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fritz posted:Do you mean deckled edges? After googling, yes I do. Maybe it was a stylistic choice by the publisher then.
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Mar 12, 2018 18:45
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Microcline posted:Book of the New Sun is Dying Earth, a subgenre it shares with Jack Vance and M. John Harrison's Viriconium, although the religious layering is Wolfe's own twist.
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Mar 12, 2018 19:17
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cis autodrag posted:impulse-bought a first edition of book of dust part 1 (the His Dark Materials sequel) at a cute little used book shop that had literal piles of books on the floors and cats running around. it was like some place out of a movie. it appears to have had some printing issues (the different sub-bindings have different width pages so it's jaggy looking) thus it landing in a 2nd hand shop while in unread condition. i'll post a review when I manage to finish (life has a way of keeping me from reading). The copy I bought also has those jaggy looking pages. I assumed it was an aesthetic choice. MockingQuantum posted:Care to toxx that? So the reviews for the RPO movie so far are actually very positive and everywhere is saying it improves immensely on the book. Spielberg must've injected some actual tension into the plot that wasn't at all conveyed through the lovely prose: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ready_player_one/
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Mar 12, 2018 22:02
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It's Spielberg. He's dramatically more competent than Cline.
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Mar 12, 2018 22:14
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Ccs posted:The copy I bought also has those jaggy looking pages. I assumed it was an aesthetic choice. I'm not all that surprised, honestly. I read the book after the movie was announced, and my feeling the entire time was not just "if anybody could save this, it'd be Spielberg" but actually "this is just the sort of sub-par putty that Spielberg could shape into a pretty decent movie." If he played kind of fast-and-loose with the source material, I could see the movie being pretty good on the merits of the little world details, a lot of which were pretty interesting when divorced from the spergy manchild geek-gatekeeper wish-fulfillment.
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Mar 12, 2018 23:05
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Ccs posted:The copy I bought also has those jaggy looking pages. I assumed it was an aesthetic choice. The Guardian is making GBS threads on it: The Guardian posted:"Unfortunately, Ready Player One has a noticeable girl problem: it can’t see female characters as just other people. For as skilled and resourceful as Art3mis/Samantha (Olivia Cooke) is, her avatar is that of an impossible pixie dream girl – a creature with a svelte body, anime-inspired big eyes, weapons training and the person who knows and loves almost reference Wade likes to make. Of course, she’s damaged with a birthmark on her face, and he’s the only nice guy who can see that she’s truly beautiful. Samantha is the artificially programed Eve to Wade’s Adam, but worse because she never gets the chance to sin." 
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Mar 12, 2018 23:58
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DACK FAYDEN posted:I hadn't heard of Viriconium before this thread and I definitely second/third/whatever that recommendation if you liked BotNS. I liked it a lot. I only found out about it by reading Mieville interviews. It's kind of hit-or-miss but it's a big missing link that explains where everyone else in SF&F is mined their ideas from. It's like how Dungeons and Dragons makes a lot more sense after reading Tales of the Dying Earth.
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Mar 13, 2018 00:30
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Not a real criticism. Do girls who play mmos usually pick uglier version of themselves? The review attacks a female character for being attractive. So attractive that how dare she have image issues because of a highly visible birth defect because she's so attractive it shouldnt matter. I think an ugly person wrote this review.
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Mar 13, 2018 00:51
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BananaNutkins posted:Not a real criticism. Do girls who play mmos usually pick uglier version of themselves? The review attacks a female character for being attractive. So attractive that how dare she have image issues because of a highly visible birth defect because she's so attractive it shouldnt matter. I think an ugly person wrote this review. It's more that she loves and respects the main character for no reason whatsoever. It's standard male wish fulfillment.
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Mar 13, 2018 01:13
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I kinda don't like Viriconium because of how cynical it all comes across, but A Storm of Wings has some of the most compelling writing in SFF. Love the weird immortal guy who shows up in the first two tho. Whatever his name was.
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Mar 13, 2018 01:33
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cis autodrag posted:It's more that she loves and respects the main character for no reason whatsoever. It's standard male wish fulfillment. It's double wish-fulfillment--he gets the hot big tiddy anime waifu AND he gets cred for being ~sensitive~ enough to "see past the surface." Honestly though I would've chalked the romance thing up as one of RPO's lesser flaws on the whole except that I also saw Ernest Cline's terrible poetry about porn and sex. He really hates sluts, you guys. But not for being women, just for not being the right, virtuous kind of women. He is eager to validate those who meet with his approval.
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Mar 13, 2018 01:42
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occamsnailfile posted:It's double wish-fulfillment--he gets the hot big tiddy anime waifu AND he gets cred for being ~sensitive~ enough to "see past the surface." This is why I stop finding guys attractive when they open their mouths, lol
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Mar 13, 2018 01:49
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my bony fealty posted:I kinda don't like Viriconium because of how cynical it all comes across, but A Storm of Wings has some of the most compelling writing in SFF. There's an unnamed character who's implied to be Cellur in In Viriconium and Viriconium Knights, although continuity is a loose thing when reality is fraying at the edges.
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Mar 13, 2018 02:52
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occamsnailfile posted:It's double wish-fulfillment--he gets the hot big tiddy anime waifu AND he gets cred for being ~sensitive~ enough to "see past the surface." This is spoiling the end of the book, not that anyone really cares, but at the end it's implied he's going to quit playing the game for the real world after his new girlfriend kisses him, even though he's just won a billion dollars and been handed over the rights to the game which he was super excited about a few pages ago. So he wont actually be banging the big tiddy anime waifu. Of course the movie only has the show birthmark girl (oh no, what a terrible disfigurement!) at the end, and can show her avatar the rest of the time. The reviews make it sound like they actually develop the theme of "it's not good to always be playing online games" which was an addendum tacked on at the end of the book with absolutely no foreshadowing (except for how utterly insufferable all the characters who play said game are.)
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Mar 13, 2018 04:49
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M John Harrison is the rare writer that no matter what genre he writes in, it is good. (Even climbers, his half autobiography/half fiction book). I love Iain Bank's Scifi stuff, but absolutely can't stand Iain Bank's normal fiction. Read Planetfall by emma newman this past weekend. Kinda hoped it was a novelization of infocom's similarily named game, was entertained regardless & enjoyed the gut-punch twist towards the end. Extra points for the hoarder main character, it was a refreshing change.
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Mar 13, 2018 05:00
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M John Harrison’s great. Of his many accomplishments, my favorite is that he wrote the absolute seediest novel about humanity’s spacefaring future I’ve ever read (Light). It’s got the best-named planet too (Motel Splendido).
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Mar 13, 2018 05:22
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Sex in myths is rarely descriptive, and if it's mentioned at all, its almost always summarized like a biblical account. "She lay with him" and that kind of thing. Who begat who is usually more important. Sanderson is just as censored and can sell to middle class protestant households and even in the bible belt. There is definitely a correlation between audience size and cultural acceptance of depicted sex and adult content. Look at how impossible it is to make a big budget R rated movie made. Lord of the rings, Harry Potter, Sandersonverse are all much more successful because they didn't include sex, but still having enough complexity that adults read them. Its the whole reason the YA genre ius always the one with explosive sales success.
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Mar 13, 2018 09:28
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occamsnailfile posted:It's double wish-fulfillment--he gets the hot big tiddy anime waifu AND he gets cred for being ~sensitive~ enough to "see past the surface." Not to mention that in the book, at least, Wade is shown cyberstalking Art3mis, constantly e-mailing and approaching her online even after she repeatedly asks him to stop and back off. It gets to the point where she's forced to block him, and yet he keeps pursuing her. And guess what? It works. He wins her over, and discovers she was pushing him away because of her own insecurities over her appearance, not because of anything he did. (And RPO's other major female character doesn't fare much better, but that's venturing into spoiler territory.)
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Mar 13, 2018 11:58
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BananaNutkins posted:Sex in myths is rarely descriptive, and if it's mentioned at all, its almost always summarized like a biblical account. "She lay with him" and that kind of thing. Who begat who is usually more important. Sanderson is just as censored and can sell to middle class protestant households and even in the bible belt. There is definitely a correlation between audience size and cultural acceptance of depicted sex and adult content. Look at how impossible it is to make a big budget R rated movie made. Lord of the rings, Harry Potter, Sandersonverse are all much more successful because they didn't include sex, but still having enough complexity that adults read them. Its the whole reason the YA genre ius always the one with explosive sales success. Yet Thrones is one of if not the top popular show out there.
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Mar 13, 2018 13:27
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BananaNutkins posted:Sex in myths is rarely descriptive, and if it's mentioned at all, its almost always summarized like a biblical account. "She lay with him" and that kind of thing. Who begat who is usually more important. Sanderson is just as censored and can sell to middle class protestant households and even in the bible belt. There is definitely a correlation between audience size and cultural acceptance of depicted sex and adult content. Look at how impossible it is to make a big budget R rated movie made. Lord of the rings, Harry Potter, Sandersonverse are all much more successful because they didn't include sex, but still having enough complexity that adults read them. Its the whole reason the YA genre ius always the one with explosive sales success. socialsecurity posted:Yet Thrones is one of if not the top popular show out there. Is the thesis here that sex *doesn't* sell? I'm confused.
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Mar 13, 2018 13:36
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I liked Seven Surrenders, though a bit less than TLtL. A weird dedication to overlong, dialogue-heavy scenes kept getting me bogged down. Palmer's writing and her awesome setting made it worth powering through. Gonna be reading the third book soon.
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Mar 13, 2018 15:09
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socialsecurity posted:Yet Thrones is one of if not the top popular show out there. also 50 Shades sold like a billion copies
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Mar 13, 2018 17:45
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andrew smash posted:M John Harrison’s great. Of his many accomplishments, my favorite is that he wrote the absolute seediest novel about humanity’s spacefaring future I’ve ever read (Light). It’s got the best-named planet too (Motel Splendido). The Centauri Device is M John Harrison's seediest novel about humanity's spacefaring future to me. Light is sorta hopeful with 7 minute clones, full in-body clonebody immersion, anything working for spaceflight once in deep space, and full VR sim tank farms run by knock-off Mark Zuckerberg aliens.
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Mar 13, 2018 17:47
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Thrones could never become as broad a success as Lord of the Rings or something that censors sex because it limits it's own audience. It connects only with an adult audience and is very successful in that arena, partly because the adult audience was ripe for exploitation after so many years of sexless fantasy.
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Mar 13, 2018 19:15
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:The Centauri Device is M John Harrison's seediest novel about humanity's spacefaring future to me. By seedy I don’t mean dystopian or pessimistic, I mean the fact that the future feels like a central Florida strip mall with a cash-only plastic surgery clinic next to a strip club and porn outlet
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Mar 13, 2018 19:53
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BananaNutkins posted:Thrones could never become as broad a success as Lord of the Rings or something that censors sex because it limits it's own audience. It connects only with an adult audience and is very successful in that arena, partly because the adult audience was ripe for exploitation after so many years of sexless fantasy. That's kinda ridiculous since Wheel of Time censors the sex dramatically and A Song of Ice and Fire started from way behind and then outsold it (Robert Jordan gave GRRM a jacket quote that GRRM said was what made the book series take off). Sex or lack thereof seems an orthogonal variable. I mean right now Game of Thrones is one of the most financially successful franchises in the world. Sure it's behind Harry Potter but that's like saying that Atlantic is smaller than the Pacific. There are about a zillion fantasy bestsellers that still undersold Game of Thrones. Given the popularity of sexualized fanfiction especially ... Just doesn't seem to hold up. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 20:14
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andrew smash So your future is Warrington, Florida with airplanes replaced by K-ships....interesting take. Nova Swing must be Chernobyl or cold-war era berlin wall for you. Empty Space wasn't as strong as Light or Nova Swing for me, the time-loop thing with hyper-cop underwhelmed. Centauri Device is not a normal space opera, just like the Committed Men isn't your standard post-apocalypse fiction. Fixated on dwarves means early M John Harrison, fixated on cats equals late era M John Harrison.
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Mar 13, 2018 20:17
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Not my future, just the one in Light. Nova Swing is interesting, it's clearly Harrison's tribute to Roadside Picnic with sort of a downbeat nostalgia to it (Saudade city was very appropriately named, to the point that I think some people in an old version of this thread thought it was too on the nose). It does bring to mind the chernobyl exclusion zone, but that shouldn't be a big shock (another recent work obviously derivative of Roadside Picnic is STALKER). I agree about Empty Space, I wasn't really sure what to make of it when it came out. I haven't reread it since and my memory of it is somewhat foggy.
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Mar 13, 2018 20:53
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Selachian posted:(And RPO's other major female character doesn't fare much better, but that's venturing into spoiler territory.) Funny enough they also totally sidestepped what could have been an interesting bit of drama by making the character have no romantic interest in the main character.
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Mar 14, 2018 02:12
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Culture Chat: What would the Culture Minds do with a human who really wanted more than anything to become a Mind? They made whatsisname in Excession into an Affronter, but one gets the impression that they would react to a human wanting to upgrade its platform to the point where it could consider itself a Mind in its own right a bit like a dog asking to borrow the car.
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Mar 14, 2018 04:50
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Kesper North posted:Culture Chat: What would the Culture Minds do with a human who really wanted more than anything to become a Mind? They made whatsisname in Excession into an Affronter, but one gets the impression that they would react to a human wanting to upgrade its platform to the point where it could consider itself a Mind in its own right a bit like a dog asking to borrow the car. They would: -do nothing or -call in the meatfucker to do things.
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Mar 14, 2018 04:54
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Pretty sure this gets mentioned in passing in Look to Windward with regard to what humans do when they decide they're done being alive. There's a reference to forming group Minds, i think. As far as I know the question of what would happen if a single human (or drone) intelligence insisted on being the seed of a new Mind all by itself remains unanswered.
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Mar 14, 2018 04:57
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Humans form groupminds, which are something different to Minds, I think. But it's apparently a popular thing to do when you want to die, join a groupmind or at least donate your memories. It may well be beyond them to alter a human mentality so much and have it be anything more than a totally new being. I think it's mentioned somewhere that humans can become drones, but it's a bit of a faux pas.
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Mar 14, 2018 05:06
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Minds exist on a pretty weird substrate that iirc involves infraspace/ultraspace, so it may not be possible to 'make' a human into a Mind without rendering them no longer recognizably human. Like a knife saying "I want to be an airliner!" — you can make it a little part of the airliner, maybe, but in no sense is it going to 'be' the plane.
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Mar 14, 2018 07:16
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General Battuta posted:Minds exist on a pretty weird substrate that iirc involves infraspace/ultraspace, so it may not be possible to 'make' a human into a Mind without rendering them no longer recognizably human. Like a knife saying "I want to be an airliner!" — you can make it a little part of the airliner, maybe, but in no sense is it going to 'be' the plane. Yeah, I figure that almost everyone loses interest when the Minds spell that out for them. I know Minds are vast unknowable incomprehensible things, and that a human consciousness is a drop in a very big bucket compared to one. But out of all the Culture's umpteen quadrillions, there's bound to have been at least one who can't get over the obsession, and probably a whole Rule 34's worth.
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Mar 14, 2018 08:10
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General Battuta posted:Minds exist on a pretty weird substrate that iirc involves infraspace/ultraspace, so it may not be possible to 'make' a human into a Mind without rendering them no longer recognizably human. Like a knife saying "I want to be an airliner!" — you can make it a little part of the airliner, maybe, but in no sense is it going to 'be' the plane. I felt like QiRia in Hydrogen Sonata was on the path to avoiding that issue. It'd be something you'd have to slowly expand into, not become overnight.
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Mar 14, 2018 09:00
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No. No more dancing! posted:I felt like QiRia in Hydrogen Sonata was on the path to avoiding that issue. It'd be something you'd have to slowly expand into, not become overnight. That makes sense, actually! Interesting. That slow expansion and self-adaptation seems like the way to go. Just because you've got the big house doesn't mean you have something for every room, to use the sort of cheap and totty metaphor one solicits on a late, tired night.
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Mar 14, 2018 09:29
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General Battuta posted:Minds exist on a pretty weird substrate that iirc involves infraspace/ultraspace That's their computational substrate, but that's not really the problem - you could render any computational process (human mind included) onto any substrate, as per Turing. The real issue is the scale and speed and breadth; the conceptual processing of the human mind probably just couldn't be stretched that far. You'd end up with a baby Mind that happens to have the memories of a human as a very small sub-process.
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Mar 14, 2018 10:21
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Right, simulating a human mind on a Mind substrate doesn’t give you a Mind.
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Mar 14, 2018 15:00
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It's been ages since I've read them so I couldn't give an exact passage where it's mentioned, but I'm fairly sure it's possible for a "human" to become a Mind (as in fully fledged, not a simulation or as part of a gestalt entity). It's just very strongly discouraged.
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Mar 14, 2018 15:53
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