7, 2017 15:11
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my bony fealty posted:Jack Vance did magic the best in the Dying Earth stories It was actually sort of jarring, having previously heard about The Dying Earth mainly in the context of its influence on D&D, to read it and find out that "Vancian magic" doesn't play much of a role after the first couple stories. The focus of the plots changes pretty radically after the first couple stories as well; I was actually a little disappointed that the rest of the book wasn't about Tsain and Turjan outwitting evil wizards.
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Oct 7, 2017 18:41
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Turns out Jack Vance wrote me as a character into one of his novels:quote:Navarth had become obsessed. He roved the garden, morose, dissatisfied, looking this way and that. He took no joy in the beauty of the garden and went so far as to sneer at Viole Falushe’s arrangements. “There is no novelty here; the pleasures are banal. There are no exhilarations, no staggering insights, no sublime sweep of mind. All is either gross or maudlin—the gratification of gut and gland.” (Palace of Love)
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Oct 7, 2017 19:00
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The only thing I don't like about Vance is that his style can get really repetitive -- it's not always easy to tell one of his protagonists from another, everyone's using Vancian Diction etc. My favorite story of his is The Moon Moth, and I think it's the best thing he ever wrote, largely because he abandoned the clever charming protagonists he usually uses and substituted an inept, accidentally obnoxious one..
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Oct 7, 2017 19:07
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I like how the 2nd Master Li and Number Ten Ox handled magic. The entire plot revolved around magic and magical events, but even Master Li who is basically ancient Chinese Sherlock Holmes only vaguely understands everything and explicitly says the truth of events are beyond mortal comprehension, just be glad it's over, let's go get drunk. I liked the Mistborn series and how it was basically a sci-fi book with a fantasy skin, as yes the plot was figuring out how the supernatural works in the universe because as the story goes on everyone realizes that they don't actually know diddly squat about how everything works. I like that sort of puzzle-book story a lot, one of my favorite books is the Andromeda Strain for a similar reason. Some people get a lot of pleasure out of thoroughly exploring conceptual thought-spaces. A lot of speculative fiction is essentially authors doing just that, and fans who enjoy doing it with them. If I could make a suggestion though, please go through the Chtorr books, as they are basically actively offensive and the worst books I've ever read just for sheer emotional loathing engendered in me. Also, can anybody explain The Master and Margarita to me? I know it's widely praised, but the most charitable thing I can assume is if you didn't live in Moscow in the 1920s-30s you just can't understand it at all.
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Oct 9, 2017 05:05
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Wapole Languray posted:
We did it as a BOTM a few years ago. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3606244 edit: reading that thread isn't gonna be much help though Absurdist fiction isn't always intended to make sense. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Oct 9, 2017 |
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Oct 9, 2017 05:55
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A lot of the customs and behaviors it mocks are pretty universal.
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Oct 9, 2017 12:20
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nobody in the botm threads has ever read a book unless it was titled "officer bouldercrotch destroys the space ants" and had at least one breast on the cover
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Oct 9, 2017 22:47
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Actually the botm this month is cool and good and for smart erudite people with impeccable taste
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Oct 9, 2017 23:18
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I like Lord DunsanyHieronymous Alloy posted:My favorite story of his is The Moon Moth, and I think it's the best thing he ever wrote, largely because he abandoned the clever charming protagonists he usually uses and substituted an inept, accidentally obnoxious one.. There's a really good comic adaption of this story, have you read it? 
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Oct 10, 2017 11:27
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The only thing I don't like about Vance is that his style can get really repetitive -- it's not always easy to tell one of his protagonists from another, everyone's using Vancian Diction etc. Thinking this over, and you're totally wrong because Cugel is an obnoxious idiot who gets owned all the time. just like [poster you don't like]
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Oct 12, 2017 11:39
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Lightning Lord posted:I like Lord Dunsany I haven't! Thanks! BravestOfTheLamps posted:Thinking this over, and you're totally wrong because Cugel is an obnoxious idiot who gets owned all the time. "Much like your posting," said Gandalf, who knew the correct reply. (Yeah Cugel undercuts it too -- I'm thinking more of all the various Oikumene books).
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Oct 12, 2017 13:01
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Cugel stories are really great on a re-read because you realize, this guy's a dumbass and also a really bad dude. Rapist, murderer, thief, trickster, etc. But he's so likable!
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Oct 12, 2017 19:47
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On a re-read?
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Oct 12, 2017 19:48
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i'm impressed it only took you two reads to realize that, it's such a subtle point
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Oct 12, 2017 20:32
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