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Nah, considerably better written, so far anyway. Plot wise, I guess? That's a good a way to describe it as anything.
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Jul 5, 2018 05:45
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Anyone else read Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse yet? I'd seen some buzz so checked it out from the library recently. After an environmental disaster, gods and monsters have returned to Navajo lands, and Maggie travels around hunting them for trade. When she comes across an unfamiliar monster, she sets off with the party boy son of a medicine man to find the witch who is creating them. The elevator pitch is "indigenous Fury Road" and it hits some of that. It's definitely a fast paced adventure though the Navajo lands of the Sixth World. I had a few issues, but on the whole, it was a promising start and looks like it'll be a good series.
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Jul 5, 2018 16:42
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I thought the setting was cool, but the female protagonist struggling not to fall in love with the impossibly handsome male costar was pretty eyerolly.
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Jul 5, 2018 16:54
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The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince are very strange but very good books.
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Jul 6, 2018 00:04
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Ben Nevis posted:Anyone else read Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse yet? I'd seen some buzz so checked it out from the library recently. After an environmental disaster, gods and monsters have returned to Navajo lands, and Maggie travels around hunting them for trade. When she comes across an unfamiliar monster, she sets off with the party boy son of a medicine man to find the witch who is creating them. The elevator pitch is "indigenous Fury Road" and it hits some of that. It's definitely a fast paced adventure though the Navajo lands of the Sixth World. I had a few issues, but on the whole, it was a promising start and looks like it'll be a good series. I'm pretty sure it's illegal for an author's last name to just be a horse of a particular colour
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Jul 6, 2018 01:30
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A human heart posted:I'm pretty sure it's illegal for an author's last name to just be a horse of a particular colour I'm glad your trolling has turned racist.
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Jul 6, 2018 02:05
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A human heart posted:I'm pretty sure it's illegal for an author's last name to just be a horse of a particular colour She gives no shits for your white man law 
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Jul 6, 2018 02:11
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GrandpaPants posted:io9 published a list of upcoming SF/F and this one caught my eye, so I was going to go for a longshot and ask if anyone's heard anything about this super new book (released yesterday, apparently), The Book of Hidden Things. Here's the blurb: I read it today. I've read worse. I've also read better. It kept me reading but it's no Eco.
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Jul 6, 2018 02:58
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A human heart posted:I'm pretty sure it's illegal for an author's last name to just be a horse of a particular colour Wow, thanks for the authentic Indian experience!
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Jul 6, 2018 04:37
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Started on the Long Earth a while ago and now the Long War and I have to say I have a problem with the Greens. that is leaving their 13 year old son behind and loving off to another world and they are being portrayed not as utter, irredeemable shitheels.
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Jul 6, 2018 07:43
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His Divine Shadow posted:Started on the Long Earth a while ago and now the Long War and I have to say I have a problem with the Greens. that is leaving their 13 year old son behind and loving off to another world and they are being portrayed not as utter, irredeemable shitheels. Realistic portrayal of humanity, then. I'd have to reread them, but I'm fairly sure there's a good reason for it.
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Jul 6, 2018 11:47
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They could do the stepping and he couldn't and they really wanted to gently caress off and live pioneer life. To my view it's a bit like leaving your child for being disabled. EDIT: Maybe it will get adressed later on in the long war, I am only at the start of that. His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 13:12 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 13:09
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I finally finished The Kingkiller Chronicle. Great book. One nitpick though: the rape teens are described as 16 or 17, by which point the penis has easily reached its full size. Yet their eight year old victim's anus is likely to be proportionately small to the rest of his body, and due to the relatively small number of shits it has taken, not as tired and lax as an older anus. Since we can assume that lubricant would be prohibitively expensive in the deprived slums of Riverside, it's unlikely that after the teens, wearing hard and hungry smiles, ripped away the sobbing boy's clothes to show his pale bare skin, they would have been able to penetrate his rear end. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 7, 2018 16:40
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Uhhhh
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Jul 7, 2018 16:46
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It was a silence of three parts.
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Jul 7, 2018 16:51
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Finally, the review those books deserve.
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Jul 7, 2018 17:26
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A Major Fucker posted:I finally finished The Kingkiller Chronicle. Great book. One nitpick though: the rape teens are described as 16 or 17, by which point the penis has easily reached its full size. Yet their eight year old victim's anus is likely to be proportionately small to the rest of his body, and due to the relatively small number of shits it has taken, not as tired and lax as an older anus. Since we can assume that lubricant would be prohibitively expensive in the deprived slums of Riverside, it's unlikely that after the teens, wearing hard and hungry smiles, ripped away the sobbing boy's clothes to show his pale bare skin, they would have been able to penetrate his rear end. A wizard did it.
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Jul 7, 2018 17:56
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It also drives me crazy when authors don’t bother to get the details right.
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Jul 7, 2018 18:43
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And knocked out another library book, Nighteyes by Garfield Reeves-Stevens. A story about UFOs, alien abductions, and abductees that ultimately ends on a hopeful note and tries at the end to portray the aliens as ultimately benevolent is pretty novel, but I find that a hard pill to swallow when much of the book is filled with the usual alien abduction stuff including sexual experimentation on humans and coercing humans into having sex with each other, and then a sixteen year old girl being pregnant at the end by a forty year old guy the aliens drugged her into being in love with being presented as the hope of all mankind is... unfortunate. I'm still chewing on how exactly I feel about the book, but I think the book suffers badly from cramming too many twists and revelations into the last couple of chapters, only one of which had been visibly foreshadowed, and one of the book's major subplots has no purpose except to waste time on conspiracy techno-thriller stuff that has no impact or relevance to the main plot beyond the first couple of chapters. There's a lesbian couple that spends most of the book doing nothing in particular while vaguely orbiting the protagonists until all of a sudden they do something the book seems to think is momentous and huge but no explanation is given for what they're doing or why. The punch of this book, though, is looking at the psychology of the abductees and their responses to what's been happening - in every case, throughout their lives. The sixteen year old girl has long had an imaginary friend. Her mother keeps seeing her cat that's been dead for years. The FBI agent regularly deals with shadowy figures in the course of his job. The hard-charging businessman refuses to acknowledge that anything at all in his life has ever been even slightly out of the ordinary. Another character notes that when they were six Santa took her to visit his workshop at the North Pole. Everything dealing with the psychology of the abductions and its trauma on the abductees felt much more compelling to me than the intrigue and thriller nonsense. Still, I thought some of the twists at the end genuinely were clever and create a pretty novel context for UFOs and abductions and whatnot, they just weren't given a chance to breathe, just implications for the reader to ponder. On the whole, a mixed bag. UFO stories have long been one of my mildly embarrassing pet interests, and the interesting twists, dwelling on the psychological trauma of abduction, and genuinely creepy writing in the first few encounters with the aliens (things get vastly less atmospheric once the book moves onto the actual ship) all let down heavily by pointless subplots, a creepy fixation on the teenage girl's sexuality (which began before she was a teenager), and the book presenting all the usual nightmarish UFO stuff then assuring you that it was all justified and necessary and they're really good guys.
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Jul 7, 2018 19:11
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I finished up The Cabin At The End Of The World by Paul Tremblay and I'm kinda stuck. On one hand it's one of the few books that has made me go "Oh gently caress!" out loud, but on the other it's just so damned odd that it's hard to like. I guess, it feels like the protagonists we're randomly picked out of a "token" list. The couple in the cabin is gay, their adopted kid is chinese (with a cleft palate). There's a random attack in the backstory about one of em being gay, etc. It's like someone wrote a kinda mediocre novel and threw in some "hot topic" adjectives so they could get a free marketing buzz. Like if this novel came out this time next year the parents would be trans vegans or something and everything would be identical. I will say that the chapters written from the kid's pov are awesome though. The writer really can put you in the mindset of a 7 year old. It's a neat premise for a plot. Quick read as well. I'd give it a whirl if you are looking for something that's kinda apocalyptic. It's not a 5 star book but it's a solid 3, easy.
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Jul 7, 2018 19:31
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A gay couple...with a child????!  to the blogosphere!!!
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Jul 7, 2018 19:45
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I finished up The Cabin At The End Of The World by Paul Tremblay and I'm kinda stuck. On one hand it's one of the few books that has made me go "Oh gently caress!" out loud, but on the other it's just so damned odd that it's hard to like. Wait, are you mad minorities are represented or that the fact they're minorities isn't important to the story? Because neither of those things are bad.
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Jul 7, 2018 22:52
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A Major Fucker posted:I finally finished The Kingkiller Chronicle. Great book. One nitpick though: the rape teens are described as 16 or 17, by which point the penis has easily reached its full size. Yet their eight year old victim's anus is likely to be proportionately small to the rest of his body, and due to the relatively small number of shits it has taken, not as tired and lax as an older anus. Since we can assume that lubricant would be prohibitively expensive in the deprived slums of Riverside, it's unlikely that after the teens, wearing hard and hungry smiles, ripped away the sobbing boy's clothes to show his pale bare skin, they would have been able to penetrate his rear end. Thank you for pointing out the error.
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Jul 8, 2018 02:07
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jit bull transpile posted:Wait, are you mad minorities are represented or that the fact they're minorities isn't important to the story? Because neither of those things are bad. I'm not mad at either. They parents were written as loving parents, the kid was written as a kid, that was fine. It was just oddly flat feeling, where the characters could be interchangeable with literally anything else. Felt more like a marketing move than a plot point, I guess. It's odd to put into words. It's like there wasn't much character development for anyone, protags or antags, past the description stage. They were just sort of cardboard cutouts that poo poo happened to (except the kid, she was actually pretty well written).
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Jul 8, 2018 02:56
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Phobeste posted:So it’s world war v? if it's two thirds as good as Z I'm sold
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Jul 8, 2018 05:12
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A Major Fucker posted:I finally finished The Kingkiller Chronicle. Great book. One nitpick though: the rape teens are described as 16 or 17, by which point the penis has easily reached its full size. Yet their eight year old victim's anus is likely to be proportionately small to the rest of his body, and due to the relatively small number of shits it has taken, not as tired and lax as an older anus. Since we can assume that lubricant would be prohibitively expensive in the deprived slums of Riverside, it's unlikely that after the teens, wearing hard and hungry smiles, ripped away the sobbing boy's clothes to show his pale bare skin, they would have been able to penetrate his rear end. Lol
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Jul 8, 2018 08:50
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I'm not mad at either. They parents were written as loving parents, the kid was written as a kid, that was fine. It was just oddly flat feeling, where the characters could be interchangeable with literally anything else. Felt more like a marketing move than a plot point, I guess. I think the flawed fundamental assumption here is that the gay parents or the Chinese adopted kid have to be "plot points" versus being het white parents with a white kid which requires no explanation. The minority representation obviously doesn't make the writing good, for reasons you've explained, but it doesn't need to be "justified" beyond that. Tokenism is definitely an issue but that's more specifically when a flat minority stereotype is inserted into a story that isn't interested in their voice, just as a prop against which the majority narrative proceeds.
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Jul 8, 2018 11:05
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occamsnailfile posted:Tokenism is definitely an issue Somebody is presumably writing a phd right now on what the difference is between tokenism (bad) and and the zeitgeisty trend towards "representation" (good, apparently). Like, obviously it's not a bad thing to have more diverse representation in fiction, but when it's a straight white dude (like Paul Tremblay) chucking a bunch of minority characters in... I wouldn't say I roll my eyes, it's not that bad, but there is a subconscious sense of "yep, right, gotta check those boxes."
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Jul 8, 2018 12:03
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Yeah man, if you're gonna use 'others' in your books, you have to emphasize their otherness obviously.
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Jul 8, 2018 12:44
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mllaneza posted:The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince are very strange but very good books. I've read them each several times now and I still mostly have no idea what's happening, and I love it. I've been trying to read The Three-Body Problem but it's been a bit of a slog. It is my first foray into non-English (in origin) scifi though, so maybe that's normal?
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Jul 8, 2018 13:44
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AmericanGeeksta posted:I've been trying to read The Three-Body Problem but it's been a bit of a slog. It is my first foray into non-English (in origin) scifi though, so maybe that's normal? I'm currently finishing up Death's End, and while overall I've liked the trilogy, I feel like Liu spends 2/3 of each of the books setting up the pieces before actually moving the plot along. The Dark Forest was really bad in this respect (though maybe it was the change in translator that I didn't like?).
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Jul 8, 2018 14:30
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freebooter posted:Somebody is presumably writing a phd right now on what the difference is between tokenism (bad) and and the zeitgeisty trend towards "representation" (good, apparently). Is merely attempting to write from a different viewpoint a bad thing? Like, I'm trying to imagine someone reading white lady Ursula K. Le Guin and making jerking-off motions with their hand every time a visitor from Terra has brown skin.
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Jul 8, 2018 18:39
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I honestly don't know. I don't normally check to see if an author is white, black,gay,etc. This just kinda bugged me cause it wasn't well written, and tbf it did feel like the dude might be just checking boxes. I know gay people exist, I know they adopt kids, but I just don't feel like it was really... I dunno shown? If that makes any sense? The characters are all just like, flat generic characters except for the kid. You could swap out black, white, trans, vegan, hipster, etc and they'd be pretty much identical. It's less character development than I'm used to. Which, honestly is a bit weird to say considering how much of the novel is written from thier povs. It's a bit weird. Kinda like the Ghostbusters remake. It just wasn't a good movie, but people focus more on yelling about how you are a misogynistic rear end for not liking it rather than just going "oh yea, different opinions and all that." I mean it's a good book, or well , an ok one, just not feeling the reviews of how it's an amazing horror novel that will stick with you forever, etc. If you dig apocalyptic literature, give it a whirl. Maybe it'll click for you and be awesome. I might reread it in a year or so and feel differently about it. I've moved on to the WWV novel now. It's gotten weird and fun.
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Jul 8, 2018 21:29
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Anyone read Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio yet? The prose is excellent and the world-building is incredible. Will post a proper review when i'm done.
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Jul 8, 2018 21:34
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No Pants posted:Is merely attempting to write from a different viewpoint a bad thing? Like, I'm trying to imagine someone reading white lady Ursula K. Le Guin and making jerking-off motions with their hand every time a visitor from Terra has brown skin. The whole "You allow women to do what!?" conversation at the beginning of The Dispossessed was rather uh, on the nose.
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Jul 8, 2018 22:16
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pseudorandom name posted:Junior high me was reading books about the murderous hermaphrodites who ruled earth. Holy poo poo, I completely forgot about that. They were also psychic.
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Jul 8, 2018 22:33
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No Pants posted:Is merely attempting to write from a different viewpoint a bad thing? Like, I'm trying to imagine someone reading white lady Ursula K. Le Guin and making jerking-off motions with their hand every time a visitor from Terra has brown skin. I'm guessing the point is it isn't really from a different viewpoint if the characters are just cardboard cutouts painted a different color (or in this case with a rainbow). Whereas Le Guin's characters are treated like more than wooden props. The criticism is no points for no effort. On the other hand, a friend of mine really likes LGBT pulp, a ton of it being total poo poo, and her defense of it is, "Minorities should be allowed to write and enjoy trash that caters to them just as much as white-cis-hets." So I see both sides of this. Edit: if the characters are so cardboard their characteristics hardly matter, that's criticism enough without mentioning "checking boxes" though, because that's what people say when they complain about the author "shoving minorities down our throats" as if including minorities in itself is such a huge burden on the reader--which is a real argument people (including editors and movie producers) make that is seriously hosed up, so maybe don't act super suprised when people argue against that in reponse to you, Stupid Sexy Flanders. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Jul 8, 2018 |
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Jul 8, 2018 23:22
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After giving up on Asimov because the Foundation trilogy just didn't really do it for me, I started reading his short stories. The Dead Past was loving cool. It was a little trite at the end where the enormous, virtually omniscient, state apparatus designed exclusively to suppress chronoscopy just throws its hands up and quits after being outwitted. Like, you think they would probably have tried to suppress things even if the cat was partially out of the bag or whatever. But it was still a cool story and the whole point was that a time machine to the past functionally an instant spying device for the present. It goes without saying that only woman character was at best two dimensional, those dimensions being frailty and uncontrollable emotions. I am probably just never going to encounter a well-written woman character in Asimov, am I? Franchise Very creative. Enjoyable. Kind of funny to read in the context of following a lot of polling and data journalism. Gimmicks Three Eh. A little smug. Kid Stuff Maybe my favorite one yet. The dialogue is playful. The elf/Atlantean/insect is an all around funny character. Asimov seems like exactly the kind of weird fucker to give more life to a breastmilk-obsessed insectoid than literally every woman character he ever(?) wrote though. On kind of a random lark I picked up Snow Crash and am almost done with it. It was sitting on a shelf for about a year, left by a previous occupant of the place I am currently living. I didn't even know what it was and took it to the field to read because I didn't have anything better. It's cool as hell. It is simultaneously an extremely creative world, and full of dialogue and absurdity that is just funny. For near-future libertarian tech dystopia it is altogether good. The digressions into linguistics and Sumerian religion narrated by The Librarian are tedious though. I get why they are in there, but they could be considerably shorter. The rest of the book is so fast paced, bouncing from character to character, swordfights and nuclear bomb laden motorcycle chases. To just crash full speed into pages of Chomsky is, eh. Those parts just feel like a chore, like if there was an abridged version that was just 20 pages shorter it would be a big improvement. Actually, I don't know that I "get" why they are there. I think maybe 'bit map that infects both computers and programmer brains because of the way they are wired' could be an internally consistent idea without bogging down in linguistics. But oh well, maybe I will change my mind by the time I finish the book. Definitely give it a courtesy fifty pages if you pick it up. The writing style is (to me) jarring and hard to get into at first, but it finds its groove pretty quick and becomes fun. I highly recommend it. Like, if listening to the wu tang clan makes you chuckle even a little bit, it's worth it just for the over the top sword fighting parts.
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Jul 9, 2018 01:31
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I honestly don't know. I don't normally check to see if an author is white, black,gay,etc. Imo it is a good thing when characters are minorities and it's not notable at all. That's, like, exactly what we want as minorities. To be equal in society and not have it be the most important detail about us for everyone else. To me, more stories need to have their characters be black or queer or little people and have it be a completely unimportant thing that doesn't get mentioned much or impact the story. That's loving progress. Not every story about minorities has to be about how being a minority adds struggle to our lives. I don't think what you're seeing is tokenism. I think you read a lovely book that nevertheless made a good choice about its characters identities.
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Jul 9, 2018 01:41
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ed balls balls man posted:Anyone read Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio yet? The prose is excellent and the world-building is incredible. Will post a proper review when i'm done. I ordered a copy from the UK because the US cover pissed me off so loving much, but I'm really looking forward to it getting here (in a few weeks...).
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