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would it be enough for you to retract your criticisms if the book more consciously considered the criticisms it was making and presented arguments as to why, notwithstanding those failings, the status quo is preferable? because it seems that following those criticisms that would be the other option rather than revolution - but you suggest that revolution is the way to make the book truly great, because that's in line with your own prejudices. also you are getting adorably pissy and personal. 
Neurosis fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Nov 30, 2017 |
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Nov 30, 2017 15:22
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Neurosis posted:would it be enough for you to retract your criticisms if it more consciously considered the criticisms it was making and presented arguments as to why, notwithstanding those failings, the status quo is preferable? or, as i suspect, is the failure that really irks you that it didn't take the opportunity to carve a path in line with your own prejudices? also you are getting adorably pissy and personal. You're telling me to analyse a hypothetical version of Lud-in-the-Mist that makes a more eloquent defense of the status quo. That is very stupid, because it's useless to try to analyse texts that dont exist. There is only one extant and published version of Lud-in-the-Mist.
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Nov 30, 2017 15:26
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I'm not. You're saying the book fails because it doesn't take the step to revolution. I'm asking you if that is the only thing that would be acceptable to you as what follows from criticisms of the 'bourgeois'. Or is it simply inescapable that that is what should follow from what is built-up in the book - it has been quite a while since I read Lud-in-the-Mist.
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Nov 30, 2017 15:29
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Neurosis posted:I'm not. "would it be enough for you to retract your criticisms if the book more consciously considered the criticisms it was making and presented arguments as to why, notwithstanding those failings, the status quo is preferable?" Here you are asking if i would retract my criticisms if the book made a better defence of the status quo. The question is stupid, because there is no such version of the book and thus it's impossible to discuss. Neurosis posted:You're saying the book fails because it doesn't take the step to revolution. What I stated was that the book fails because it chooses safe comfort instead of harsh reality (embodied as the black abyss found in the heart of Faerie). Having the incompetent ruling class be overthrown would perhaps been the more ethical and truthful ending, but it's impossible to say, because there is only one version of Lud-in-the-Mist. The other solution is to read the happy ending as false, even satirical; it's a merry fantasy that serves to soothe anxieties and hide unresolved conflicts. This is what Mirrlees herself suggests indirectly, when she twice tells the reader not to trust happy epitaphs. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Nov 30, 2017 |
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Nov 30, 2017 15:41
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what i was getting at is that it seemed that the book only failed for you because it did not give the ending that would be consistent with your apparent political predilections (because that criticism would really just amount to personal preference), and i was loosely framing something which would be opposite to your apparent politics to try to draw that out better. perhaps i didn't frame that point perfectly well, although i think in context it was hardly as difficult to understand as you pretend. that was the impression i had from reading your review, but after this discussion i can appreciate better the position you have and that someone with a differing set of values could have the same problem. i will think about whether i agree with this when i reread the book.
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Nov 30, 2017 16:03
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:I presented my much more critical opinion here. It makes me sad that you no longer enjoy a book you enjoyed so much on first reading =( BravestOfTheLamps posted:
I think it's more signpost than anything else, but I tend to a sexualized, autobiographical reading of Lud; On at least one level the book is an "It's ok that I'm gay" love letter to Mirrlees' dad, and I read the ending as, at least on one level, an attempt to reconcile Faerie sexuality with bourgeois conventionality. It's ok for the town to just accept the Fae and move on. Love your kids anyway, even if they taste Fae fruit. They don't have to be outcasts. Welcome them back. It's a prescriptive ending, not descriptive. Mirrlees tells the reader not to trust that happy ending because she isn't sure it's possible (but, of course, in hindsight, looking back, we can tell it was). That's just one level though of course not all levels; Mirrlees isn't Lewis and Lud isn't a pure allegory. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Nov 30, 2017 |
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Nov 30, 2017 16:23
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Stanfield posted:Are there any good/mediocre/just not offensively bad books that aren't about epic adventures or wars or evil empires or whatever and are just about a group of people hanging out in a cool Fantasy/Sci-Fi world? I'd point to Ithnalin's Restoration by Lawrence Watt - Evans. It's set in the background to one of his other books; the other book is all world shaking magic drama, this book is just "random apprentice is trying to fix her Master's magical accident so she can complete her apprenticeship and get a job, but she can't get any help because all the big important wizards are busy dealing with a crisis." It's very slice-of-life-in-magical-kingdom fantasy.
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Nov 30, 2017 16:40
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Sanderson-wise, I'd say just read his  magnum opus, the Stormlight Archive series. If you really, really dig it, go back to the Mistborn books and see if you can tolerate them.
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Nov 30, 2017 16:42
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The only Sanderson I've read is The Way of Kings. It read like Sanderson was deeply in love with someone else's fantasy world and wrote dedicated fanfiction of it. There's no subtlety with regards to his fantasy elements.
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Nov 30, 2017 17:01
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Is Sanderson an author who takes pains to have his magical fantasy explicitly explained and internally consistent? Like it has to follow a well-defined rules system? vv hmm ok I will probably avoid him for now then. I used to love that spergy magic stuff in fantasy but one day recently I had an epiphany like 'its literal magic not physics, who cares,' I think around the time I reread LOTR. It does seem challenging to write a magic story without hard rules that doesn't end up relying on deus ex magicka to resolve plot, if the magic is powerful. Best to leave it ambiguous and unpredictable. my bony fealty fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Nov 30, 2017 |
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Nov 30, 2017 17:04
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my bony fealty posted:Is Sanderson an author who takes pains to have his magical fantasy explicitly explained and internally consistent? Like it has to follow a well-defined rules system? Yes, gods yes.
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Nov 30, 2017 17:05
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Any people writing like Pratchett recently? Terry, not Ann.
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Nov 30, 2017 17:14
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my bony fealty posted:Is Sanderson an author who takes pains to have his magical fantasy explicitly explained and internally consistent? Like it has to follow a well-defined rules system? Not only that but it's not hyperbole to say that a a large chunk of the plot in his books tends to be directly linked to said rules.
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Nov 30, 2017 17:24
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papa horny michael posted:Any people writing like Pratchett recently? Terry, not Ann. Nobody was writing like him ever, but they sure as hell wanted to.
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Nov 30, 2017 17:57
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It's funny because I thought that would be right up my alley, but when not in like a video game that sort of thing started driving me up the wall real quick. I get a weird soulless vibe from Sanderson too, can't really put my finger on it though The Chad Jihad fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Nov 30, 2017 |
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Nov 30, 2017 18:03
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The Chad Jihad posted:I get a weird soulless vibe from Sanderson too, can't really put my finger on it though It just ends up so generic like a madlib.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:09
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Jedit posted:Nobody was writing like him ever, but they sure as hell wanted to. Recasting the question to "Is anyone writing non-horrible f/sf humor," because yes, nobody else can or could be Pratchett, I'd recommend Christopher Moore and Jasper Fforde.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:14
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I can second the recommendation for Fforde, he's quite clever. Jon Swartzwelder is a dude who wrote for the Simpsons a bit and also wrote some SF parody mysteries starting with The Time Machine Did It. They're closer to farce than anything else, where Pratchett was writing light-toned fantasy with humorous elements and more serious themes hiding there somewhere. And in celebration of the recent remake of Murder on the Orient Express, B&N has put together a list of SF "locked room" mysteries. There's several on that list I want to read, especially Six Wakes and The Big Time, though for very different reasons in each case.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:19
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A3th3r posted:not a fan of Brandon Sanderson because of what he did to the Dune series. By the way, a good kid's series of books, if you have a child in mind that seems like a reader, is the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. It is basically a YA version of LOTR and then suddenly turns out it's Christian apologia and C.S. Lewis actually believed all of that! but Voyage of the Dawn Treader was fantastic and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was obviously also great. So I would absolutely have a kid read it but I would also not bother buying them the last three books in the series because man was it ever ham-handed even if I had never smelled a metaphorical pig in my life at that point
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Nov 30, 2017 18:20
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I was a big Sanderson fan not that long ago, but I think it was only the avalanche I really enjoyed and it just takes too long to get to it in a massive fantasy novel.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:21
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Thranguy posted:Christopher Moore and Jasper Fforde. drat. As they're what have sated me previously. Thanks for the Jon Swartzwelder recommendation, occamsnailfile. He's someone who doesn't pop up enough. Any opinions on Tom Robbins?
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Nov 30, 2017 18:23
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papa horny michael posted:
Haven't actually read Robbins since high school but from what I remember he was like a Vonnegut-lite. Christopher Moore with a lot of extra raunchy sex. (I realize that's chronologically backwards).
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Nov 30, 2017 18:26
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papa horny michael posted:Any people writing like Pratchett recently? Terry, not Ann. No. If you back out to "lightly comic sci-fi/fantasy" as a whole I'd go with Fforde and Moore as already mentioned, Johannes Cabal by Howard, maybe the better A. Lee Martinez books like Automatic Detective. Fforde is the closest but he's somewhat polarizing. If I remember right, there are people who consider him essentially a Douglas Adams ripoff... I am not one of those people. Pratchett dying practically killed off an entire sub-genre. Plus the 80s-era zany fantasy stuff from e.g. Aspirin is long gone.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:28
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Narnia is so hit-or-miss for me. Like, even when I read it for the first time (we're talking single digit age here) I didn't get why they spent fifty pages talking about how they couldn't see the sun undeground and I didn't get why random people were condemned to die when the world ended rather than being saved like their family members I still like the Magician's Nephew too, if only for the imagery of a sweet peaceful wood with dozens of portals to other worlds, Narnia and England being only two of them.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:35
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Yeah, A. Lee Martinez is no Pratchett but he's funny. I liked Gil's All-Fright Diner. It's nothing to write a paper about but it has some decent chuckles.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:36
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Rough Lobster posted:I still like the Magician's Nephew too, if only for the imagery of a sweet peaceful wood with dozens of portals to other worlds, Narnia and England being only two of them. Charn was another really stark image though it has been literally thirty years since I last read it--but the silent, dead world stuck with me, and the origin of the White Witch from that was actually a clever bit. The portal woods were a huge possibility I almost felt was wasted when nobody from the series ever went back--so many worlds to explore! I feel like Diana Wynne Jones was somewhat inspired by that in crafting her 'nine worlds river' setup, particularly in The Lives of Christopher Chant though I couldn't tell you specifically why.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:43
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Thanks, y'all. I was trolled hard once by someone recommending Carlton Mellick
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Nov 30, 2017 18:53
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occamsnailfile posted:I can second the recommendation for Fforde, he's quite clever. Jasper Fforde can't even aspire to be Tom Holt.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:54
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Fforde's the guy who writes Troper fiction, right?
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Nov 30, 2017 18:57
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Is there a reason i love K.J.Parker but dislike Tom Holt?
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Nov 30, 2017 19:25
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Narnia is so hit-or-miss for me. Like, even when I read it for the first time (we're talking single digit age here) I didn't get why they spent fifty pages talking about how they couldn't see the sun undeground and I didn't get why random people were condemned to die when the world ended rather than being saved like their family members I never managed to read the whole series is my definitive memory of it is this BBC miniseries adaptation of the whole series that the library had on VHS when I was a kid. They were pretty dang good from what I remember, upping the spooky level and toning down the religious angle quite a bit.
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Nov 30, 2017 19:34
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Jedit posted:Jasper Fforde can't even aspire to be Tom Holt. I've never been able to get into Holt. Maybe I tried the wrong books though. What's a good starting point for him?
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Nov 30, 2017 19:42
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papa horny michael posted:Thanks, y'all. I was trolled hard once by someone recommending Carlton Mellick Man I like Mellick, but recommending him to someone asking for comedic fantasy is some next-level trolling.
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Nov 30, 2017 20:21
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A3th3r posted:not a fan of Brandon Sanderson because of what he did to the Dune series. By the way, a good kid's series of books, if you have a child in mind that seems like a reader, is the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. It is basically a YA version of LOTR Narnia is familiar territory... when I was a kid in Norway in the 1980s we didn't have anything like the selection of SF/F in our own language as we do now [1], but Narnia was one of the ubiquitously translated things. My own kids are all readers already; well, the three-year-old is figuring out how to read individual words, but both the six- and the nine-year-old are heavily into stuff like Horrid Henry, Captain Underpants, and the 13-story Treehouse series... we've done a little David Walliams and Roald Dahl and so on; haven't really branched out into "real" fantasy or SF yet (although the stuff they do read has a good deal of fantastical elements in it) but there is now a huge amount of YA fantasy around in Norwegian and it's extremely popular among older kids, so the risks of them following in my footsteps is pretty high. [1] Which basically forced me to learn how to read English by the time I was 12 or 13, since I had exhausted all the Norwegian nerd-genre stuff that was easily available to me.
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Nov 30, 2017 22:03
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I'd point to Ithnalin's Restoration by Lawrence Watt - Evans. I searched for this book and got no results aside from this forum topic and one other blog mentioning it. It seems to not be available from Amazon or any other book-sellers.
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Nov 30, 2017 22:43
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https://www.amazon.com/Ithanalins-Restoration-Legend-Legends-Ethshar-ebook/dp/B00LTW1EVW Sorry, dropped an A from the title
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Nov 30, 2017 22:50
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Megazver posted:Sanderson-wise, I'd say just read his I actually like Mistborn better than Stormlight but I have never been a big fan of the a zillion super huge books to tell a story format. I would start with some thing faster like Mistborn or if you want super fast The Emperor's Soul.
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Nov 30, 2017 22:51
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:I actually like Mistborn better than Stormlight but I have never been a big fan of the a zillion super huge books to tell a story format. I would start with some thing faster like Mistborn or if you want super fast The Emperor's Soul. The Emperor's Soul is pretty much the best work he's done so far. It's also very tonally different than a lot of his other work. It's a much more thoughtful, sedate piece.
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Nov 30, 2017 22:55
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Strategic Tea posted:Corporate getta load of this guy
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Nov 30, 2017 23:44
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I'm nowhere near finished with Oathbringer yet but I think Sanderson has definitely improved on the avalanche thing. There's been enough interesting twists and turns in the first 40% of the book that I can't really figure out what he's got planned for the last 20%.
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