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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Eh, if you absolutely must do children's literature you could do a lot worse than Harry Potter. I think the most shocking thing here is crediting Yudkowsky with personhood or authorship. Kchama posted:There is actually a bit in the Honor book I'm Let's Reading in the Honor Thread that is relevant to this. This was the VERY first book in 1993, and it has a scene where this guy who has no idea who the protagonist is calls her a 'he' when talking to one of her crew, and he snaps back "SHE." for assuming her gender. Isn't that mostly because the Honor series is all tall ships in space, so of course they do the 'assume all competent officers are male' bit like it's the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Dec 28, 2019 |
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The most frightening thing about this thread is how easy it is to dismiss "it's fantasy" stuff that is inherent sexist racist propaganda Edit: I'm p sure I am guilty of this
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Dec 28, 2019 13:52
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Liquid Communism posted:I think the most shocking thing here is crediting Yudkowsky with personhood or authorship. Actually, no! It's suppose to be a completely egalitarian setting where men and women are treated exactly the same. This is actually very important in the second book where Honor gets assigned to be the person in charge of a diplomatic mission to a backward hellhole where women are second class citizens. It's as bad of a book as it sounds. Kchama fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Dec 28, 2019 |
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Dec 28, 2019 16:56
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Kchama posted:Actually, no! It's suppose to be a completely egalitarian setting where men and women are treated exactly the same. This is actually very important in the second book where Honor gets assigned to be the person in charge of a diplomatic mission to a backward hellhole where women are second class citizens. Oh, God, I hate the "well, the Good Society treats everyone equally, but we're going to spend a bunch of time in the prejudiced Bad Society so we can have the minority characters get harassed without implying the protagonists condone this" trope. It always makes me think of Firefly, where they go out of the way to establish that sex workers are viewed as respected professionals in most of the setting, then spend multiple episodes on plots entirely about backwater hicks abusing the sex worker character. (Firefly even does the "the galactic core is sinful and decadent" thing, so the effect is that sex-worker acceptance is associated with immorality, which is really great. Also the main character constantly verbally harasses the sex worker because he's in love with her? God, I loving hate Firefly.)
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Dec 29, 2019 00:51
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Antivehicular posted:Oh, God, I hate the "well, the Good Society treats everyone equally, but we're going to spend a bunch of time in the prejudiced Bad Society so we can have the minority characters get harassed without implying the protagonists condone this" trope. It always makes me think of Firefly, where they go out of the way to establish that sex workers are viewed as respected professionals in most of the setting, then spend multiple episodes on plots entirely about backwater hicks abusing the sex worker character. (Firefly even does the "the galactic core is sinful and decadent" thing, so the effect is that sex-worker acceptance is associated with immorality, which is really great. Also the main character constantly verbally harasses the sex worker because he's in love with her? God, I loving hate Firefly.) It's great in Honorverse since the protagonist ends up living on that planet full-time and it turns out that it's actually a good planet full of good people and have the right kind of chauvinism and the bad planet is the one in the system where it's Rape O'Clock all the time and women have zero rights, instead of just few!
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Dec 29, 2019 04:40
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Kchama posted:Actually, no! It's suppose to be a completely egalitarian setting where men and women are treated exactly the same. This is actually very important in the second book where Honor gets assigned to be the person in charge of a diplomatic mission to a backward hellhole where women are second class citizens. Yeah I've read all of them and Weber's -other- tall ships sci-fi series, and while that's what it's supposed to be, he's really just here for Horatio Hornblower with the names rubbed off. 
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Dec 29, 2019 05:44
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So I would normally go after said books...but this is what Tor is publishing right now. They are pushing this author hard. Tor seems to have descended into Harlequin territory in the last decade and a half imo. Not everything is, but unfortunately this sells? Apparently? (*sigh*) Patrat posted:Because dragon. Best reason.
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Jan 2, 2020 06:02
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http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_01_20/ Speaking of Science Fiction and gender...
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Jan 2, 2020 11:02
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SimonChris posted:http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_01_20/ this reads like someone trying really hard to imitate watts
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Jan 2, 2020 13:22
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Eh, if you absolutely must do children's literature you could do a lot worse than Harry Potter. You could do a lot better too. Michael Ende for example, he even have a story about a magic school and he didn't as far as I know write about greedy goblins or villainous trans people. Terry Pratchett and China Mieville also wrote some good YA litterature.
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Jan 2, 2020 13:37
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I just caught up with this thread—the parts that are actual discussion and criticism sure are pulled down by the rest of whatever this is. But be the change you want to see and also I need something to do to avoid doing useful work. So, to go back like 20 pages, an effort post in defense of N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth because I think the discussion of it in this thread kind of missed the boat on a work that is engaged in exactly the same thing this thread is (criticising speculative fiction) as well as a bunch of other things. Jemisin tells you what she's doing right from the beginning. Compare the prologue* of The Fifth Season to the opening of The Hobbit, both because it's sort of emblematic of the school of speculative fiction that she is critiquing and also because Jemisin invites it: The Fifth Season Prologue posted:In this town is a house like any other. This house, which sits along one of these slopes, is little more than a hole dug into the earth that has been lined with clay and bricks to make it waterproof, then roofed over with cedar and cut sod. The sophisticated people of Yumenes laugh (laughed) at such primitive digs, when they deign (deigned) to speak of such things at all—but for the people of Tirimo, living in the earth is as sensible as it is simple. Keeps things cool in summer and warm in winter; resilient against shakes and storms alike. Which, you know, is the beginning of The Hobbit: The Hobbit ch. 1 posted:In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. And now that she's directed your attention, she's going to first differentiate this work from the way that speculative fiction, particularly fantasy, has treated "race" as a stable and unmistakable determinant of physicality and temperament, as in Tolkien: The Hobbit ch. 1 posted:I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow); wear no shoes, because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it). Instead, Nemisin presents race as poorly differentiated, subjective, and constructed. The Fifth Season Prologue posted:The woman’s name is Essun. She is forty-two years old. She’s like most women of the midlats: tall when she stands, straight-backed and long-necked, with hips that easily bore two children and breasts that easily fed them, and broad, limber hands. Strong-looking, well-fleshed; such things are valued in the Stillness. Her hair hangs round her face in ropy fused locks, each perhaps as big around as her pinky finger, black fading to brown at the tips. Her skin is unpleasantly ocher-brown by some standards and unpleasantly olive-pale by others. Mongrel midlatters, Yumenescenes call (called) people like her—enough Sanzed in them to show, not enough to tell. And then she's going to set up an inversion in the role that speculative elements are going to play within her work. Where Bilbo's story is an escapist fantasy—the mystical elements are facilitating a journey from a topographically familiar land to one infused with mysterious and incredible beings almost entirely detached from our concerns—the mystical elements in Nemisin's narrative are pushing Essun, and hopefully the reader, to confront the realities of oppression and intolerance that she would (it becomes abundantly clear) prefer to paper over. The Fifth Season Prologue posted:The boy was her son. His name was Uche; he was almost three years old. He was small for his age, big-eyed and button-nosed, precocious, with a sweet smile. He lacked for none of the traits that human children have used to win their parents’ love since the species evolved toward something resembling reason. He was healthy and clever and he should still be alive. Essun is an orogene, as is her son (which is why he was killed by his father). I'll let TheGreatEvilKing explain what that means: TheGreatEvilKing posted:Yes, orogenes can decide not to hurt people, but you can't actually stop them from getting angry because someone cut them off in the supermarket checkout line so they froze twenty people. A lone orogene can't actually be stopped without others around to check them. It's nuts. Essun's journey, particularly with The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate, I read as a cogent reimagining of North American antebellum† slave narratives‡, engaging with the body of postmodern neo-slave narratives (some people call them liberatory narratives) from within the context of speculative fiction¶. The sex scenes after Essun has initially escaped bondage might seem like some weird wank fantasy aside (it involves some MMF threesomes) but Essun reclaiming her sexuality is an important part of her (at least attempting) to deal with her trauma, and I would argue that it's pretty salient to what the novels are doing. The idea that Essun has sexual agency at all is important, even while she's still suffering trauma§, in contrast to women like Harriet Jacobs who had to attempt to communicate that they had been sexually assaulted while societal standards precluded them from directly mentioning sex. There's more to say but I have to do actual work and poo poo now I think. * She's not perfect or anything, as evidenced by her use of a prologue, which people should stop doing. It was a poo poo idea when Mary Shelley did it and it's still a poo poo idea now. † As opposed to the slave narratives later produced by the WPA during the Great Depression which tend towards a very different tone. ‡ If you're interested in the parallels, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself by Harriet Jacobs which is available on Project Gutenberg is probably a good place to start. ¶ I'm no expert but as far as I know this is fairly novel. Toni Morrison's Beloved is sort of leaning in that direction but it's clearly magical realism rather than outright speculative fiction. § See e.g. her remarks about how "[Alabaster] doesn’t feel as good as a dildo or her fingers" after her coerced coupling with him (Fifth Season ch. 4).
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Jan 6, 2020 18:26
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Alhazred posted:You could do a lot better too. Michael Ende for example, he even have a story about a magic school and he didn't as far as I know write about greedy goblins or villainous trans people. Diana Wynne Jones is the best magic school writer by far. Christopher Chant could wipe the floor with Harry Potter.
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Jan 6, 2020 18:39
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toni morrison is not magical realism lol "speculative fiction" as a term should be taken away from nerds, who transparently try to use it to lend more validity to their chosen genres. just say "fantasy" you're not fooling anyone Wallet posted:§ See e.g. her remarks about how "[Alabaster] doesn’t feel as good as a dildo or her fingers" after her coerced coupling with him (Fifth Season ch. 4). jesus christ
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Jan 6, 2020 19:29
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it also betrays a pretty surprising lack of knowledge of, simultaneously, the fantasy genre, medieval romance, fairy tales, folklore, and the mythology of northwestern europe to derisively categorize the hobbit as "escapist fantasy" because it isn't interested in hamfistedly speaking to extremely american 21st century ideas about race
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Jan 6, 2020 19:33
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quote:coerced coupling with I'll write more later because I respect the effort but lol
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Jan 6, 2020 20:16
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Wallet posted:It's like some nutcase in a Wallmart with some kind of speculative object or power could kill twenty people on a whim; must be a childish and unrealistic power fantasy. Anyway, orogenes are indeed powerful, and so it falls upon society to restrain them from Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jan 6, 2020 |
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Jan 6, 2020 20:32
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Putting that writing next to Tolkien's is not doing it any favors. I have no specific affinity for Tolkien but his prose is so languid in comparison, so much more tactile, when placed next to "The woman’s name is Essun. She is forty-two years old." The description of the Hobbit hole evokes so much about it by describing first what it isn't, and then what it is (not wet and muddy, not dry and bare, but comfortable, and associating it with what a Hobbit is - Hobbit society and comfort are synonymous.) Establishing that and then moving on to describe the Hobbits physically reinforces that idea - barefooted and a little chubby, prone to laughter and a good meal, you know instantly so much about their society by way of their physicality, their "race." By comparison this author rattles off some physical stats about the (unremarkable in any sense, according to the prose, making me wonder why I've bothered to read about it at all) domicile, and I know nothing about the society save that there's a bourgeois hierarchy to which the owner of the home does not belong. And she takes twice as many words to tell me half as much. Much the same for her description of the main character. It's worth nothing that Tolkien describes the people first, and the character of Bilbo by way of them, but this author describes the race by way of the character ("she's like most women of the midlats" followed by "Mongrel midlatters, Yumenescenes call (called) people like her—enough Sanzed in them to show, not enough to tell,") and throws three terms at us whose meaning is not obvious and has no reference outside of the story - I know basically what a dwarf is, I have no idea what a Yumenescen? or a Sanzed is, except that they're different people and are probably of a different race. Also the way she writes (wrote) tense is a loving terrible affectation
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Jan 6, 2020 20:42
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Heath posted:It's worth nothing that Tolkien describes the people first, and the character of Bilbo by way of them, but this author describes the race by way of the character ("she's like most women of the midlats" followed by "Mongrel midlatters, Yumenescenes call (called) people like her—enough Sanzed in them to show, not enough to tell,") and throws three terms at us whose meaning is not obvious and has no reference outside of the story - I know basically what a dwarf is, I have no idea what a Yumenescen? or a Sanzed is, except that they're different people and are probably of a different race.
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Jan 6, 2020 20:46
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I take no issue with prologues tbh, as long as not everything it contains (contained) boils down to in-your-face ~foreshadowing~
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Jan 6, 2020 21:02
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Prologues are best when they set up something that misleads you. If it's just straight exposition or "worldbuilding" it should be extirpated. A decent writer can work those details into the prose itself.
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Jan 6, 2020 21:06
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to be fair I only read those two quotes so I probably shouldn't have said "everything"
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Jan 6, 2020 21:13
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its important to remember also that the hobbit is a children’s book and jemisin’s opening her own story in direct dialogue with it tells us what shelf they both belong on
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Jan 6, 2020 21:15
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like can you imagine a work that began by launching a salvo at Harry Potter and then still expected to be taken seriously as a book for grownups
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Jan 6, 2020 21:16
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chernobyl kinsman posted:like can you imagine a work that began by launching a salvo at Harry Potter and then still expected to be taken seriously as a book for grownups Do you really want the answer to this
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Jan 6, 2020 21:22
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No
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Jan 6, 2020 21:23
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Heath posted:Putting that writing next to Tolkien's is not doing it any favors. chernobyl kinsman posted:toni morrison is not magical realism lol chernobyl kinsman posted:"speculative fiction" as a term should be taken away from nerds, who transparently try to use it to lend more validity to their chosen genres. just say "fantasy" you're not fooling anyone Sham bam bamina! posted:I can't tell whether you're arguing against gun control or for racism here. chernobyl kinsman posted:it also betrays a pretty surprising lack of knowledge of, simultaneously, the fantasy genre, medieval romance, fairy tales, folklore, and the mythology of northwestern europe to derisively categorize the hobbit as "escapist fantasy" because it isn't interested in hamfistedly speaking to extremely american 21st century ideas about race Eugene V. Dubstep posted:I'll write more later because I respect the effort but lol Wallet fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jan 6, 2020 |
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Jan 6, 2020 22:13
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Wallet posted:I just caught up with this thread—the parts that are actual discussion and criticism sure are pulled down by the rest of whatever this is. But be the change you want to see and also I need something to do to avoid doing useful work. So, to go back like 20 pages, an effort post in defense of N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth because I think the discussion of it in this thread kind of missed the boat on a work that is engaged in exactly the same thing this thread is (criticising speculative fiction) as well as a bunch of other things.
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Jan 7, 2020 00:36
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quote:Have you ever read Beloved? It definitely is. no it’s not. magical realism is a particularly Latin American genre and i dont think attempts at applying it to any book that has a ghost in it or whatever make sense. at that point the term loses all meaning Wallet posted:If anything she's writing science fiction, not fantasy. If you have a better universally understood shorthand for "the combined genre of science fiction and fantasy" I'm all ears. sci-fi/fantasy quote:I like The Hobbit, personally, but it's not exactly a deep and introspective look at the human condition "a deep and introspective look at the human condition" is a nerd's idea of what Real Literature should be. chretien de troyes' romances aren't "a deep and introspective look at the human condition" either, but neither are they "escapist fantasy" quote:it's a bildungsroman dipped in a fairy tale yes, it is a fairy tale, and if you think fairy tales are as simple as "escapist fantasy" then you have a brick for a brain quote:Tolkien's massive influence on the genre has definitely contributed to how poorly race has often been handled within in. true, along with the fact that it has overwhelmingly been shaped by white male nerds quote:that was literally written for children correct, which is why this book's attempt to show how its much more Serious and Thoughtful and A Deep and Introspective Look at the Human Condition is hilarious. it's a children's book. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Jan 7, 2020 |
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Jan 7, 2020 00:42
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Wallet posted:Instead, Nemisin presents race as poorly differentiated, subjective, and constructed. No, she doesn't. The main racial-esque conflict in the novel is structured around the hereditary orogenic powers. The awkward n-word substitute isn't applied to Yumenescenes or whatever the world-building ethnicities are, it's explicitly a conflict between the hereditary wielders of power and the regular people who would prefer not to be frozen to death. It's not the usual arbitrary thing where Irish are Schrodinger's White Person, the racial discrimination is between people who are born with earthquake powers and people who are not. You can make a case that this is a better depiction of gays then black people, as there's not really a visual indicator that you have orogenic powers until you actually use them. Sure, this could be a metaphor for "passing as white", but any orogene can theoretically pass as a normal by not shooting ice and quakes everywhere until they lose control whereas not everyone can pass for white. Wallet posted:It's like some nutcase in a Wallmart with some kind of speculative object or power could kill twenty people on a whim; must be a childish and unrealistic power fantasy. Anyway, orogenes are indeed powerful, and so it falls upon society to restrain them from Ok, hang on. The Wal-mart analogy is spectacularly bad because a gun is the opposite of hereditary power. A gun doesn't care whether you're descended from fifty generations of kings, inbred hillbillies, or the Dark Lord Satan, it will kill people no matter who wields it. It's not some mystic power only the chosen can use, you or I can go buy one right now. If my enemies declare that they are going to get guns, I can go get a gun to fight them myself. Hell, you or I could probably learn to build guns. Meanwhile the opening chapters of book one point out that orogenes - or, at least, our mother of many names - are immune to conventional attack, and this is hereditary, and that's ultimately why this fails as a racial allegory. Black people. white people, whatever kind of people are pretty much the same, and if you actually look at racial categories they're completely incoherent. This is more like Slan, where the telepathic supermen are being oppressed when they should really be stepping up to rule the unworthy muggles. It's also completely incoherent as an oppression narrative as the defining traits of oppression are fear and powerlessness. Solomon Northup posted:An hour before daylight the horn is blown. Then the slaves arouse, prepare their breakfast, fill a gourd with water, in another deposit their dinner of cold bacon and corn cake, and hurry to the field again. It is an offense invariably followed by a flogging, to be found at the quarters after daybreak. Then the fears and labors of another day begin; and until its close there is no such thing as rest. He fears he will be caught lagging throughout the day; he fears to approach the gin-house with his basket-load of cotton at night; he fears, when he lies down, that he will oversleep himself in the morning. Such is a true, faithful, unexaggerated picture and description of the slave's daily life, during the time of cotton-picking, on the shores of Bayou Boeuf. The other scene I tend to quote is the scene in Black Boy when the white co-workers try to trap Richard Wright into a contradiction so they can beat him up. But as a power fantasy where you revenge yourself on all the bad people who don't understand? It works perfectly. You don't have the powers because of your character or the work you put in, that poo poo is your birthright. As I pointed out in my earlier post, by Jemisin's own admission this crap is taken directly from Dragon Age, a videogame where you can play as an oppressed mage to add pathos to your backstory and justify you running around committing a murder spree against your enemies by boiling them alive in their own blood. This is not helped by her writing crap like her Inheritance Trilogy which is just a straight wish-fulfillment power fantasy. nankeen posted:thank you for doing this! jemisin is one of those authors whose books i'm not personally into but recognise as important to the genre. she gets ragged on a lot, far more than white male authors of similar quality (i wonder why), so it's vital to have arguments from both sides because a lot of the reception she gets is very unfair and belittles her work. glowing demigod cum aside, she has a lot to say from an informed viewpoint about society, culture, identity and sf/f, much more than a lot of other successful authors whose stuff is completely empty and hollow (sanderson), and that shouldn't be invalidated by how much goons do or don't enjoy her books I agree that Jemisin is trying to do a lot more than Sanderson, but the problem is that it's still genre. I think her use of the mystical elements hurts the oppression story more than it helps it, and there's a reason I tell people to go read Richard Wright or Toni Morrison instead. She has said a lot in author interviews that she is trying to correct for the white male perspective - and that's a completely fair thing to do - but this is more reminiscent of things written by white men like Slan, Odd John, or even X-men, the former two which are partially about the injustice done to the supermen by those who fear their hereditary power. The ultimate problem we must go back to is the hollowness of the genre. If you want to discuss society, culture, and identity there is a ton of quality literature that has more depth and insight and doesn't rely on bizarre metaphors of oppressed wizards and gargoyles appeasing the evil earth by using a magic rock to bring the moon back into orbit. The problem a lot of genre literature has is that it doesn't really know when or why to apply the fantastical elements and they end up awkwardly shoehorned in.
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Jan 7, 2020 01:58
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chernobyl kinsman posted:no it’s not. magical realism is a particularly Latin American genre and i dont think attempts at applying it to any book that has a ghost in it or whatever make sense. at that point the term loses all meaning 
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Jan 7, 2020 03:33
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Looks like somebody hasn't read Murakami.
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Jan 7, 2020 13:58
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magical realism is universal non-fiction
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Jan 7, 2020 14:03
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by giving an equal voice to the weird delusions and fantasies that haunt our species so they act alongside and equally to the worldly physics of the narrative, magical realism taps into our shared unconscious and expresses the real human condition - 50% bound to this world, 50% ruled by superstition and individual madness. by accommodating this human weakness, rather than assuming most people are rational actors as classical non-fiction does, magical realism presents narratives that (if done well) expl
nankeen fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Jan 7, 2020 |
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Jan 7, 2020 14:06
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anilEhilated posted:is there something that binds magical realism to its place of origin? no that was pedantically purist
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Jan 7, 2020 14:26
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Sure, this could be a metaphor for "passing as white", but any orogene can theoretically pass as a normal by not shooting ice and quakes everywhere until they lose control whereas not everyone can pass for white. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Ok, hang on. The Wal-mart analogy is spectacularly bad because a gun is the opposite of hereditary power. A gun doesn't care whether you're descended from fifty generations of kings, inbred hillbillies, or the Dark Lord Satan, it will kill people no matter who wields it. It's not some mystic power only the chosen can use, you or I can go buy one right now. If my enemies declare that they are going to get guns, I can go get a gun to fight them myself. Hell, you or I could probably learn to build guns. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Meanwhile the opening chapters of book one point out that orogenes - or, at least, our mother of many names - are immune to conventional attack, and this is hereditary, and that's ultimately why this fails as a racial allegory. Black people. white people, whatever kind of people are pretty much the same, and if you actually look at racial categories they're completely incoherent. This is more like Slan, where the telepathic supermen are being oppressed when they should really be stepping up to rule the unworthy muggles. You know this is speculative fiction, right? You seem to think that the only way for an author to explore something is to precisely reproduce it. Like The Left Hand of Darkness can't be saying anything meaningful about gender because them weird aliens can get pregnant and get other people pregnant. What a bunch of nonsense! TheGreatEvilKing posted:As I pointed out in my earlier post, by Jemisin's own admission this crap is taken directly from Dragon Age, a videogame where you can play as an oppressed mage to add pathos to your backstory and justify you running around committing a murder spree against your enemies by boiling them alive in their own blood. This is not helped by her writing crap like her Inheritance Trilogy which is just a straight wish-fulfillment power fantasy. TheGreatEvilKing posted:I agree that Jemisin is trying to do a lot more than Sanderson, but the problem is that it's still genre. I think her use of the mystical elements hurts the oppression story more than it helps it, and there's a reason I tell people to go read Richard Wright or Toni Morrison instead. She has said a lot in author interviews that she is trying to correct for the white male perspective - and that's a completely fair thing to do - but this is more reminiscent of things written by white men like Slan, Odd John, or even X-men, the former two which are partially about the injustice done to the supermen by those who fear their hereditary power. I think she deserves some respect for actually attempting to do something meaningful—even if you don't personally find it successful—instead of writing 1500 page wank-fests about perfectly ordered magic systems. We should be encouraging genre authors that are actually trying to move it forward, even if their attempts are flawed. anilEhilated posted:I was thinking Chinghiz Aitmatov or Olga Tokarczuk myself; is there something that binds magical realism to its place of origin?  .
Wallet fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Jan 7, 2020 |
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Jan 7, 2020 15:08
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Based on what's been posted I don't see how it's speculative fiction at all tbh, to be pedantic myself
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Jan 7, 2020 15:32
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Looks like somebody hasn't read Murakami. Is it worth sticking with Murakami? I got halfway through Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and its just a load of "quirky" pedants with ennui talking about how they're "quirky" pedants with ennui.
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Jan 7, 2020 15:34
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Is it worth sticking with Murakami? I got halfway through Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and its just a load of "quirky" pedants with ennui talking about how they're "quirky" pedants with ennui. I read the sheep book and it was just this.
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Jan 7, 2020 15:39
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Lex Neville posted:Based on what's been posted I don't see how it's speculative fiction at all tbh, to be pedantic myself That's so exceedingly pedantic I'm not even sure what argument you are implying.
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Jan 7, 2020 15:48
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In my novel I speculate on what if wizards existed. So obviously it is speculative fiction you loving pedant
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Jan 7, 2020 16:19
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