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Ccs posted:So Ready Player One is really terrible. The movie can only improve on the source material. Care to toxx that?
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Mar 9, 2018 23:26
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Submarine Sandpaper posted:it's the ship. That's why there's no blood and also why it didn't use the mag field to take off the helmet. The field is the smear. No idea about the transfer of consciousness wrt query though Ok yeah three readings 1) it's the passenger 2) it's the ship 3) it's something else All three appear semi-valid but all have weaknesses; the passenger didn't start whatever it was, something arguably caused the ship to start breaking down, there's no direct evidence of an invasive presence; It could be a contagion but the ship could be a contagion; it's ambiguous whether or not the passenger is a human being in the same way we would consider earth natives "human" and ditto on the spaceport guards; etc. Basically everything in the story is an unreliable narrator and everything is alien to one another and nothing understands.
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Mar 9, 2018 23:42
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My opinion on the story : ship ate him, and since that other dude saw the same weird smear thing, here's infected with whatever alien nanite thingie the ship used to eat the other dude.
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Mar 10, 2018 00:33
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Welcome to the hosed up world of Brian Evenson, folks  .
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Mar 10, 2018 00:44
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Alright, I finished reading Brust's The Good Guys a couple days ago, and I'm eager to hear what other people thought of it. To be honest, I don't think I liked it that much. The book pretty clearly is trying to grapple with the question of whether or not the main characters are doing the right thing: are they the good guys by solving the murders? I didn't feel like there was any real resolution on that front. A bunch of people got killed, but I never had any context on who they were; all I know is that they died, and then somebody would say "oh this person was kind of a dick". We'd get first person segments from the perspective of the murderer, but we never really learn anything about him; the story literally cuts away when the murderer is talking about why he did what he did. So when I don't care about the victims and I don't care about the killer, it's hard for me to get invested in the question of "is stopping the killer right or wrong", because I have no idea; I have no context for who anybody is, I have no reason to root for one side over the other. I would have loved to learn more about the main characters, but everything about the plot just kind of fell flat for me. It's a bummer because I've really enjoyed the Vlad Taltos novels, and I was hoping for something as engaging as those, and I didn't get it at all.
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Mar 10, 2018 03:37
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MockingQuantum posted:Care to toxx that? Well the book got good reviews from everyone for completely incomprehensible reasons* so it's gonna be hard to objectively compare critical reactions to the book vs. movie. At least Spielberg has storytelling experiencing whereas Cline never wastes an opportunity to dispel tension as soon as the slightest possibility of it is introduced. *Must've been a badass press junket.
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Mar 10, 2018 05:58
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I got to say general buttbutter, the cover of the next book is fantastic.
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Mar 10, 2018 06:00
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Yea, that short was structured exactly like the Banks one, but it doubled down on the vagueness. The prose was sparser than Banks' and I never got the sense that the passenger had much character.
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Mar 10, 2018 06:13
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gvibes posted:I got to say general buttbutter, the cover of the next book is fantastic. Actually Ibn Battuta was a cool dude: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Battuta
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Mar 10, 2018 08:46
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The Folio Society has announced Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.
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Mar 10, 2018 15:03
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Haven't been keeping up with the thread but I recently came back to Iain M. Banks and gave more Culture novels a shot. I'm going to post some spoiler-free reviews with spoilers at the bottom for the ones I've read (in order I read them): Player of Games It's been at least five years since I read this, but it was my favorite one. I found this story a lot tighter than the others I read. It had fewer extraneous components and characters, it had no big crazy space battles that I got bored reading, and it managed to just make a tight story in the Culture setting. It wrote about a game where the rules were never clearly defined, which is hard to do, but it made reading about the matches still interesting somehow. Use of Weapons This was pretty good, and probably my second favorite. This had much more of a space opera feel. There were tons of things going on, and it's been a few years since I read it, so I no longer remember all of what was going on. I think the main plot was a bit weaker, mostly because I no longer remember what the main plot actually was. It was still good enough, and the characterization felt mostly solid. The backstory woven in worked pretty well. My biggest gripe was probably what people like most about the book, which was the ending. I didn't feel it was earned. I just don't buy that the protagonist was actually the bad guy all along. It's an issue where the author tells us that it was him, but going back and recalling everything you've already read with that knowledge in mind...it doesn't really ring true to me. He saw a way to work that cool twist in there, and he put it in, but it just strained my immersion more than anything else. Matter This was my least favorite. Iain M. Banks tends to do a lot of "Show and Tell" in his writing, and this book opening up with all Show and no Tell. He did this JUST long enough that I felt hopelessly confused. Why were there weird crab aliens on this planet with no technology? Even knowing the Culture setting, it made no sense. Just as I gave up and checked Wikipedia really fast to make sure I wasn't lost, in the next chapter or so, he went into a insanely long info-dump about shell worlds. If he was going to do the info-dump, he should have just done it earlier or something? This book had some fairly strong characters, the antagonist and Furbin (I listened to Audiobook so I can't spell anyone's name) were pretty good characters. The female protagonist wasn't great, and this is turning into an issue I have with many Culture novels, because her plot arc was basically "SC Agent who is called into duty, and she goes and does her job." Yes, there were some personal elements thrown in there, but ultimately she was just an SC Agent. Furbin and his servant's arc ended up being a journey into the culture and back, which honestly was kind of lame They just saw a bunch of cool and wild stuff outside their planet, then came back with cool armor to give them some reason to fight. If you took that armor off them, they'd have had no business in the climax of the story. The entire conflict between Oroman and Loesp was the most interesting thing happening, and it ended up resolving basically unceremoniously and offscreen. The big dumb object coming to life and taking over as the final antagonist sucked and was incredibly boring. The sacrifice the SC Agent made meant little to nothing, because she was backed up anyway. The story had like 3-4 more alien races than it needed. I think this was part of the point, to show how overly complicated it gets with shell worlds, but it made for muddled reading. The choice to have the ending be what it was basically ruined the book for me. Going up to that I was pretty into it, but after that ending I just can't say I enjoyed the experience. Surface Detail This was my third favorite, and it would be more or less tied with Use of Weapons if not for the terrible ending. This book was kind of bloated. There were a few too many characters, and the characters that were in it had a bit too much going on. The setup for each character's plot was pretty compelling, and at first I really liked the characters that were in the virtual hell. Similar to Matter (but with a totally different execution) the ending ruined the book. It's hard to say that the ending itself ruined the book, but the fact that Banks had to resort to an ending like that just shows that he couldn't work enough into the actual story. It's similar to Surface Detail in that he set up something that seemed very compelling, but when I realized he couldn't actually execute an ending from that setup, it fell totally flat and left me disappointed. The book ends with a thing like on the Sandlot, where a narrator just tells us what happened to each character. He also goes in and tells us stuff that the author couldn't manage to actually work into the plot or reveal through the plot. This was just really terrible. Yaim (spelling?) was a completely superfluous character. She wasn't interesting and nothing she did really mattered. The whole sideplot of her going to the Bulbitiate and whatever else she did ended up not mattering at all. All of her little backstory about wanting to defend habitats from attacks, being androgynous, and looking for Ludega was just pointless. The narrator reveals she was an SC plant into Quietus. Okay? I didn't care, that did nothing for me, and it obviously didn't matter for the plot, since it wasn't in the actual story. The character introduced like 65-70% into the story in the spaceship fighting the smatter. Completely pointless and uninteresting. That entire battle was boring and dragged on forever. I never cared about this character, and it was a chore to read through her parts. I'm glad she got mentioned in the epilogue!!! The Veppers/Ludega thing was pretty good. Veppers was a tad comically over-the-top, but I still kind of liked him somewhat even if it was just for him being such a dick. I feel he was written well because I was able to sympathize with him despite being a total monster. His whole machinations were pretty complex but actually worked more or less. His Sandlot-ending actually worked for me since he'd died. I was curious to know how history would remember him, and the Sandlot voice told me that. Ludega was slightly less good. She felt a bit less like a whole character. I honestly don't ever buy someone having a chance to be a Culture citizen and rejecting it. Imagine waking up on an orbital and having the ability to do whatever you want in a utopia and saying, "No, take me back to the shithole I died on." This is meant to be a strong character choice for her to do, but I still don't really buy it. Having her so hand-tied the whole time started to feel tedious, and in the end the ships and the Culture gave her a "wink wink" and basically equipped her to kill Veppers anyway. This is another issue in Culture books where I feel the omniscient ability of the Culture gets in the way of good plots. At no point was Ludega really on her own or did she have a sense of true agency, and everything that ultimately happened was oversaw and controlled by various Culture elements. The reveal with Yaskin was kind of stupid and felt tacked on and fake to me. Her Sandlot-ending was really boring.e Vatoy was pretty hit or miss with me. Many of those battles were intensely boring to read. His tricky stuff with being a traitor or not didn't really work for me within the plot. The reveal that he was the guy from Use of Weapons all along was...I don't know. I can buy it because Vatoy didn't have much personality, but it also was kind of a cheap reveal to me. It was pretty neutral to me, and I don't think it helps or hurts the story. The hell characters were actually my favorite part for a while. The hell was over the top, and the hell scenes dragged a bit too much at times, but I found these characters' dilemmas the most interesting. I liked Prim and his decision to save himself rather than being the typical book hero who ALWAYS does the selfless thing. I think the lady trapped in hell ended up getting too deep into random stuff happening though. Becoming the angel of death and taking to the überdemon was a bit much. Having a whole life in a refuge was too much. This could have been paired down. The whole story could have been trimmed a lot and these arcs would have fit in there in a cut-down state without feeling too short. I don't really know if I want to go read all the other ones right now. I might chill for a while and read one every so often when I'm looking for something else to read and don't have anything. I enjoy these books despite my criticisms, but it can be frustrating that there is always some pretty major fault in most of the stories. I noticed also that in both Matter and Surface Detail he uses omniscient narrator. I found this pretty weird, and it didn't really add much to the story for me. He still had pretty much "POV characters," but would occasionally just let us know what someone like Yaskin was thinking. Another huge gripe I have with Banks' writing is the frequency which he uses characters blacking out and waking up. He then subjects us to the character waking up to start a chapter, and we have to go on for pages of the character slowly remembering who they are, where they last were, what they were doing, etc. etc. I feel like in Matter and Surface Detail this happened 5-10 times in each book, and it became incredibly tedious. I do appreciate that for all their faults, these books are character-focused sci-fi. For all the spergy worldbuilding and space battles Banks sometimes lets happen, he never really does lose sight of his characters, and he tries to always keep things character-focused.
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Mar 10, 2018 17:13
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What are goon thoughts on Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana compared to his other novels? I've really enjoyed most of his that I've read, notably Under Heaven, Sailing to Sarantium/Lord of Emperors, A Song for Arbonne. I recently read Children of Earth and Sky and was disappointed, and before that tried to read the first Finovar book and gave up after a third of it, it was boring. Children of Earth and Sky felt like half a novel, rushed and incomplete despite it's respectable page length. angel opportunity posted:Use of Weapons It has been years since I read it but I never thought that Banks was portraying the protagonist as inherently evil or bad, but willing to do evil or bad things in pursuit of victory at all costs, and the twist showing that he recognizes that in himself and at the end is horrified at himself for what he sees in the mirror of his life from what he has done and is deeply remorseful, and wants forgiveness/absolution. Having trouble putting my thoughts into words this morning but you get the idea.
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Mar 10, 2018 17:29
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PlushCow posted:
Again, it's been too long since I've read it also, but I think the sheer depravity of what he did was what made it ring false for me. To make the bone chair is just like 5 or 6 levels beyond something like "Doing whatever it takes to win" for me. I just didn't buy that anyone who could do something like that would be able to redeem himself. It's like...if he had made it something less over the top, I probably would have bought it. He wanted that really visceral image and shock factor though, which is what helped that twist really resonate for a lot of people, but for me it just put it into the territory of not believable
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Mar 10, 2018 18:11
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angel opportunity posted:Again, it's been too long since I've read it also, but I think the sheer depravity of what he did was what made it ring false for me. To make the bone chair is just like 5 or 6 levels beyond something like "Doing whatever it takes to win" for me. I just didn't buy that anyone who could do something like that would be able to redeem himself. It's like...if he had made it something less over the top, I probably would have bought it. He wanted that really visceral image and shock factor though, which is what helped that twist really resonate for a lot of people, but for me it just put it into the territory of not believable That was essentially the point. He was the eponymous weapon that the Culture has no compunction in using. His use of an unusual weapon, made him an ideal candidate to be a weapon of the Culture.
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Mar 10, 2018 18:28
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Started reading The Fifth Season. A lot of stuff wasn't making any drat sense until the... twist? Is revealed. That was a good one. Really liking this so far.
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Mar 10, 2018 18:56
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Right...but just by being in his head for the whole book, I simply didn't believe that this guy is the guy who did that thing. There wasn't enough hint of it in the way he thought or acted.
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Mar 10, 2018 18:56
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Matter is deliberately extremely disorienting on the first read, because the whole point of the book is about how there's these different levels of peoples and civilisations at different powers, and suddenly things that you think are incredibly important can not matter at all to the people above you, and he builds that into every layer... the shells of the shellworld, the social strata of the characters, the civilisations of the universe... and ultimately, as it turns out, the narrative of the book itself, when suddenly a plot that's been brewing on a higher level that you're barely aware of drops in and sweeps aside every story that you thought mattered, to smack you with the same feeling that all these characters have been suffering. I will say that I enjoyed the last 20% a lot more on my second readthrough when I wasn't too busy being steamrolled.
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Mar 10, 2018 19:17
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Started reading The Fifth Season. It gets real dumb real fast, my rogga. I had to read it for my MFA and around 80% of us hated the second person gimmick and the "Omelas" twist. I never felt like the world was a real place with it's own culture. The closest to interesting was the way the tremor school was structured, like the ninja clans in Naruto, but with mandatory sex with people who don't want to have sex and aren't attracted to each other. Jemisin spoke later that year to my class and all she wanted to talk about were the Trump supporters who personally wanted her dead and how we all needed to #resist. I didn't feel compelled to read the sequels. MartingaleJack fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Mar 10, 2018 |
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Mar 10, 2018 19:25
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angel opportunity posted:Right...but just by being in his head for the whole book, I simply didn't believe that this guy is the guy who did that thing. There wasn't enough hint of it in the way he thought or acted. Same here, I found the ending to be so laughably over the top and at odds with the character's voice that it left a really bad aftertaste about the whole book
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Mar 10, 2018 19:36
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BananaNutkins posted:my rogga. lol seriously
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Mar 10, 2018 20:54
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andrew smash posted:lol seriously I don't think fantasy euphemisms ever work. That one got on my nerves more than most.
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Mar 10, 2018 21:00
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Works on commission? No, money down
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Mar 10, 2018 21:14
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Burning Rain posted:Same here, I found the ending to be so laughably over the top and at odds with the character's voice that it left a really bad aftertaste about the whole book Use of Weapons: Zakalwe doesn't seem like that kinda guy because he's had his mind wiped repeatedly. The price for his service is the location of his surviving sister, who hates and fears him because she knows who he really is and what he did. This loop isn't the first time he's done this, and it's not the first time the Culture has done this to him, which Sma knows, but she goes through with it anyway. Zakalwe doesn't have the information in his head as to the specific monstrous thing he's done, but his methods and means are just as extreme. It's why we see him performing the assassination of the genocidal dictator earlier in the book, unrelated to the Culture's wants and desires; he basically did it for his own personal satisfaction, because he could. Zakalwe has always been a monster, he just gets reset whenever SC needs him again. That's the punchline. What's worse than mutilating a crippled child? Taking that mutilator to your breast and repeatedly brainwashing him so you don't have to get your hands dirty to protect your own personal utopia. Unrelated, I reread Revelation Space the other week. There's some rough prose in this book. I wasn't able to find anything to that effect, but it really feels like this was a serialized story before it was collected into a novel - there's a bunch of "as you knows," chapters repeat things we just learned between each other, and sometimes even within the chapters themselves. The plots feel pretty disjointed even after they've all woven into each other, and the characters are still pretty flat. "Behold, the wedding gun" is still a great line, though.
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Mar 10, 2018 22:17
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How's Ancilliary Justice?
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Mar 10, 2018 22:20
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team overhead smash posted:How's Ancilliary Justice? I enjoyed it, found the sequel somewhat plodding and didn’t read the third book.
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Mar 10, 2018 22:44
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team overhead smash posted:How's Ancilliary Justice? I tried it three different times and never made it more than a hundred pages in. Found it to be terribly overhyped and not very good. 
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Mar 10, 2018 23:42
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Ccs posted:So Ready Player One is really terrible. The movie can only improve on the source material. It really is. I have a thick skin for poo poo books and for gently caress sakes I read a lot of litrpg but even in that genre RPO stands out as utter crap.
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Mar 11, 2018 00:42
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I thought it wasn't bad, as far as the virtual reality sub-genre goes. The thing that annoyed me most was that it half-heartedly included a dumb message about not escaping into a vr world just because that theme was within easy reach, and the rest of the story didn't reinforce the message in any way. I might have had a more positive experience than most because I was pretty sure it was supposed to be schlocky like Hackers the movie, and l got the audio version read by Will Wheaton, who convinced me it was definitely intended to be as schlocky as I thought. The last book I liked that most forums people seemed to hate was the first Hunger Games, and I still don't understand that one.
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Mar 11, 2018 00:56
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PlushCow posted:What are goon thoughts on Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana compared to his other novels? Tigana was one of the first Kay novels I read, I'd put it right up there with Sarantium/Lord of Emperors as my favourites. And if you haven't checked out Lions of Al-Rassan, it's also terrific.
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Mar 11, 2018 00:57
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BananaNutkins posted:I thought it wasn't bad, as far as the virtual reality sub-genre goes. The thing that annoyed me most was that it half-heartedly included a dumb message about not escaping into a vr world just because that theme was within easy reach, and the rest of the story didn't reinforce the message in any way. Something that's schlocky can still have narrative tension though. RPO has none, because the author diffuses any chance of it at the end of every paragraph that introduces a possible conflict. The guy might be trapped in a slave labor help-desk forever? No, actually he bought secret company passwords and wired himself money before getting captured, etc. It's a "Just as planned" except the "Just as planned" always happens immediately after the initial setup.
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Mar 11, 2018 03:57
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BananaNutkins posted:I thought it wasn't bad, as far as the virtual reality sub-genre goes. The thing that annoyed me most was that it half-heartedly included a dumb message about not escaping into a vr world just because that theme was within easy reach, and the rest of the story didn't reinforce the message in any way. Ok so positive=ready player one, the hunger games; negative=Ursula leguin , nk jemisin. rockin this thread like a hurricane
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Mar 11, 2018 04:02
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i havent read hunger games, but im not a big fan of books designed specifically for teenage girls
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Mar 11, 2018 04:30
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Doorknob Slobber posted:i havent read hunger games, but im not a big fan of books designed specifically for teenage girls It’s not? Are you saying that any YA book with a female protagonist is aimed at girls?
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Mar 11, 2018 04:33
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Proteus Jones posted:It’s not? if you include all the romancy crap that was explained to me in your description then probably mostly?
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Mar 11, 2018 04:37
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I think the first Hunger Games book was a fun read
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Mar 11, 2018 04:38
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Like I said I haven't gotten past it being explained to me by my spouse, but young adult books as a genre tend to have issues. As another example I had fun reading Revenger, it had some neat ideas but it was almost entirely a bad book specifically written for teenage boys.
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Mar 11, 2018 04:51
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The Hunger Games was pretty fun and good
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Mar 11, 2018 05:05
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I kind of enjoyed the Hunger Games trilogy when I first read them, but the feelings evaporated pretty fast after I set them aside and now I feel nothing about those books, except that the box set I got them in still looks nice. When I first read The Fifth Season, I liked it because of the perspective twist, which might be why The Obelisk Gate was much less interesting. It might also be because I read both books as part of Hugo voting; nothing on The Fifth Season's ballot was amazing, but I much preferred Too Like the Lightning and A Close and Common Orbit to The Obelisk Gate. I haven't touched The Stone Sky or made up my mind on the series as a whole yet.
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Mar 11, 2018 05:11
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I've only seen the movie but I thought the idea that they had to fake a teen romance to win over the crowd while in fact just being desperate for their loving lives was pretty good.
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Mar 11, 2018 06:16
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| # ? May 22, 2024 19:23 |
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I never had an issue with the romance element of The Hunger Games as much as I had an issue with the leader of a rebellion fought with machine guns using a magic sci-fi bow like Hawkeye had
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Mar 11, 2018 06:17
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