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Elviscat posted:So, if I plug in: I haven’t read a lot of his stuff, but Kim Stanley Robinson might work. Sure someone will prove me wrong right quick though.
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Feb 26, 2020 15:33
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I'd like to also mention Susan Palwick; she writes some of the best and most emotionally brutal science fiction I've ever read.
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Feb 26, 2020 15:34
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xcheopis posted:Startide Rising has a dolphin sexually harassing a crewmate. That just seems like the result of some solid research into dolphins.
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Feb 26, 2020 15:56
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Karia posted:What there is is torture porn. I don't know, it's too miserable to qualify as porn and the Culture comes off as psychotic most of the time. That dissonance between the hedonistic enlightened fully-automated space-communism society versus the cloak-and-dagger "enlightened imperialism" at the edges is the primary theme of the series. There's less violence in the book than most sci-fi, but when it's there it's terrifying instead of being glorified. Banks is one of the few authors who made me genuinely uncomfortable. The Chair 
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Feb 26, 2020 16:04
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I've been very into Adrian Tchaikovsky lately. He is prolific, and we're at a point where Amazon is emailing me every time he has a new book/novella. He writes both science fiction and fantasy, and I've really only read some of his sci fi at this point, but I have one of his fantasy selections in my to-read pile. Children of Time passes the Bechdel test easily enough if you accept lady spiders for the rule.
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Feb 26, 2020 17:03
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Rascar Capac posted:That just seems like the result of some solid research into dolphins. It's 100% this in the Uplift saga, which is great. I was waiting for the dolphin rape scene all book though.
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Feb 26, 2020 17:21
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Antigravitas posted:I don't know, it's too miserable to qualify as porn and the Culture comes off as psychotic most of the time. That dissonance between the hedonistic enlightened fully-automated space-communism society versus the cloak-and-dagger "enlightened imperialism" at the edges is the primary theme of the series. There's less violence in the book than most sci-fi, but when it's there it's terrifying instead of being glorified. Banks is one of the few authors who made me genuinely uncomfortable. The Chair I may have used "porn" too loosely. It's certainly not intended for tittilating the readers. But would you argue that "one legged music critics" really helps bring out that dissonance you mentioned in The Player of Games? Frankly, at that point it's just boring, and not even in a "banality of evil" way: that sort of cruelty is presented as a luxury. It just doesn't add anything. And with the way the revolution just happens afterwards without the Culture doing anything else, the Culture comes out with their hands looking much cleaner than they should after orchestrating a regime-change. Really, that's my least favorite book in the series, it's much less critical of the Culture than the others. The others strike a much better balance. In contrast, I really like how Excession shows the real effects of the war with the Affront. As I remember it, some diplomatic personnel are led away to unstated but probably horrible fates, with the implication that this was happening in hundreds and hundreds of systems. That's a much less blatant way of showing how people suffer in the games of great powers. But I may be trying to have my cake and eat it too: that scene is largely effective because we already know how brutal the Affront can be. But that was hammered in effectively during the diplomatic dinner, so I still feel it's at least relatively subtle. Anyway, I mostly just wanted to do a content warning, because it gets pretty graphic sometimes. The Chair is nasty but very effective, but Surface Detail just goes over the top.
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Feb 26, 2020 17:35
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Rascar Capac posted:That just seems like the result of some solid research into dolphins. Elviscat posted:It's 100% this in the Uplift saga, which is great. Oh, ok, a dolphin trying to rape a human is not "weird sex stuff" got it.
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Feb 26, 2020 17:45
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xcheopis posted:Oh, ok, a dolphin trying to rape a human is not "weird sex stuff" got it. Excellent reading comprehension, gold star.
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Feb 26, 2020 17:50
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3915392 My Twilight thread is almost ready for its hiatus, so I made the thread for the William Control books if you want to bookmark it early.
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Feb 26, 2020 17:54
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Elviscat posted:So, if I plug in: Specifically, I keep meaning to see if CJ Cherreyh (sp)? is good but the only book I glanced into I opened on a chapter where the human and alien have decided to try to get it on and ran into some difficulties because neither of them knew even where the erogenous zones were on the other... Probables: T J Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) - fantasy Becky Chambers - SF - never realized you could build a whole series of suspense around beings trying to be polite to one another Theodora Goss - victorian era supernatural feminists, roughly speaking K. B. Spangler's Stoneskin Possibles: Seanan McGuire aka Mira Grant (Fantasy, horror) James Alan Gardner (SF) Heide Goody & Iain Grant *maybe* Rosemary Edgehill? Technically Diana Gabaldon qualifies but... Dana Stabenow's Star Svensdottor trilogy, but it probably fails the "well written" prong - I mean it's not bad, but it's definitely written in a Golden Age-ish style. Seconding: Max Gladstone Ann Leckie In my TBR but could be worth checking: Rachel Aaron Charlie Jane Anders Octavia Butler and if you feel like reading mystery give Amanda Cross a try.
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Feb 26, 2020 17:56
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Speaking of James Tiptree Jr, Google has him listed as the author for The Screwfly Solution despite that being not at all the case. If you're looking for woman-centric horror, Screwfly Solution is an intense read. PHIZ KALIFA has a new favorite as of 19:14 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 18:04
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Karia posted:But would you argue that "one legged music critics" really helps bring out that dissonance you mentioned in The Player of Games? I had totally forgotten about that. No argument there, I felt that was gratuitous. Surface Detail goes ott, but I have to hand it to him, he managed to find several new ways in which ubiquitous brain uploading tech is actually horrifying.
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Feb 26, 2020 18:14
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Speaking of Tiptree, Google has him listed as the author for The Screwfly Solution despite that being not at all the case. I don't know if  but Alice Sheldon wrote Screwfly Solution under the pen name Raccoona Sheldon, but her other, more famous pen name was Tiptree.
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Feb 26, 2020 18:16
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thepopmonster posted:Specifically, I keep meaning to see if CJ Cherreyh (sp)? is good but the only book I glanced into I opened on a chapter where the human and alien have decided to try to get it on and ran into some difficulties because neither of them knew even where the erogenous zones were on the other... Which book is this?
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Feb 26, 2020 18:18
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Dienes posted:I don't know if I didn't know that! Interesting. In either case, Google had it listed as James Tiptree Jr, who was mentioned earlier ITT, so its more an issue of me not being clear enough.
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Feb 26, 2020 19:15
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Karia posted:I may have used "porn" too loosely. It's certainly not intended for tittilating the readers. But would you argue that "one legged music critics" really helps bring out that dissonance you mentioned in The Player of Games? Frankly, at that point it's just boring, and not even in a "banality of evil" way: that sort of cruelty is presented as a luxury. It just doesn't add anything. And with the way the revolution just happens afterwards without the Culture doing anything else, the Culture comes out with their hands looking much cleaner than they should after orchestrating a regime-change. Really, that's my least favorite book in the series, it's much less critical of the Culture than the others. The others strike a much better balance. I think that some of the Culture-initiated violence can justifiably be seen as wish fulfillment, but in any case, a content warning is definitely fair. Re: Player of Games, the "one-legged music critics" bit wasn't necessary, per se, but I don't think the intent of the scene was to show us how cruel they were. The guided tour and decrypted snuff feeds had already hammered that point home. I think the scene was more about having the comfortably cruel explain why they believe what they're doing is cool and good. Also, it feels less over-the-top to me when I remember that the real world is full of analogous things, like books bound in human skin. Re: Surface Detail, it's definitely brutal, but I think it had to be. The book is largely an argument that eternal damnation is a morally bankrupt concept, and it's a lot harder to really drive home that point if you pan to curtains whenever something upsetting is about to happen. Ambitious Spider posted:I haven’t read a lot of his stuff, but Kim Stanley Robinson might work. Sure someone will prove me wrong right quick though. I've only read his Mars trilogy and Aurora, but I can't recall anything in there that really qualifies. Characters sometimes have sex, but it's not written pruriently. There's some arguably orientalist stuff in the Mars trilogy that hasn't aged great, but nothing that would land the books in this thread. thepopmonster posted:Specifically, I keep meaning to see if CJ Cherreyh (sp)? is good but the only book I glanced into I opened on a chapter where the human and alien have decided to try to get it on and ran into some difficulties because neither of them knew even where the erogenous zones were on the other... A) I like Chambers' stuff, but  that's a pretty accurate summary of her Wayfarers seriesB) I haven't ready any Cherryh, but that sounds pretty similar to a (probably tamer) scene in the first Wayfarers book.
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Feb 26, 2020 19:26
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Which book is this? https://the-toast.net/2014/04/02/alien-erotica/ https://the-toast.net/2015/09/17/erotica-written-by-an-alien-pretending-not-to-be-horrified-by-the-human-body/ God I love these.
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Feb 26, 2020 19:33
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Elviscat posted:So, if I plug in: Ann Leckie, N. K. Jemisin, Jeff VanderMeer, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ted Chiang, Malka Older, Maurice Broaddus, Alistair Reynolds, Nancy Kress. Two singleton (as in, only read one book by the author) books I highly recommend are Recursion by Blake Crouch and The Punch Escrow by Tal Klein. The SF/F recommendations in Book Riot are often very good. This overview of highly reviewed SF/F books of 2019 could be a start. I’ve read all of them except The Water Dancer, and liked most of them a lot. I think Cherryh is an excellent writer, but I haaaaaaate reading about diplomacy so I’ve never gotten into her books.
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Feb 26, 2020 20:10
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:https://the-toast.net/2014/04/02/alien-erotica/ Thank you!  Edit: wait that's something else
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Feb 26, 2020 20:25
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The one Banks book I read featured one protagonist who preferred hanging out with murder-rape aliens who'd genetically engineered both all animals on their planet to feel extreme fear as well as their own women so that they hated sex (so that every time they had sex they'd have to rape the women) to living with the posh space scientist society. The murder rape aliens were portrayed with the same sort of jolly rowdiness you might use when depicting friendly orcs, or the Scottish. Also, one of the two women protagonists had a series of extended gags about how she liked makeup, had a lot of luggage, and didn't understand why she couldn't take her gal pals on a secret diplomatic mission.
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Feb 26, 2020 20:43
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Elviscat posted:So, if I plug in: A different thread?  More seriously, a bunch of the authors I would have recommended (Vernon, Chambers, Leckie, Muir...) have already been recommended. I'd like to add Julie Czerneda (Species Imperative) and Sam Farren (Dragonoak) to the pile, since I read both of those trilogies recently and enjoyed them a great deal, and thinking back a bit further, Seth Dickinson (Baru Cormorant), Rosemary Kirstein (The Steerswoman), Mur Lafferty (Six Wakes), and Arkady Martine (A Memory Called Empire). And C.J. Cherryh is, of course, a perennial recommendation from me, especially if you like first-contact stories or alone-in-an-alien-culture stories. The Pride of Chanur and its sequels is more swashbuckling space opera, while Cyteen and Foreigner are more slower-paced political stuff, with the Merchanter books, Cuckoo's Egg, and Serpent's Reach falling somewhere in between. thepopmonster posted:Specifically, I keep meaning to see if CJ Cherreyh (sp)? is good but the only book I glanced into I opened on a chapter where the human and alien have decided to try to get it on and ran into some difficulties because neither of them knew even where the erogenous zones were on the other... Cherryh (her real last name is Cherry but she was given the prosthetic H by her publisher early in her career because "otherwise people will think these are romance novels written under someone's pen name"). I'm not sure what book you're referring to, though. My best guesses are either one of the early Foreigner books -- there are, IIRC, one or two sex scenes in the entire 21-book series, but they're pretty early on -- or perhaps Hestia, her first novel, which I don't remember much about. thepopmonster posted:In my TBR but could be worth checking: Oh poo poo I forgot Octavia Butler, I have shamed my family. Go read the Xenogenesis series, it's good stuff. Also Fledgeling although I think that might have, as elviscat puts it, "some weird sex stuff" in it. Rachel Aaron's Legend of Eli Monpress series is a good bet. Her Paradox and Heartstrikers books lean a bit more on romance tropes that drive me up the wall. ToxicFrog has a new favorite as of 21:10 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 21:06
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ToxicFrog posted:Cherryh (her real last name is Cherry but she was given the prosthetic H by her publisher early in her career because "otherwise people will think these are romance novels written under someone's pen name"). Based on the wikipedia description it was an early Foreigner book. Guess I was just lucky.
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Feb 27, 2020 01:42
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thepopmonster posted:Based on the wikipedia description it was an early Foreigner book. Guess I was just lucky. Think that's the third book iirc, don't remember it even being that graphic, and the two characters actually end up in what seems like a pretty healthy and committed long term relationship. Cherryh is really good. Also seconding or fourthing or whatever Ann Leckie, Alistair Reynolds, William Gibson, T. Kingfisher, Becky Chambers, Arkady Martine, great stuff.
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Feb 27, 2020 02:15
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So based on the last several pages of discussion, it seems like the best way to write sex in prose is to have the characters embrace and then fade to black. Not being sarcastic, that really seems the best way to keep from 1) Being creepy, 2) Letting your subconscious fantasies leak into your work, or 3) Letting your social awkwardness leak into your work. This article also comes to mind., when this dovetails into stuff like "History is full of these things!", "Our culture produced this, therefore other cultures could and should have produced the same in a different vein!", and so on.
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Feb 27, 2020 03:40
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The best way to avoid the common problems with sex scenes is to not write them, much like the best way to avoid STDs is to never have sex.
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Feb 27, 2020 03:53
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Cornwind Evil posted:So based on the last several pages of discussion, it seems like the best way to write sex in prose is to have the characters embrace and then fade to black. The secret is that Skyfall was just bringing Bond back to his roots. Ian Fleming was really into BDSM and a lot of the stuff in his books that a basic surface read suggests as "Bond being an abuser" were actually him inserting his kinks in a way that was covered in mass market 1950s paperbacks. The ball-smashing torture at the end of Casino Royale was actually an original Fleming creation, not something made up for the movie to make it darker, and includes a comment on how people who are tortured begin to actually enjoy the torture and the interrogator needs to back off to let them stop getting aroused by it. The very last line of Dr. No is Bond getting dommed by Honey Ryder with "Do as you're told" as she says she's owed "slave time." The film Bond is really tame and generic by comparison.
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Feb 27, 2020 03:54
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I just read a book where the sex scene was so vague I didn't even realise sex had happened until like two paragraphs later. (The sex was kind of important.)
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Feb 27, 2020 03:58
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It was pretty tastefully handled and also actually important to the plot and the themes in Noughts and Crosses.
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Feb 27, 2020 04:01
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Jerry Cotton posted:I just read a book where the sex scene was so vague I didn't even realise sex had happened until like two paragraphs later. (The sex was kind of important.) I was skimming through Breaking Dawn and Bella losing her virginity is like that. There's a vague mention of them slipping underwater and then she wakes up the next day bruised and with feathers everywhere from Edward biting pillows to avoid accidentally decapitating her with his teeth. I had to double check that I was at the right place because of how vague it was.
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Feb 27, 2020 04:02
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chitoryu12 posted:I was skimming through Breaking Dawn and Bella losing her virginity is like that. There's a vague mention of them slipping underwater and then she wakes up the next day bruised and with feathers everywhere from Edward biting pillows to avoid accidentally decapitating her with his teeth. I had to double check that I was at the right place because of how vague it was. YA fiction kinda needs to be vague on the sex scenes I would hope.... The "fade to black" is great for most situations where, say, important characters have a romantic connection, but it doesn't wash away everything, like, say, creepy power imbalance relationships. Also, hey, thanks for some great author rec's in the lovely book thread everyone.
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Feb 27, 2020 04:12
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Elviscat posted:YA fiction kinda needs to be vague on the sex scenes I would hope.... Only in the US. E: although obviously I haven't read European kids' books since the 90s so things may have changed 
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Feb 27, 2020 04:14
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I was allowed unfettered access to books when I turned about 11, including any book off my parent's small library-size collection, or my brother's bookcase. At 11 I read the Magnum Opus "Cybernetic Samurai" and distinctly remember asking my mom and brother at breakfast on the weekend "what's a clitorus?" Which still haunts me to this day. At 12 I read my Dad's collection of Richard Blade novels, for those not familiar, the format is: protagonist (MI6 agent) hops dimensions->graphically bangs many women in said dimension->violences his way out of dimension. There was one where all the males in the dimension had died, and he was forced to "stud farm" his way out. At 13 I read the entire extant Game of Thrones series circa 2003, when the show came out I didn't remember much besides Circe being cautioned to make sure Jamie "spilled his seed" outside her vagina. It's really weird how you can't show a booby on TV, but crazy-rear end poo poo is totally accepted in literature, I guess bookish types just develop internal neuroses about it so no one notices.
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Feb 27, 2020 04:31
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I liked Piers Anthony as a kid and my high school library stocked his books. I won reading awards for having the highest points for reading "mature" novels. My goal is to go back in time and shoot past-me. For many reasons, and being into Piers Anthony is but one of them.
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Feb 27, 2020 05:12
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I think part of it is that it's pretty easy for a parent to notice a boob in it, but a parent isn't going to read thirty Animorphs books so they can get the context of 'oh these children are literally performing War Crimes when they drained a pool'.
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Feb 27, 2020 05:31
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YggiDee posted:I think part of it is that it's pretty easy for a parent to notice a boob in it, but a parent isn't going to read thirty Animorphs books so they can get the context of 'oh these children are literally performing War Crimes when they drained a pool'. Remember when the books have Visser 3 on trial at the Hague and he calls them out on that? And the internal narration is 'he was right but ultimately I got a pass and no one really wanted to deal with it because we won'. There's a ton of really hosed up stuff in those last few Animorph books
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Feb 27, 2020 06:20
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Zore posted:There's a ton of really hosed up stuff in those last few Animorph books Most of them have some pretty hosed up stuff but what sticks with me is trapping a kid as a rat and leaving him alone on an island to spend his last 1-2 years of life in a brutal, solitude existence.
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Feb 27, 2020 15:44
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Zore posted:There's a ton of really hosed up stuff in those last few Animorph books "The last few"? I never finished them as a kid, but I've been rereading them now with an eye to finishing the series, and something I didn't really appreciate as a kid is how KAA doesn't really shy away from the fact that these are a group of kids who've been dragged into fighting a clandestine guerrilla war against an overwhelming foe in which they can't even trust their own families and must be prepared to kill themselves, or their friends, to avoid capture, and that that seriously messes you up. You have stuff like the fact that, on reread, Tobias clearly hated his body and his life and was aiming to trap himself in hawk form right from the beginning, then struggling with the fact that he's happier now than as a human but doesn't want to completely abandon his humanity; Rachel realizing that she really loves violence and worrying about what sort of outlet she'll find for that once the war is over; Cassie becoming numb to death and worrying that she's turning into another Rachel (she still wakes up screaming though -- most of them do, at this point); and of course the ever-present fact that every time they kill a controller they're also killing the human (or hork-bajiir) shield they were wearing. And the debates about whether it's ethical to kill Yeerk non-combatants knowing that they'll become combatants as soon as they have hosts, or Cassie basically attempting to kill herself to prove to a pacifist Yeerk that she has the courage of her convictions. And I'm not even a third of the way into the series; I just finished the story arc where -- Dienes posted:Most of them have some pretty hosed up stuff but what sticks with me is trapping a kid as a rat and leaving him alone on an island to spend his last 1-2 years of life in a brutal, solitude existence. -- that happens, because they tried to recruit another kid, and he wanted to use the powers for a life of crime and, when the others objected, tried to betray them to Visser Three and kill them all (and I thought he had killed Tobias for a while), so once they got the upper hand they decided the best alternative to killing him outright was to trap him in rat form and maroon him on a small island with an existing rat colony out of thoughtspeak range of the shore. And of course when Jake realized he'd gone rogue, his first thought was "get Rachel because we might need to kill him", and knowing that Jake basically thinks of her as "the one you call when you need someone murdered without hesitation" isn't doing her mental state any good, especially because she knows it's true. KAA goes hard and from what I've heard, this remains true right to the end. And after reading a bunch of other YA small-band-of-heroes-against-the-forces-of-evil books over the years, I have a much better appreciation for how unusual this is -- the closest parallel I can think of is Shade's Children by Garth Nix and honestly I remember that being relatively upbeat by comparison.
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Feb 27, 2020 17:04
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ToxicFrog posted:"The last few"? I never finished them as a kid, but I've been rereading them now with an eye to finishing the series, and something I didn't really appreciate as a kid is how KAA doesn't really shy away from the fact that these are a group of kids who've been dragged into fighting a clandestine guerrilla war against an overwhelming foe in which they can't even trust their own families and must be prepared to kill themselves, or their friends, to avoid capture, and that that seriously messes you up. You are about to hit the part where the series goes to mostly ghostwriters and the series takes a pretty hard nosedive, quality wise for a while. I think the transition happens around book 26. Even when I was a kid I didn’t make it past book 30 or so, the quality change was that noticeable. But yeah, it did the “woah, that’s pretty dark for YA” stuff way before Hunger Games and the like did.
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Feb 27, 2020 17:17
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ToxicFrog posted:"The last few"? I never finished them as a kid, but I've been rereading them now with an eye to finishing the series, and something I didn't really appreciate as a kid is how KAA doesn't really shy away from the fact that these are a group of kids who've been dragged into fighting a clandestine guerrilla war against an overwhelming foe in which they can't even trust their own families and must be prepared to kill themselves, or their friends, to avoid capture, and that that seriously messes you up. Yeah the last few books get so much more hosed up than that You have Jake force Erik to commit a war crime (and also implied suicide), the kids deliberately building an auxiliary army of Animorphs made up of disabled kids who serve primarily as cannon-fodder, Jake sending Rachel on a suicide mission to kill his brother (both die), Tobias having multiple POV books about him being explicitly tortured. and the ending where Tobias, Jake and Marco are going to crash a ship into one that Ax (possessed by a Yeerk) is captaining and they all just die because of their horrible PTSD. Cassie is the only main character who makes it out of the series alive.
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Feb 27, 2020 17:23
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