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FMguru posted:I'm the curator who froze and turned his head simultaneously. You read this stuff and realise the 'Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown' article was going easy on him 
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Oct 17, 2017 13:55
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Inescapable Duck posted:Reilly's version has a special forces free-for-all in an Antarctic base where the British have freeze grenades, the French have crossbows, and the Americans have grappling hook guns. And it's loving awesome. (also, don't forget the giant leopard seals) These are batshit insane adventure novels, for people that like batshit insane adventure novels, by a guy that fully embraces the batshit insanity. I mean, I'm pretty sure one of the books had bad guys throwing around FOOF grenades. Proteus Jones has a new favorite as of 14:01 on Oct 17, 2017 |
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Oct 17, 2017 13:59
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All Dads Love Clive Cussler
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Oct 17, 2017 15:32
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NoneMoreNegative posted:You read this stuff and realise the 'Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown' article was going easy on him Here's another article (from 2009) which picks out renowned author Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences.
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Oct 17, 2017 15:53
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zoux posted:All Dads Love Clive Cussler My dad hates Clive Cussler, but all his non-reading friends who know he likes to read bought him Cussler books. He had a whole shelf of them until he could use the excuse of moving to dump them on some poor unwitting Goodwill.
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Oct 17, 2017 16:23
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It's Clive Cussler, Bernard Cornwell and Wilbur Smith that have occupied my dad's bookshelves for most of my life. Some Tom Clancys (he only likes the Jack Ryan ones) but surprisingly no Michael Crichtons.
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Oct 17, 2017 16:32
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NoneMoreNegative posted:You read this stuff and realise the 'Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown' article was going easy on him How can you write that headline and not make it "Don't clown on renowned Dan Brown"?
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Oct 17, 2017 17:52
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You're all lucky: my dad has the full collection of Xanth novels.
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Oct 17, 2017 20:03
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Brawnfire posted:You're all lucky: my dad has the full collection of Xanth novels. How is therapy going?
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Oct 17, 2017 20:25
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Not great. Not... Great.
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Oct 17, 2017 23:05
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I had most of them too  They were "racy" as a repressed 12-year-old girl. Luckily they got lost in a box of books (rip Kate Forsyth series) years ago and never got replaced because ew.
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Oct 17, 2017 23:48
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Wheat Loaf posted:It's Clive Cussler, Bernard Cornwell and Wilbur Smith that have occupied my dad's bookshelves for most of my life. Some Tom Clancys (he only likes the Jack Ryan ones) but surprisingly no Michael Crichtons. I'm grateful society has moved past making movies out of Michael Crichton books. Even if Jurassic park was more entertaining as a movie then as a book.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:02
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Klaus88 posted:I'm grateful society has moved past making movies out of Michael Crichton books. Even if Jurassic park was more entertaining as a movie then as a book. Andromeda Strain was fantastic.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:04
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Klaus88 posted:I'm grateful society has moved past making movies out of Michael Crichton books. Even if Jurassic park was more entertaining as a movie then as a book. I'm a little surprised one of the "conservatives are oppressed in Hollywood" types like Rob Schneider or Kevin Sorbo hasn't made a film adaptation of State of Fear, really.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:08
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Klaus88 posted:I'm grateful society has moved past making movies out of Michael Crichton books. Even if Jurassic park was more entertaining as a movie then as a book. I've never read any Michael Crichton novels but the one really petty thing I've heard about them is how his book State of Fear ("  Climate change isn't real! It was invented by the climate change fanatics! They've tricked everyone!" as a novel) got a bad review, so in his subsequent novel, Next, he wrote in a scene where the critic's name is given to a child molester with a small penis.That being said, there's a bit in the book DisneyWar where Michael Ovitz (co-founder of Creative Artists Agency who briefly became President of Disney before being ousted in a strange series of events) is quoted as saying that in his experience in publishing, the four "mega authors" of the 1990s - the Steven Spielbergs and Francis Ford Coppolas of publishing - were Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Stephen King and Michael Crichton. I can see the first three, but Crichton? Was he really that big a name or was it just because Jurassic Park was the most popular movie and ER was the most popular TV show?
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Oct 18, 2017 00:11
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Wheat Loaf posted:I've never read any Michael Crichton novels but the one really petty thing I've heard about them is how his book State of Fear (" Crichton moved a poo poo ton of books in the 90s. I'd bet he sold more in more languages then Grisham and Clancy. I could look all this up, but why introduce facts when I have "feelings" (he was a huge author in 90s and early '00s) Stephen King is the Wayne Gretzky of authors and no one will probably ever approach his numbers.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:16
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Stephen King is the Dark Souls of literature
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Oct 18, 2017 00:19
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Michael Crichton was absolutely huge, and not just because his stuff got adapted into smash hits. However I choose to only remember him for his petty pissbaby episode with the critic because it's so childish it overrides everything else.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:24
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Screaming Idiot posted:Stephen King is the Dark Souls of literature If the something awful dot com forums has a triggering phrase, this is it.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:27
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Xarbala posted:Michael Crichton was absolutely huge, and not just because his stuff got adapted into smash hits. Yeah, he had a pretty bad meltdown going into the 2000s. Sucks, because I used to like a lot of his books and it just taints his work now.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:35
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Barry Bluejeans posted:If the something awful dot com forums has a triggering phrase, this is it. "X is the Dark Souls of Y" is the Dark Souls of memes.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:56
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Klaus88 posted:I'm grateful society has moved past making movies out of Michael Crichton books. Even if Jurassic park was more entertaining as a movie then as a book. Westworld is still a thing.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:56
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Besesoth posted:"X is the Dark Souls of Y" is the Dark Souls of memes. "'X is the Dark Souls of Y' is the Dark Souls of memes." is the Undertale of Dark Souls comparisons.
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Oct 18, 2017 01:06
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Proteus Jones posted:Yeah, he had a pretty bad meltdown going into the 2000s. Sucks, because I used to like a lot of his books and it just taints his work now. 9/11 broke some people's brains in a way they never recovered from. See also Orson Scott Card and that guy that draws the aardvark comic.
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Oct 18, 2017 01:45
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Dark Souls
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Oct 18, 2017 03:54
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Dork Souls
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Oct 18, 2017 03:55
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Dirk Souls is a Clive Cussler book, right?
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Oct 18, 2017 04:00
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Stephen King is the Citizen Kane of horror writers.
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Oct 18, 2017 04:09
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Brawnfire posted:You're all lucky: my dad has the full collection of Xanth novels. Speaking of which, have a friendly reminder that Piers Anthony is alive and sufficiently well to keep writing prolifically (even if Wikipedia pages for his specific books seem to have stopped updating somewhere in 2013, same as the bibliography section on his website).  Hope your father has his series kept up to date.
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Oct 18, 2017 05:29
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I know for sure he's up to "cube route", there. Jesus Christ. I actually kind of liked the first three, and then sightly less the next few... Then it was a long, slow plunge into nothing but puns, weird panty poo poo, etc. the whole weird adulthood thing where there's some kind of literal sexy line like instapuberty, but then lol and behold all sorts of weird magic blurs that line so kids metamorphised into adults can enjoy magic statutory rape I guess. Xanth is Florida, though, and it helps to remember that.
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Oct 18, 2017 05:45
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A Pinball Wizard posted:9/11 broke some people's brains in a way they never recovered from. See also Orson Scott Card and that guy that draws the aardvark comic. Dave Sim lost his mind way before 9/11, for what it's worth. You may be thinking of Dan Simmons, one of the archetypal victims of the Brain Eater.
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Oct 18, 2017 07:05
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Screaming Idiot posted:Stephen King is the Dark Souls of literature I dunno man, I never regretted the time I invested into Dark Souls.
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Oct 18, 2017 08:16
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Dave Sim lost his mind way before 9/11, for what it's worth. You may be thinking of Dan Simmons, one of the archetypal victims of the Brain Eater. Yeah as I recall he started putting weird misogynist screeds in the back pages of Cerebus like 25 years ago.
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Oct 18, 2017 09:04
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Powaqoatse posted:Yeah as I recall he started putting weird misogynist screeds in the back pages of Cerebus like 25 years ago. I thought Cerebus was nothing but tracts against women, and something about an aardvark. Sims wanted to be an independent writer who wrote 300 issues of his own comic, but he only had enough content for 200, so he used his own personal issues to substitute. Inspector Gesicht has a new favorite as of 09:19 on Oct 18, 2017 |
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Oct 18, 2017 09:13
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I read Lamps' takedown of Ian Banks and I largely agree - especially the part about the Culture's eccentricity vs everyone else's barbaric perversity. Like, everyone in the universe is hosed up but somehow the Culture gets a pass because they're hosed up in the right ways. I don't agree, however, that the settings' binary choice between regressive assholes and all-permissive ultra-liberalism is somehow a philosophical or ideological failing of the book or author. Banks doesn't strike me as trying to write some kind of liberal "Atlas Shrugged" - the Culture is just this quirky place he gets to use as a backdrop for his spaceship books. To bring this back to terrible books - I've actually only read Consider Phlebas by Banks. Goons have been recommending Banks as an author of decent hard sci-fi, so I wanted to give him a try. Apparently Consider Phlebas is the first Culture novel, but as an introduction it gave me absolutely zero insight into the larger setting, and no desire to find out more. The main character is a shape-shifter who gets hired by the Culture's enemies to go bring back a Culture AI that's crashed on a planet that only shape-shifters are allowed to land on. And none of this has any impact on the story. The protagonist starts out disguised as an old man, gets stranded in space and picked up by a bunch of pirates, and slowly starts shifting to a younger body. When the rest of the crew notices, it's just shrugged off as an effect of rest and recuperation. After a weird sidestory where the protagonist gets stranded on an island with cannibal cultists he shifts to take the identity of the pirate captain and steal his spaceship. He casually blows his cover (or has it blown, don't remember) after about 24 hours aboard the ship, and none of the crew gives a poo poo. Then they land on the forbidden planet, but for some reason everyone who isn't a shape-shifter gets to come along anyway. The fact that the protagonist is a shape-shifter has absolutely no impact on the plot, and nothing he does or experiences has any relevance. He just stumbles from one weird place to another (Now he's on a planet ruled by old people! Now he's on an abandoned supercruiser! Now he's on an island of crazed cannibals! Now he's playing poker for the fate of a doomed planet!) and nothing matters. In the end I think he actually doesn't give the the AI over to the Culture's enemies, and in an epilogue we find that this was such a splendid action that they named a spaceship after him 500 years in the future or something. That's it, end of story. Then in the back there's a timeline of events that they never mention in the book and has no relevance to the events taking place, and the entire setting is actually in the past and the Culture are actually not humans? Or something? And the entire book is filled with these grotesque details. Like, the story opens with the protagonist locked in a dungeon with sewage pipes connected straight to toilets installed in the chairs at a banquet of the ruling class, so he'll eventually drown in sewage. The rich and powerful are literally going to poo poo him to death while they eat and drink. And the cult he gets caught by later has these hosed up tenets where only the leader is allowed to eat meat - everyone else is forced to live off garbage and excrement. The cult leader is grotesquely fat, eats the meat off of people's bones while they're still alive and eventually suffocates a prisoner with his gigantic rear end.
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Oct 18, 2017 10:23
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Mr. Sunshine posted:and nothing matters. In the end I think he actually doesn't give the the AI over to the Culture's enemies, and in an epilogue we find that this was such a splendid action that they named a spaceship after him 500 years in the future or something. That's it, end of story. Then in the back there's a timeline of events that they never mention in the book and has no relevance to the events taking place, and the entire setting is actually in the past and the Culture are actually not humans? Or something? That's the whole point of the book - after all his struggles, after all the blood sweat and tears, nobody cares. Nobody even knows what happened, apart from the Mind he rescues (they don't name a Ship after him, the Mind names itself after him) and his long running enemy, who promptly autoeuthanises because of the sheer futility of it all. War sucks, and while the events of the book meant a great deal to Horza and the Mind, it just gets lost among the billions of other deaths and struggles of the Idiran war, callously summarised in the epilogue as "a fairly minor conflict". The island cannibals I can't defend. Banks likes to play around with weird poo poo (the eccentricity vs perversion is a deliberate false dichotomy that runs through the whole series) but he takes it too far, and those chapters just drag on with seemingly no purpose. Edit: If we want to slag off and Iain Banks book, I'd like to put forward his non-"M" Walking on Glass - 3 disconnected and largely tedious narratives that clumsily smash together to give the freshman level message of "what even is real, dude?" Strom Cuzewon has a new favorite as of 11:07 on Oct 18, 2017 |
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Oct 18, 2017 10:57
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A Pinball Wizard posted:9/11 broke some people's brains in a way they never recovered from. See also Orson Scott Card and that guy that draws the aardvark comic. Orson Scott Card didn't get suckered by the brain-eater, he was already a frothing fuckhead on account of being a raging homophobe who is clearly so far in the closet he's being buggered by Aslan.
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Oct 18, 2017 11:51
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One of the first things I can remember reading which I thought was overwrought enough it made me go, "Oh, come on  " was the blurb/mini-review Orson Scott Card wrote for fellow Mormon fantasy author Dave Wolverton's (a.k.a. David Farland) novel The Runelords.quote:A new series, set in a world of mages and earth wardens, kings and knights equitable, glamors and Voices, endowments and Dedicates, force horses and reavers. Swords flash. Cruelty abounds. Men and women obey their lords and die for it, or worse, do deeds so terrible they cannot bear to live with them. [Farland] explores the very nature of virtue and finds disturbing contradictions at the heart of every moral question. Good men and women find themselves serving evil for good reasons; people who long served evil waken and discover their honor. Love can be noble and self-sacrificing; it can be lusty and filled with pleasure. When I reached the end of this first volume,The Runelords, and saw grace arise from a devastating battlefield where too many great hearts lay dead, Farland had earned the tears that came to my eyes. It was not sentiment but epiphany. And then the novel is just this generic high fantasy story that apparently lifts a whole bunch of stuff from the Book of Mormon.
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Oct 18, 2017 12:21
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Wheat Loaf posted:One of the first things I can remember reading which I thought was overwrought enough it made me go, "Oh, come on Oh man, I actually read that series, though it was like a decade back and I don't really remember a whole lot about it. But yeah, from what I do remember it was pretty generic if serviceable fantasy. Now I can't help but wonder how the Mormonism played into it.
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Oct 18, 2017 12:49
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All this is making me picture Dark Souls set in Maine. Like that one horror game that everyone was talking about then forgot about some years ago, but with even more death.
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Oct 18, 2017 13:07
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