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And knocked this out in a day. Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller is a weird one. Show of hands, everyone who wanted Inuit cyberpunk. No one? How about a badass lesbian Inuit grandmother with a pet killer whale? Blackfish City is cyberpunk with a distinctly modern bent, set on a floating city in the arctic, in a bleak future rather different from traditional cyberpunk in that it's heavily informed by more modern events and fears, and switches regularly between four main protagonists: a wealthy young gay man, a gender-fluid street criminal, a modern-day gladiator tied up in organized crime, and a local politician with a shady past. All the while, the city is being ravaged by a mysterious disease that causes people to have strange visions and remember events they couldn't have seen. Into this mix comes a mysterious woman with an orca and a polar bear and a bladed staff she's frighteningly skilled with. I was not expecting the book to lean so heavily on Inuit culture, and that most of the protagonists end up tying into it in some way, but it helps Blackfish City stand out. I don't know if Miller is Inuit himself, but the book dwells on what might happen to that culture in this kind of dystopian future, and what their relationships with the rest of North America would be like. The breaks, the mysterious disease of the book, also end up being rather fascinating once the book reveals the origin of the disease and what exactly it does. Blackfish City ends on a remarkably hopeful note, and the promise that in this floating arctic city, at least, the world might be starting to change for the better.
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Jun 11, 2018 03:39
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I’m so into indigenous futurism that I don’t even care if that book is any good, I want to buy it.
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Jun 11, 2018 04:00
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tuyop posted:I’m so into indigenous futurism that I don’t even care if that book is any good, I want to buy it. I thought it was good cyberpunk. Not great, but good. Ends on a hopeful note, prominent and positive portrayals of LGBT people of various stripes (again: badass lesbian Inuit grandma), and I felt the Inuit aspects and the reveal of what the disease is added some nicely original flavor. Been on a spree of sci-fi books I've never read from my local library.
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Jun 11, 2018 04:20
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tuyop posted:I’m so into indigenous futurism I agree in the sense that tribal peoples who are really into F T Marinetti would be cool
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Jun 11, 2018 05:11
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Just finished reading The Bible. It was a very interesting premise that essentially details a diety's creation and eventual destruction of the universe. Its an interesting take on a diety who is supposed to be perfect, but is actually vain, conceited, jealous, maniacal, murderous and extremely narcissistic. In the first part he creates humans and then throws a hissy fit when his creation modeled after himself turns out less than perfect. How or why a perfect God creates unperfect humans in his image is not answered. He destroys their cities and eventually drowns them all. He also selects one race as his favorite and has them do a bunch of stuff. As a token of their friendship, he requires them to chop off a portion of their penises. They are not too successful until many generations later when they take over the financial, medical and entertainment industries. He also makes nonsensical claims such as rainbows being a symbol of his friendship when everyone knows they are actually just light reflecting through water vapor. In Part 2 he sends his son down to earth and sits idly by as he is arrested for being a heretic and then tortured and murdered by humans. He does nothing about it as a way of somehow forgiving humanity's sinful nature. Not sure how that works. Both then disappear for the next 2000 years and counting. Overall, its pretty good but requires major suspension of disbelief. I don't think this will be a problem and I can forsee a lot of fanaticism. I also think fans will disagree about the first and 2nd parts and will be divided. I also think it will be wildly open to interpretation by the various people reading it. The last part is a collection of songs and poems which are pretty good. I recommend.
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Jun 11, 2018 18:11
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You didn't even mention all the crazy sex scenes and action sequences.
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Jun 11, 2018 18:13
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Jun 11, 2018 18:17
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drat, CHristianity's not going to be bouncing back from this one
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Jun 11, 2018 18:37
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Authority by Jeff Vandermeer Annihilation was pretty good, but I ended up preferring the movie. This is pretty good, too. I like that this time around the focus is less on getting into the thick of Area X and more about Kafka-esque paranoia in a more banal setting. I was also more interested in the personal hangups of this book's protagonist more than Annihilation's, too, though maybe that's because the Annihilation movie ended up overshadowing the book in my mind. Not sure how I feel about the ending yet. At first it looked like Control's life would go nowhere, and he'd be stuck in a dead end, the truth of Area X out of reach as it's always been for everyone researching it. But then all hell breaks loose, which makes things tense, but provides a breakthrough at the same time. I don't necessarily need an explanation for what Area X is; maybe keeping the Southern Reach's mission futile would have made a better point. I'll have to read Acceptance to come to a conclusion on this.
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Jun 11, 2018 19:14
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TommyGun85 posted:Just finished reading The Bible. please dont share my edge livejournal posts from when i was 13 in 2004
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Jun 11, 2018 21:16
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Finished Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, a YA fantasy book that draws from West African religion, culture, and mythology. It's pretty by-the-numbers YA fantasy in terms of plot beats, but it's also the first in a trilogy so my hope is that knocking out cliches early will allow for wild poo poo later. There's also a conversation to be had about how works that seem rife with fantasy standards can't be viewed as such when created by and for diverse audiences who weren't necessarily the intended audiences for works like Harry Potter or Divergent or whatever, so I definitely issue that criticism with a grain of salt. First-person POV switching is rough no matter who you are, though. Whew. A good read if you like fast-paced magic-heavy fantasy. It looks long but is a breeze to read. The internal and oppressive politics of Orisha are also more complex than initially presented, which helps. I think I would recommend it if you like this sort of thing. I don't normally, but it was still very easy to get through regardless.
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Jun 11, 2018 22:22
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chernobyl kinsman posted:please dont share my edge livejournal posts from when i was 13 in 2004
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Jun 12, 2018 01:10
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Doc Fission posted:There's also a conversation to be had about how works that seem rife with fantasy standards can't be viewed as such when created by and for diverse audiences who weren't necessarily the intended audiences for works like Harry Potter or Divergent or whatever, so I definitely issue that criticism with a grain of salt. what
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Jun 12, 2018 11:45
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I said what I said. (Edit: If incoherently, because I am always phone posting. My bad.) Minorities who are interested in fantasy, but didn't read popular fantasy canons for reasons that even in small ways involve the fact that those canons didn't reflect them, are absolutely interested in openly diverse fantasy, and they're not wrong to actively seek that work out I'm brown and queer and people like me notice when LOTR movies don't have brown people or when HP books only have gay people retroactively. Ergo, if there is a book about magic school that has brown and/or gay people but the book is intensely reminiscent of HP, that book still has value because while magic school might be tired ground to tread in a vacuum it certainly isn't for those audiences. Representation in genre fiction is good. People get a lot out of it. Doc Fission fucked around with this message at 12:26 on Jun 12, 2018 |
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Jun 12, 2018 12:21
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I don't really understand why its good that a by the numbers YA fantasy book has an African cultural veneer now when books by Africans that emphasise African culture that are also actually good to read in your brain exist. Like if you want 'fantasy' drawing on West African culture why would you read that book instead of Amos Tutuola, for instance. It doesn't seem very progressive to me to write genre fiction that's exactly the same as before except there are references to African gods and black people instead of like norse myth or elves or whatever.
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Jun 12, 2018 12:45
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I am not all people of color but young kids of color are probably not as engaged with Norse mythology as one might hope? So by the numbers for you isn't the same as by the numbers for me. I also don't know where you fall on the demographic line either so I'm not trying to speak for you. But like, for a more straightforward example, 100 high school romance novels come out a year. The one that is about a gay teen will absolutely feel new to a gay teen who felt alienated from that genre, because it is about a gay teen. Obviously this shouldn't preclude people from seeking out or writing exemplary works. But minorities should have space to create and produce run of the mill stuff too.
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Jun 12, 2018 13:05
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A human heart posted:I don't really understand why its good that a by the numbers YA fantasy book has an African cultural veneer now when books by Africans that emphasise African culture that are also actually good to read in your brain exist. Like if you want 'fantasy' drawing on West African culture why would you read that book instead of Amos Tutuola, for instance. It doesn't seem very progressive to me to write genre fiction that's exactly the same as before except there are references to African gods and black people instead of like norse myth or elves or whatever. To use your example, African culture and African people are not monolithic. There’s space for more traditional cultural stories, more imaginative cultural stories that adapt or reject tradition, and there’s space for a reimagining of that culture the same way mainstream western culture has been reimagined in all sorts of SF and Fantasy for like a century now. It’s progressive because it provides a section of the population with a version of itself as different in some way that might help a group of those people see themselves in novel and liberating ways. If you only see traditional, static versions of people like you, or versions that you think are boring or trite, it can be really alienating and hazardous. It’s easy to imagine it the other way. When I was a young adult, I saw all these young adult stories and they were obsessed with poo poo like monogamy and really basic questions of identity like what white middle class people should do when they leave home. I had no interest in those stories, but since I’m a white man it was easy to find literally any other representation of myself in literature. The effect is a kind of freedom to not just reproduce the young adult narrative or otherwise feel lost and alone. You can take pieces of all the media you encounter and imagine a more complex - and personally accurate - identity for yourself.
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Jun 12, 2018 13:18
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Doc Fission posted:I said what I said. (Edit: If incoherently, because I am always phone posting. My bad.) It actually makes plot sense for there to be no black kids at Hogwarts. Magic is mainly hereditary, and the black people in Britain are mainly descended from immigrants who came here seeking a better life. But if you're a wizard, you and your family are unlikely to have to do that because you have the power to make your own better life. So all the black wizards are still at home in the West Indies.
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Jun 12, 2018 13:22
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Jedit posted:It actually makes plot sense for there to be no black kids at Hogwarts. Magic is mainly hereditary, and the black people in Britain are mainly descended from immigrants who came here seeking a better life. But if you're a wizard, you and your family are unlikely to have to do that because you have the power to make your own better life. So all the black wizards are still at home in the West Indies. Actually they are still at home in Africa because a wizard isn't going to let themself be kidnapped into slavery by muggles.
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Jun 12, 2018 13:54
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Just wanted to point out that there are black characters in Harry Potter, such as Lee Jordan, Dean Thomas, Angela Johnson as well as other POCs, like major love interest Cho Chang. JK Rowling's just one of the few genre writers that doesn't explicitly call out a characters ethnicity, for better or worse. Now, none of these characters are really substantial or do much, which is a different talking point, but they're there. I also want to point out that modern American pre-teens loving love fiction based on mythology. Most of the kids I taught were obsessed with Rick Riordan's never-ending bullshit. As for older audiences, I can't go to the bookstore without someone talking about how much they love Gaiman's Norse Mythology book.
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Jun 12, 2018 14:10
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To contribute, BookRiot regularly posts lists of books in all genres, from thrillers to sci-fi to fantasy, written by/for POCs and by/for the LGBTQ community, both for adults, and young adults. There's certainly things out there that would appeal to you and others, so maybe you can find something on there that you'll enjoy and share.
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Jun 12, 2018 14:27
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Yeah, again, my experience isn't monolithic but it's also not unique to me either. Totally anecdotally, I haven't seen as many non-western-myth YA fantasy to get as insanely popular as Riordan's work. So I checked out Children of Blood and Bone because it hit the ground running--NYT bestseller, NPR features, etc. etc. Just because I wasn't super impressed doesn't mean the text doesn't have value; it's well-executed, just not particularly unique for the genre in a vacuum. It's probably as competently written as any Riordan work but is slightly more "for" an audience that isn't always in view of big publishers. To that end, that's a great resource, Franchescanado. Thanks 
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Jun 12, 2018 15:59
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Finished Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World because it was recommended to me by Audible. It was a cute little book about a girl whose house is destroyed by a tornado and then she loses her diary/art book (full of drawings of girls holding hands) at the refugee center. She deals with the loss of her house and the perceived loss of her family's affection. It's really interesting.
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Jun 12, 2018 22:04
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Franchescanado posted:Just wanted to point out that there are black characters in Harry Potter, such as Lee Jordan, Dean Thomas, Angela Johnson as well as other POCs, like major love interest Cho Chang. JK Rowling's just one of the few genre writers that doesn't explicitly call out a characters ethnicity, for better or worse  Keep the Aspidistra Flying Reading this at a time when I'm personally in a bit of financial trickery the book was god-drat depressing. I would probably have liked it if I could view it from a more outside perspective. I started my own business a few years ago and it's not been going very well. For the past two years I've felt so financially insecure that I haven't dared to do much else than pay bills/food and work. If I go back to regular work then I would in contrast be able to pay the bills, buy food, have some fun and put away $1000 a month. But I feel like going back to work would be admitting defeat. At the same time I'm utterly miserable running my business. But my father was so proud of me when I started my own business. The idea of running my own business was to get more freedom. But tending to several clients makes me feel less free than I was as a worker. As a union worker no one could tell me to do anything I didn't want to do. There was nothing to compromise on ever. As a business owner life is nothing but compromise towards clients. Edit: Also getting interrupted in the middle of a Gordon money rant by a phone call from my bank telling me I can't re-finance my loans because as a business owner my income counts as basically zero for the first 4-5 years. Since I can't re-finance them, I am actually paying my bank about $150 too much every month. But their calculations for the loan with an income of zero returns that I can't afford to re-finance it and so it remains what it currently is. You would think that this is malice from the bank for that extra $150 but it is in fact 100% bureaucracy. Katt fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Jun 13, 2018 |
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Jun 13, 2018 05:08
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Doc Fission posted:Yeah, again, my experience isn't monolithic but it's also not unique to me either. Totally anecdotally, I haven't seen as many non-western-myth YA fantasy to get as insanely popular as Riordan's work. It's not actually good, but it fills a niche (of bad fiction for a certain demographic)
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Jun 13, 2018 10:11
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I finished the last of the three L.A. Noir / Lloyd Hopkins trilogy books. On the whole, I enjoyed the series, but it wasn't as good as other James Ellroy novels.
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Jun 13, 2018 11:23
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I finished The Obelisk Gate, the 2nd book in the Broken Earth series. I liked it even more than the first and it made the first better in retrospect, so I'm pretty hype for my library hold on the third one to come through. It's also written by a woman of color, has a genderqueer secondary character, and some interesting approaches to race representation.
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Jun 14, 2018 03:19
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Finished The Freeze Frame Revolution. Even though I hadn't read the other stories in this series, I still enjoyed the black holes and revelations. I like the sort of science fiction that makes your brain feel like it's out of breath trying to encompass it all.
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Jun 15, 2018 02:05
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Felt like some folk tales so I gave Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, a read. Very interesting, I thought it was a collection of old Japanese horror stories, that isn't quite accurate, many of the stories are supernatural and intending to shock and alarm but some of them are more whimsical in nature. I found the one about the bell and the Bronze mirror really funny. The version I read on Gutenburg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1210 also contained a number of essays by the books compiler Lafcadio Hearn, about insects in Japanese and Chinese folk tales. A short but interesting read, I enjoyed learning about myths based on and infused with Buddhism, and I learnt a bit about ants.
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Jun 15, 2018 19:06
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All Systems Red by Martha Wells is much different than what I thought it was going to be, and I'm relieved to say that. When I saw the word "murderbot" on the cover, I sighed and prepared myself for a stale rehash of "meatbag lol" jokes, but it's more of an expression of self-loathing. The protagonist is a manufactured cyborg who hacked itself into having free will and begins the story balancing the apathy of a beaten-down retail worker with the antsy, on-edge attitude that I imagine most marginalized people feel living in a society known for mistreating their demographic. I'm sure there's a debate on the morality of expecting privileged people to empathize with fictional minorities more than real ones, but for what it's worth this is one of the best versions of this idea I've seen in years. It sure beats Detroit: Become Human. Bonus points for making the ending much more interesting, and honest, within the last few pages.
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Jun 16, 2018 03:01
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Rolling Thunder by John Varley is a sci-fi novel that doesn't know what kind of story it wants to be. On the one hand, it has my favorite kind of sci-fi aliens: incomprehensible and so far beyond us no communication is possible and they're probably not aware we exist at all. I'm a sucker for big dumb object stories, and this... wasn't that. There's no awe or wonder about it, just a little bit of pretending there's a mystery to the story before going "gently caress if we know, next." There's a novel idea for a protagonist in a sci-fi book, a singer who serves her military tour as part of a military band to tour the outposts and put on shows for the garrisons, but the book never does anything with it beyond making the protagonist a huge celebrity through no particular effort of her own. Plot devices are wheeled in and out without foreshadowing or remembrance, and there's a ten year time skip in the book for seemingly no reason but to abruptly change the direction of the book. Cardboard thin characters (everyone from Earth is stupid, religious, and greedy, everyone from Mars is smart and driven and kind), a protagonist with no discernable personality, and it all just adds up to a waste of time. Also, male writers: women don't think about their breasts as much as you guys seem to think.
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Jun 16, 2018 03:21
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Robot Wendigo posted:. I like the sort of science fiction that makes your brain feel like it's out of breath trying to encompass it all. Ted Chiang does that for me but with less nihilism/pessimism than Watts (who I also really like) so check him out if you haven't. Edit: this isn't the recommendation thread so...I read The Things They Carried and thought it was excellent. I guess a lot of people read it in school but I never did. Reminded me in a lot of ways of All Quiet On the Western Front in the loss of innocence and "war can't really be written about, it has to be experienced" themes but with the unique fuckeduppedness of Viet Nam. As a Viet Nam memoir I liked it more than Platoon Leader but overall I think All Quiet affected me more, possibly because as an 80s kid I always knew Nam was super hosed up but didn't realize just how hosed up WW1 was. Lawen fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Jun 16, 2018 |
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Jun 16, 2018 05:48
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The Gone World, by Tom Sweterlitsch. I don't say this much, but I truly have no idea what the gently caress I just finished reading. The Gone World starts with an intriguing premise: a time-traveling detective who can jaunt forward and backward in time to solve cases. Then it gets really, really crazy and the time traveling detective is trying to stop an apocalypse. By about two thirds of the way in, The Gone World had completely lost me, I had no idea what was going on, when anything was happening, or what the unfolding plot was. It's always a hazard of books where time travel is a central premise, and doubly so when you start invoking alternate realities and potential futures, and triply when duplicates from alternate timelines start bleeding over: it is incredibly easy for things to get so convoluted that you completely lose track. And that's what happened to me with this book. And the central apocalyptic threat, the Terminus, in my opinion was never really explained. I came away with no idea of what it was doing or why. There's some good ideas here to be sure, I liked the strained relationship the protagonist had with her mother because the protagonist kept seemingly aging at an unnatural rate, from time passing while she's in the future. The effects of the Terminus are creepy as hell. I thought there was a couple of good twists with the protagonist before things went completely batshit. But the whole mess was so hard for me to keep track of that in the end I stopped trying. If you think you can figure out what's happening in this book, I recommend it. As for me, my head hurts.
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Jun 18, 2018 04:29
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The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi. It has a weird tone befitting a breezy adventure, not unlike a Jim Butcher or Joss Whedon story, but it's about a massive catastrophe that brings massive change to an interstellar political system. It went by in a flash, and of course it's only the prologue to a series that Scalzi says will last about a decade in the afterword. For now I'd just recommend you read Lock In instead.
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Jun 19, 2018 23:51
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Does it have those same Scalzi problems where all of his characters are two dimensional nerdcore snark machines that sound exactly the same or did he grow out of that?
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Jun 20, 2018 00:10
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tuyop posted:Does it have those same Scalzi problems where all of his characters are two dimensional nerdcore snark machines that sound exactly the same or did he grow out of that? He hasn't grown out of it.
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Jun 20, 2018 00:46
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tuyop posted:Does it have those same Scalzi problems where all of his characters are two dimensional nerdcore snark machines that sound exactly the same or did he grow out of that? I didn't notice that being an issue in Lock In, but I did here. I also forgot to mention that all of the spaceship names are whimsical sentence fragments, one of which is a reference to a Cat Stevens song that's at least a few centuries old in the time of the story. Why?
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Jun 20, 2018 02:02
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rich thick and creamy posted:The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh Prop. by Robert Coover. Henry Waugh has a drab, lovely life as an accountant. His only joy is the baseball league which plays every night in his head. His rich inner life has created eight teams of colorful players. He didn't stop with just stats and figures, Waugh created whole back stories, histories and families for each one of his players. Armed only with a pair of dice, he watches his players struggle on towards victory. Lots of dark humor to be found in here. The big allegory is that Waugh is God propelling his world forward one roll of the dice at a time. (Take that, Einstein!) Sorry to bring back a post that's almost a decade old, but holy poo poo I was starting to think I was the only person who ever read that book, thanks for mentioning it (and reminding me of the title). And for a bit of content I thought it was an interesting story, though considering how much I was into the Strat-O-Matic sports games in my teens I suppose I would. 
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Jun 21, 2018 05:02
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Speaking of books nobody else has read, did anyone else read “Dear American Airlines” by Jonathan Miles? I bought it in an airport during a layover years ago and devoured it as quickly and shamelessly as possible. I remember it being good but I bet it wasn’t!
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Jun 21, 2018 12:47
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Moktaro posted:Sorry to bring back a post that's almost a decade old, but holy poo poo I was starting to think I was the only person who ever read that book, thanks for mentioning it (and reminding me of the title). And for a bit of content I thought it was an interesting story, though considering how much I was into the Strat-O-Matic sports games in my teens I suppose I would. You're not the only one. I enjoyed that book too.
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Jun 21, 2018 15:42
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