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Groke posted:Wingnut organizations always are, it's the old People's Front of Judea problem. This was the Wright/Pratchett post.
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Jan 16, 2019 12:17
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StrixNebulosa posted:what the gently caress He's a hardcore fundie, so he's not a fan of suicide and he's really not a fan of assisted suicide.
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Jan 16, 2019 12:18
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Darth Walrus posted:He's a hardcore fundie, so he's not a fan of suicide and he's really not a fan of assisted suicide. That makes slightly more sense than randomly wanting to assault him, but: gently caress him. e: "Civilization is Christianity. Christianity is civilization." 
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Jan 16, 2019 12:24
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There was also the Legend of Korra meltdown...my bony fealty posted:Oh jeez I didn't realize they were factionalized. Its hard to keep right-wing shitheads straight. Ugh, at least the whole thing flamed out relatively quickly.
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Jan 16, 2019 12:40
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:. yeah but still manages to work in sexual politics, sexual violence and consent in an artificial romantic society. and a truly depressing marriage break up/ impotence sub plot in a later book. can someone throw a recommendation that reminds them of iron clads by adrian tchaikovsky?
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Jan 16, 2019 12:49
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Groke posted:Between that, and his jerk-off fantasy about wanting to physically assault Terry Pratchett... yeah, gently caress that guy. I mean he does look like he's cosplaying a discworld villain
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Jan 16, 2019 12:57
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StrixNebulosa posted:That makes slightly more sense than randomly wanting to assault him, but: gently caress him. Yeah; like, I rather enjoyed that Golden Age trilogy thingy when I read it (despite rolling my eyes rather hard at the Randian parts, and certain aspects of the ending) but basically, gently caress the idea of reading anything more that guy writes.
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Jan 16, 2019 13:21
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:See, that's the difference. Wright's nonfiction prose reads like a freshman objectivist trying to throw his bigwords weight around. Mieville reads like a post-doc who has gone through so many graduate seminars that his poo poo comes out in loops that form the word "liminal."  This didn't get enough love.
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Jan 16, 2019 13:58
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Ornamented Death posted:Yeah, between the WorldCon people showing they were more than willing to not award a Hugo for a given category rather than give it to a Puppy nomination and the Hugos changing how nominations work, the Puppies have largely disappeared. They've mostly moved over to the Dragon Awards, which they've been trying to promote as the REAL barometer of SF/F fandom. The only drama last year came from Jon Del Arroz, who loudly declared his intention to wear a bodycam to Worldcon and get into as many private sessions/parties as possible, in the obvious hope of recording some prominent SFers saying or doing something inappropriate. It took the con organizers about five minutes to decide to ban him, which enabled him to go into the "Help, help, I'm being suppressed!" act. Anyway. I've said before, but Wright clearly thinks he's a modern-day Lewis, Tolkien, or Chesterton.
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Jan 16, 2019 15:28
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branedotorg posted:yeah but still manages to work in sexual politics, sexual violence and consent in an artificial romantic society. Just like Steven Brust, John Barnes was simply incorporating whatever happened in his life into whatever book he was writing at the time. In retrospective comparison, Stephen King's self-insertions post nemesis van was one of the more open author writing out their issues compared to Brust/Barnes. William Burroughs despite rigid unbending competition from Heinlein wins all "author working out their issues" awards forever though. Killing your wife while on heroin will do that.
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Jan 16, 2019 15:46
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StrixNebulosa posted:what the gently caress I realize we know, thanks to other posters, what the gently caress. But it bears repeating. Kesper North fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 20:12
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mewse posted:Gonna be driving for about 10 hours over the next couple days and would like recommendations for audiobooks. On my last heavy travelling stint I listened to locke lamora (gentlemen bastards) #1 and 2 and they were very good. Following up my own post: the trick to audiobooks on iphones are to tag them as "audiobook" in the get info window before copying them over to the iphone in itunes. This One Weird Trick throws them into the Books app rather than the music app, where it is much better about holding your place. With that sorted out, I've been listening to The Broken Empire trilogy by Mark Lawrence. It's as grim-dark as I was warned, but.. hasn't crossed the line with me yet.
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Jan 17, 2019 03:25
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90s Cringe Rock posted:It does at least have foxes, right? I finished it. Not as complex as his other stuff, but that just leaves it a clear and straightforward story of adventure, optimism, and character growth. I like the setting and I'm looking forward to whatever Min gets herself into next.
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Jan 17, 2019 07:25
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The Cyberiad is $2.49 on Kindle
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Jan 17, 2019 12:40
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https://twitter.com/JCareyAuthor/status/1085897481458724865 So glad she survived, drat!
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Jan 17, 2019 14:55
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mewse posted:Following up my own post: the trick to audiobooks on iphones are to tag them as "audiobook" in the get info window before copying them over to the iphone in itunes. This One Weird Trick throws them into the Books app rather than the music app, where it is much better about holding your place. If you can get through the first book you'll be fine as far as how excessively grim it is. It's much less gratuitous from there on. I found those early vaguely juvenile bits bearable because while pretty distasteful it never felt like the author had his dick in his hand while he was writing it.
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Jan 18, 2019 02:53
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Couple of points re John C Wright chat:Clark Nova posted:Yeah, the women characters in the Golden Age trilogy were few, weak and lovely, even though I'm pretty sure there was a scene where the protagonist swapped bodies or genders with his wife on their honeymoon. It shows you he knew rigid gender roles are a completely outmoded concept in a far-future setting where everyone is an AI or a brain in a jar, but he couldn't help himself This was dealt with in the setting with a plausible explanation, I think. The social group which the protagonist and his wife belong to emphasise certain aspects of pre-Singularity modes of living and disfavour anything that doesn't resemble the real pre-Singularity world to the degree possible (with many concessions, of course). As it is presented, this isn't because those traditions are inherently right or good, but rather because they offer a way of living which helps to protect people from some of the corrosive elements of the future presented. The Golden Oecumene is a libertarian utopia where government forbids almost nothing and technology grants its inhabitants incredible powers to alter themselves and their surroundings. Wright argues that such freedom and power without some guiding set of ideas or morals offers great scope for self-harm. The protagonist's group imposes strictures from the real world to provide a protective moral framework. This is a reasonably plausible idea, I think, although I would've liked to see more about how some of the other cultural groups' (who were much more exotic) ways of living served the same purpose. The framework of the protagonist's cultural group also tends to shape gender roles to some degree. Now of course it could be interpreted that Wright is saying those traditional roles are morally optimal (and if you read about him in the real world that's certainly the more probably correct inference), but within the text itself it's not necessarily the case. I didn't find the sex relations in themselves too nuts or grating, anyway, since while the female characters didn't get as much airtime as the men they weren't useless either and I didn't see anything in the moral code the protagonist followed suggesting women are to be deprived of agency or anything like that. I vaguely remember some peripheral characters who did change sexes or were hermaphrodites who didn't fit modern gender categories well and I don't remember there being any negative implication about them. Applewhite posted:I got stuck at the opening to The Architect of Aeons where the cowboy genius hero and evil Spaniard are strapped in a spaceship arguing about how smart the author is. I intend to finish the series at some point but right then it was just too much. Agreed re that being the thinnest and worst part. While it wasn't purely UP BY THE BOOTSTRAPS in that before the protagonist came along there had been an evil exploitative capitalist type intentionally keeping those beneath him in a state of subservience it wasn't far off as those are two pretty thin dimensions. I found it somewhat more palatable by thinking of the bootstraps lesson as something specific to the far-future setting depicted. In real life mobility from the middle class is decent; the problem is those who are stuck at the bottom who have effectively nothing with which to get traction. In the setting depicted it might be thought that wealth is so abundant pretty much everyone can acquire basic endowments necessary to not fall into that trap. I think he does a better job of presenting alternative views on how to live in The Golden Age and giving them their due; later on he becomes more dogmatic... But the ideas in his sci fi books are cool enough I grit my teeth through the annoying bits.
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Jan 18, 2019 07:08
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Despite the hundreds of books I've read, Bill the Galactic Hero is still my favorite book. It's got so many things going on in it from FBI style entrapment plots, the eternal war military industrial mind-set/the deep state mentality, fake news, god-tier drunkness, military healthcare, relentless disses on Heinlein + Asimov back when nobody dared to mock Heinlein + Asimov, how religion is treated in the military, 7 inch tall enemy spies, etc........all while being classified as a mil-fiction book despite being secretly anti-war as hell once you actually read it. military training quote:The grand old lady of the fleet, Christine Keeler, was still in orbit while her engines were being installed. There was very little to do, because, in spite of what First Class Spleen had said, they had mastered all the intricacies of fuse tending in a little less than the prescribed year; in fact it took them something like maybe fifteen minutes. god-tier drinking quote:If you’re so hot on someone holding your hand while you go sightseeing, take the sergeant.” the most plausible far future space battles ever captured in print quote:The gunner’s seat was padded and looked very comfortable, far more so than the warped steel deck: Bill slid into the recently vacated position and stared with unseeing eyes at the screen before him. Little moving blobs of light. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Jan 18, 2019 |
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Jan 18, 2019 08:26
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BIG NEWSquote:Tor Books is honored to announce the forthcoming publication of Warrior of the Altaii, the never-before-seen first novel by epic fantasy titan Robert Jordan.
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Jan 18, 2019 17:32
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All the momentum of a tugged braid.
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Jan 18, 2019 18:09
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:BIG NEWS Written by Sanderson ? Neurosis posted:If you can get through the first book you'll be fine as far as how excessively grim it is. It's much less gratuitous from there on. I found those early vaguely juvenile bits bearable because while pretty distasteful it never felt like the author had his dick in his hand while he was writing it. As I recall, it is basically a parody where the protagonist is a massive edge lord. In terms of grimness, it tried to be so over the top that it felt surreal. Decent enough series, but so far not enough to make me read his other series.
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Jan 18, 2019 18:37
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:BIG NEWS aka "We found this poo poo in the bottom of a box in his attic."
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Jan 18, 2019 18:59
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Selachian posted:aka "We found this poo poo in the bottom of a box in his attic." YUP
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Jan 18, 2019 19:01
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Selachian posted:aka "We found this poo poo in the bottom of a box in his attic." Ahh yes, the time honored "Tolkien children" approach.
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Jan 18, 2019 19:17
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Gotta wonder whether he ever wanted it published
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Jan 18, 2019 19:26
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MockingQuantum posted:Ahh yes, the time honored "Tolkien children" approach.
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Jan 18, 2019 19:58
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Feel like Brian Herbert set the bar so low that any legacy work/continuation published by an author's kid or estate will be considered worthy.
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Jan 18, 2019 20:00
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my bony fealty posted:Feel like Brian Herbert set the bar so low that any legacy work/continuation published by an author's kid or estate will be considered worthy. To be fair, the number of short overpriced books I have seen released by authors like Erikson, Scalzi, Stross or Reynolds indicates that you don’t actually have to wait for the author to die first.
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Jan 18, 2019 21:00
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"a fascinating formative work" yeah that's one way to put it.
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Jan 18, 2019 21:04
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MockingQuantum posted:Ahh yes, the time honored "Tolkien children" approach. I was working at Random House Children's Books when Dr. Seuss's editors, a few years after his death, managed to squeeze three more books out of a first draft and a handful of notes and scribbles.
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Jan 18, 2019 21:26
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uber_stoat posted:"a fascinating formative work" yeah that's one way to put it. Some clever editor realized that a lot of people won't realize the difference between "formative" and "formidable".
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Jan 18, 2019 21:52
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The family ran out of coke already?
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Jan 18, 2019 23:55
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I imagine they just don't expect Jordan's legacy to have Tolkien-level staying power. Strike while the iron is still uncomfortably warm to the touch, etc. It's certainly possible for properties to be continued by others after the death of the original author--we have heaps of Arthurian stuff, Lovecraftian stuff, Sherlock Holmes and superhero comics to show that. Yeah there's a lot of poo poo in those piles as well but also some cultural favorites. Author's kids getting involved though, that never seems to work. They either completely gently caress it up (Brian Herbert) or they strangle the estate with overmeddling. This is basically what's happening with Octavia Butler's estate at present, it's hard for anthologies to reprint her stories because her heirs just demand absurd figures for them.
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Jan 19, 2019 00:34
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occamsnailfile posted:It's certainly possible for properties to be continued by others after the death of the original author--we have heaps of Arthurian stuff, Lovecraftian stuff, Sherlock Holmes and superhero comics to show that. Yeah there's a lot of poo poo in those piles as well but also some cultural favorites. You're comparing apples to oranges here. Copyright doesn't apply to Doyle anymore, never applied to folklore, and while I think some of Lovecraft's stuff is still under copyright, he was fairly unique in that even when he was alive, he invited other writers to play with his creations. That's not to say that it's impossible for new work to show up in properties of recently-deceased authors, but it isn't going to be the free-for-all of the examples you gave. It's going to be Brian Herbert making GBS threads all over his dad's legacy, or Brandon Sanderson taking some of Jordan's notes and completing a novel. It's all very tightly controlled because there's too much potential money at stake.
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Jan 19, 2019 01:02
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Finished the Traitor Baru Cormorant and can whole heartedly recommend it. I'm slightly puzzled that there were apparently a lot of people who didn't see the betrayl coming. It was always the obvious reading with no mention of Aparator's "favourite method" after the discussion that led to the rebellion. And the meta argument that there was no way that Cormorant would take off her metaphorical and literal mask this early in the books. I had a bit of a quibble at the very end, since being the one unimplicated person in a criminal conspiracy is an easy way to get a knife in the back, but it does make sense in terms of a power struggle between her sponsor and the eugenics guy. I'm still not sure why pretending to be a total sociopath is helpful in any way. The economic aspect is still the part I most struggle with. Somehow the quasi-feudal setting, the seemingly self-sufficiency of the duchies as a system and the totally monetized economy just don't mix in my mind. What would the dukes buy with their unlimited credit to totally crash the currency? Armaments to beat up their neighbors? But the duke's mode of warfare is more sticking people with sticks and riding them down with horses. You can certainly break an economy by overspending on those, but I don't think you can do it very fast. Or is the whole province dependant on grain imports? One final nitpick is that Mask science seems to offer a nearly perfect way to understand the world, with economic projections that appear to be vastly more accurate than anything we manage in the real world, yet their understanding of gender and half their genetics is on the level of phrenology. I'd have liked to see just one other example where they are completely off their rocker. genericnick fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Jan 19, 2019 |
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Jan 19, 2019 01:36
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For what it's worth, copyright still applies to Holmes, in the US only on the last nine stories. But that was only secured because someone took the estate to court. Until just a few years back, the estate had a death grip on the rights in the US and attempted to extract as much money as possible, in an especially litigious fashion. The estate is very unpopular in the wider Sherlockian community.
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Jan 19, 2019 01:38
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Xotl posted:For what it's worth, copyright still applies to Holmes, in the US only on the last nine stories. But that was only secured because someone took the estate to court. Until just a few years back, the estate had a death grip on the rights in the US and attempted to extract as much money as possible, in an especially litigious fashion. The estate is very unpopular in the wider Sherlockian community. Yeah, the best annotated collection of the Sherlock stories is currently out of print due to rights conflicts.
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Jan 19, 2019 01:43
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Ornamented Death posted:You're comparing apples to oranges here. Copyright doesn't apply to Doyle anymore, never applied to folklore, and while I think some of Lovecraft's stuff is still under copyright, he was fairly unique in that even when he was alive, he invited other writers to play with his creations. It's true that the volume involved allowed more gems to flourish. Sanderson might be the better example in that he was a carefully chosen successor and a seasoned professional writer in his own right versus Brian Herbert, even with the dubious assistance of Kevin J Anderson.
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Jan 19, 2019 01:59
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:BIG NEWS 
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Jan 19, 2019 02:04
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Ornamented Death posted:Copyright doesn't apply to Doyle anymore, never applied to folklore
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Jan 19, 2019 02:21
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