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Got 57% through William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land @1912 before giving up on it. Certain details of the book were interesting, others not so. The sheer amount of text devoted to eating and drinking every 6 hours on schedule and moss-bush creeping on the outbound journey was tolerable but repeated seemingly hundreds of times. I quit the book after the main character found his eternal true love and started headed back towards the gorge leading to the path that crosses the plains that border the area that eventually leads to where his home is....and I can't take more endless repetitions of moss-bush creeping and eating and drinking with the addition of protecting & admiring his true love. Interesting bits in the Night Land: -definitely not the 1st chapter -the 7.5 mile tall, 3.5 mile per side great pyramid shaped Arcology containing the last 15 million or so humans on a post-dead sun earth (this book was written pre-modern day understanding of how the sun will die) -the 100 or so subterranean self-contained ecosystems protected by losTech under the great pyramid that feeds everyone inside the great pyramid arcology and keeps them sane-ish. -the forcefield style barrier that keeps mutated humans and other nasty entities away from the great pyramid -the watcher things that stare at the great pyramid from 100+ km away, and in a modern novel would be collapsing quantum possibilities to keep bad-entities from quantum tunnelling into the great pyramid and hopefully just murdering everyone/everything inside. -the 3 day therapy/physical conditioning regime for people going outside the great pyramid which includes embedding a suicide capsule in your left arm's wrist, and seemingly rewires your digestive system to handle mars-type atmosphere. -super concentrated food tablets and dust that turns into hyper-gatorade once it reacts with the air -a giant trench caused by some world-destroying event that ironically allows life on a post-dead sun earth to exist -the giant trench is hundreds of miles into the global crust (this book was written pre-continental drift theory) where the dregs of the earths atmosphere reside and the dying heat of the earth's core keeps life vaguely possible -the great pyramid exists somewhere in that world-spanning trench -wreckage of earlier ages is scattered around the world-spanning trench quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Jul 20, 2018 |
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Jul 20, 2018 19:27
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There's a rewrite of The Night Land that is amazingly competent. If you were digging the story (and it sounds like you were), it may be worth looking in to.
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Jul 20, 2018 19:54
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Go on, got a link to the rewrite? e: found it http://amzn.eu/5kRWdgn Steakandchips fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Jul 20, 2018 |
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Jul 20, 2018 22:59
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Steakandchips posted:Go on, got a link to the rewrite? Google is hard eh https://www.amazon.com/Night-Land-Story-Retold/dp/0615508812/ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10577778-the-night-land-a-story-retold
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Jul 20, 2018 23:05
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Sorry, thanks!
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Jul 20, 2018 23:05
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I'm reading some Greg Bear stuff because of his interest in the Night Land and boy was this a bad idea.
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Jul 20, 2018 23:14
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It took me like 6 months to get through TNL and I think it was actually worth it. The imagery is so wild that I can forgive the dumbass plot and language. The diskos is cool, the giant cave slugs are cool, the house of silence is real spooky. There's some neat fanart on nightland.website
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Jul 21, 2018 00:27
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my bony fealty posted:The diskos is cool It is, but it is also a giant pizza slicer
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Jul 21, 2018 00:50
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Steakandchips posted:Go on, got a link to the rewrite? pretty cool that they've totally ruined the prose style, which is the main reason you'd read this book in the first place
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Jul 21, 2018 00:54
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That’s not the main reason to read it, it’s the mesmerizing imagery and comforting fatalism
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Jul 21, 2018 01:13
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I'm kinda digging how Ninefox Gambit just dumps you in this world with some crazy magical math system thing and doesn't really explain it. On the other hand it's very confusing.
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Jul 21, 2018 02:09
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A Proper Uppercut posted:I'm kinda digging how Ninefox Gambit just dumps you in this world with some crazy magical math system thing and doesn't really explain it. On the other hand it's very confusing. Magic math: if they do formations right, they act like magic shields or whatever. If they do formations wrong, everyone dies. The magic math only works if they're in an area that follows the correct calendar and does rituals on the right dates. If they're not, then the magic formations stop working. There, you're up to speed, have fun.
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Jul 21, 2018 02:18
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less laughter posted:Google is hard eh 4bux? Fuckin' sold.
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Jul 21, 2018 02:20
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Heads up. The Amazon Kindle store has another good Stanislaw Lem on sale for a unspecified amount of time. $1.99, Peace on Earth: Ijon Tichy Book 4. It is a good and bizzare story, and I'm buying the book yet again just to have an ebook version of it.
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Jul 21, 2018 02:41
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StrixNebulosa posted:Magic math: if they do formations right, they act like magic shields or whatever. If they do formations wrong, everyone dies. Formations are just one application of high calendar exotic physics, there's all sorts of other stuff too. Note that the "high calendar" of ritualized torture murder is purely their own system for exotic physics, there's an adjacent civilization that bases their exotics on flower arranging or something.
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Jul 21, 2018 02:53
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Also yes I got the gist of it, it's just interesting because most sci fi explains everything in very specific detail.
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Jul 21, 2018 03:04
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less laughter posted:That’s not the main reason to read it, it’s the mesmerizing imagery and comforting fatalism Imagery, a thing that exists in books independently of the prose
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Jul 21, 2018 03:54
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The best way to read The Night Land would be to take a drink whenever the author doesn't start a paragraph with a "and," "then," "but," "now," or whatever. (the joke is that you wouldn't get to drink at all)
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Jul 21, 2018 07:35
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less laughter posted:Google is hard eh There's a couple of Night Lands anthologies by Andy Robertson too; modern writers writing in the setting. I remember the first one as being OK but not really standout, FWIW.
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Jul 21, 2018 08:17
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Also yes I got the gist of it, it's just interesting because most sci fi explains everything in very specific detail. Oh! Okay, cool. I think that's my favorite kind of sci-fi, too - when a book makes you work to grok everything about the setting. You can see this in Cherryh, Delany and Glen Cook for good examples. Or, sci-fi where the author isn't so proud of their cool idea that they can trust that the audience is smart enough to follow along... I like it.
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Jul 21, 2018 10:28
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I only just now connected that the Night Land guy was also the author of the Carnacki stories. I never would have thought to link the two, the styles and content are so different.
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Jul 21, 2018 12:54
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I don't know why, but I thought Ninefox was much more 'hard sci fi' than it was so I was pretty bemused for a while. If I'd known it was more 40K I'd have had an easier time at the start.
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Jul 21, 2018 13:13
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occamsnailfile posted:I only just now connected that the Night Land guy was also the author of the Carnacki stories. I never would have thought to link the two, the styles and content are so different. His other books, The Boats of the Glen Carrig (adrift in the Sargasso Sea with ~monsters~) and The Ghost Pirates (sort of like the Carnacki story The Haunted Jarvee with no meddling psychic investigators) are kind of similar to each other but less so to his other books, and The House on the Borderland is a wonderful batshit-crazy ride through space and time and Lovecraft-adjacent horrors.
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Jul 21, 2018 13:30
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Night Land rewrites that develop the main character out seem like they miss the point. The narrator + his motivation was really boring. The really interesting stuff to a modern audience would be the dead sun world full of mystery, danger, lost Tech, and creepy weird lifeforms. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Jul 21, 2018 |
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Jul 21, 2018 17:37
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Junkenstein posted:I don't know why, but I thought Ninefox was much more 'hard sci fi' than it was so I was pretty bemused for a while. If I'd known it was more 40K I'd have had an easier time at the start. I bounced off of it really hard the first time I tried. I gave it another go a few weeks after that, and loved it. Really enjoyed the whole trilogy.
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Jul 22, 2018 03:32
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M John Harrison's Empty Space was much better on a re-read. Two of the three story-lines are interesting(side characters from Harrison's Nova Swing), the third story-line (ex-wife of a main character from Harrison's Light) is boring filler material until the last few chapters, and can be power-skimmed without losing anything.
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Jul 22, 2018 04:32
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Nova Swing killed my interest in that series. I liked Light a lot, but Nova Swing felt like it was taking place in an entirely different universe where people acted more like caricatures than living, breathing human beings (except for the Albert Einstein lookalike's lieutenant, who expressed a lot of the frustration I felt with the book later on). I know Empty Space is more like Light than Nova Swing, but I wasn't able to get through it. I'll probably return to it at some point - hell, I imagine I'd like Nova Swing better on a reread now that I know what to expect.
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Jul 22, 2018 04:37
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Neurosis posted:Nova Swing killed my interest in that series. I liked Light a lot, but Nova Swing felt like it was taking place in an entirely different universe where people acted more like caricatures than living, breathing human beings (except for the Albert Einstein lookalike's lieutenant, who expressed a lot of the frustration I felt with the book later on). I know Empty Space is more like Light than Nova Swing, but I wasn't able to get through it. I'll probably return to it at some point - hell, I imagine I'd like Nova Swing better on a reread now that I know what to expect. Pretty much yes, Everything was synthetic and fake feeling in Nova Swing, especially the Albert Einstein looking detective. Light focused on three characters across time and space plus K-ships/K-tech + light kitsch elements(the Mona's, cultivars as throwaway items, uncle zip franchises, tank farms, Sandra Shen circus, etc) while Nova Swing focused on a tourist trap planet with heavy kitsch + detective noir + the exclusion zone from roadside picnic. tldr: If you don't enjoy detective noir, Nova Swing will probably suck for you. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Jul 22, 2018 05:42
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Counterpoint: Vic Serotonin
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Jul 22, 2018 07:12
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I'm reading The Coming By Joe Haldeman. It was written in 2000, and set in the 2050s, and it's kind of amazing how much he got wrong. Like, newspapers still exist, but in a more complicated and expensive form where stores have a big printer and you put money in and print out the newspaper sections you want. Radio Shack is explicitly mentioned as not only still existing but actually doing really well and having expanded worldwide. The Internet only exists as like, campus networks and the like. Lawrence v Texas never happened, and gay sex was eventually banned nationwide. Nobody has cell phones. Broadcast TV is till the dominant medium, albeit in 3D. The only thing he got right is that it's really hot. I'm only a third of the way through, I'm kinda more interested in the bad futurism than the plot or the characters. It's like, what's he gonna say next? I'm fully expecting former president Hillary Clinton and KB Toys to make an appearance.
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Jul 22, 2018 13:29
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StrixNebulosa posted:Oh! Okay, cool. I think that's my favorite kind of sci-fi, too - when a book makes you work to grok everything about the setting. You can see this in Cherryh, Delany and Glen Cook for good examples. If you haven't yet you'd probably really like the Jean le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi.
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Jul 22, 2018 15:04
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Guy Goodbody posted:I'm reading The Coming By Joe Haldeman. It was written in 2000, and set in the 2050s, and it's kind of amazing how much he got wrong. Like, newspapers still exist, but in a more complicated and expensive form where stores have a big printer and you put money in and print out the newspaper sections you want. Babylon 5 had the same thing, except you also had to bring yesterday's newspaper with you to feed into the machine's recycler.
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Jul 22, 2018 16:37
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Selachian posted:Babylon 5 had the same thing, except you also had to bring yesterday's newspaper with you to feed into the machine's recycler. The Door Into Summer predicted what amounts to reading the news on a tablet, funnily enough, but had people still calling it newspapers.
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Jul 22, 2018 16:57
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Cythereal posted:The Door Into Summer predicted what amounts to reading the news on a tablet, funnily enough, but had people still calling it newspapers. I subscribe to the NYT and the WSJ digitally and read them on my tablet. I still call them newspapers.
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Jul 22, 2018 17:25
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Cythereal posted:The Door Into Summer predicted what amounts to reading the news on a tablet, funnily enough, but had people still calling it newspapers. Bubblegum Crisis had re-writable magazines. You took it to a magazine machine, stuck the spine in the slot, and the cover and pages all got updated to the new issue. I wish we'd gotten that instead of tablets.
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Jul 22, 2018 17:56
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Guy Goodbody posted:Bubblegum Crisis had re-writable magazines. You took it to a magazine machine, stuck the spine in the slot, and the cover and pages all got updated to the new issue. Door's newspapers were described as flat pieces of plastic where you'd just tap the bottom right corner of the screen to flip to the next page.
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Jul 22, 2018 19:28
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rewrittable media throughout the ages chat: Wax tablets were the re-writable magazines back in the Roman empire era. Knots + strings + a good memory for spatial placement were the re-writable magazines of the America before the conquistadors happened. andrew smash posted:Counterpoint: Vic Serotonin Funnily I see Vic Serotonin as the most raymond chandler-esque inspired character in Nova Swing. Vic's entire adult life is built from what he's absorbed from old noir movies. The "my office is a bar" noir cliche, the hard-boiled persona he can't quite pull off, the chambers pistol he carries......just gonna quote Nova Swing quote:Bonaventure chose to ignore him. “They never heard of contingency,” he said, “that’s the fact of it.”
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Jul 22, 2018 19:47
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Dunno if it was this thread or some slate of awards nominations that had Sea of Rust on it, but I really enjoyed it, so uh, if someone here recommended it, thanks.
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Jul 22, 2018 20:25
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muscles like this! posted:If you haven't yet you'd probably really like the Jean le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi. I need to give that one a go again, because I read the first bit of the Quantum Thief and bounced off of it hard. It felt too.... modern, in a bad way?
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Jul 22, 2018 20:45
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StrixNebulosa posted:I need to give that one a go again, because I read the first bit of the Quantum Thief and bounced off of it hard. It felt too.... modern, in a bad way? You bounced off too many neologisms for things we have perfectly good words for in modern English. There’s not much of value beneath the surface, Rajaneimi is no Wolfe.
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Jul 22, 2018 21:03
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