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Wasn't that the hidden power reveal/ kicker or something like it though? It has been at least 10 years since I read it, so I might be completely off. E: After reading the summary on Wikipedia, yeah OK that does seems pretty bad. tight aspirations has a new favorite as of 19:53 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 19:51
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nonathlon posted:There we go. There's a real evolution in PKDs work: the early stuff feels very 50s or old fashioned, just in settings and attitudes. Like it's from an earlier time with different attitudes, as it is. The latter stuff has a more psychedelic vibe. Of course, he'd been writing for decades by then. Writing for decades and had gone completely no-joke insane for a while there. It’s why he writes stuff where reality is so questionable so well- he often wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t IRL.
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Dec 8, 2020 19:55
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Don Gato posted:In Golden Man, the titular golden man escapes using a combination of his precognitive abilities and because he's so hot that one of the female officers is enthralled by his rock hard abs and golden skin and lets him go. It's even more AUG than that - he's evolved to spread his genes by being so incredibly hot that women can't help but bang him and get knocked up. He's pretty much the ultimate incel chad fantasy - utterly brainless, operates on infallible instinct, all women want that golden dick.
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Dec 8, 2020 21:27
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Ah yea, forgot about that one! I'm trying to think if the story itself could have been salvaged if he swapped the sexes of those two characters, but then you're just swapping misogyny for misandry. Except maybe not, since all other major characters are men? The thrust of the short story (that the fall of man will not come from ubermench, but from some lowly evolutionary advantage) could certainly have been done without involving sex drives.
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Dec 9, 2020 05:55
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Serephina posted:ubermench ? 
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Dec 9, 2020 06:09
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Gats Akimbo posted:I read a lot of high fantasy and romance, love me some Tolkien, Jack Vance and Tanith Lee, and I bounced hard off that. I think he's trying to be Vancian with that "monger of spies" stuff, and it's really not working for him.
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Dec 10, 2020 10:30
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It's purple, but it's legible. The previous stuff was so bizzare that it took me several re-reads to understand that the sentences where grammatically correct, technically. Literally yes, the idea that Mankind should be honing itself towards excellence in all areas, physical and mental. The PKD short short story had the protagonists all worried about super psychics and braniacs.
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Dec 10, 2020 11:29
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Tiggum posted:Sorry, but is that supposed to be an example of better writing? Because it's terrible. This guy needs to put the thesaurus down and back away slowly. If I try to read any one of those sentences out loud I just automatically put on a ridiculous voice because there is no other way to read them. Well, yeah, it's written to be silly and over-the-top and thesaurus-abusing for exotic effect. If you don't like the style fair enough, but my point was that as someone who does enjoy purple verbiage I still hated Bakker's version of it.
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Dec 10, 2020 13:24
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The Vance excerpt is good and funny, in fact.
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Dec 10, 2020 23:01
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I haven't delved too deeply into Vance, but the impression that I've gotten is that he's one of those authors whose idiosyncrasies spawned tons of imitators, few to none of whom could pull it off. (See also: Tolkien and conlangs/worldbuilding, Cummings and irregular grammar/capitalization in poetry)
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Dec 10, 2020 23:21
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Writing for decades and had gone completely no-joke insane for a while there. It’s why he writes stuff where reality is so questionable so well- he often wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t IRL. The dedication page in A Scanner Darkly (my favorite, I think, of his books) is haunting. edited to add: 
Pastry of the Year has a new favorite as of 00:12 on Dec 11, 2020 |
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Dec 11, 2020 00:09
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Can someone help me find this thing: it’s a two page excerpt from some lovely fantasy book where a guy describes a woman and goes into insane detail about every body part using weird metaphors something like: “her hair was corn, it was a summers day, her feet were snails”. I vividly remember finding some great fanart of the woman as described and the male characters name was something dumb like Skynard.
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Dec 11, 2020 00:49
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That would be the classic LJ whipping boy Silk & Steel, by Ron Miller.
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Dec 11, 2020 01:10
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Pastry of the Year posted:The dedication page in A Scanner Darkly (my favorite, I think, of his books) is haunting. I feel the same way although it is a difficult book. I prefer the movie where the (shorter?) version of the list of the dead is accompanied by Radiohead but still achieves the same effect.
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Dec 11, 2020 01:10
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Fake edit: it's not so much important that the list is complete. Those were merely people he knew. And that included himself. It was really the point about being children playing in traffic and not realizing it. And well everything else about that it's very beautiful/poignant.
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Dec 11, 2020 01:12
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A fake edit that's actually a real edit that accidentally ended up as a double post is a hell of a thing.
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Dec 11, 2020 01:14
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Sham bam bamina! posted:That would be the classic LJ whipping boy Silk & Steel, by Ron Miller. Thank you, that’s exactly it. And now I can find the image I was thinking of: https://www.deviantart.com/maggock/art/Bronwyn-the-Beautiful-115715837
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Dec 11, 2020 01:14
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I keep forgetting how great "the fragrance of a gibbous moon" is.
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Dec 11, 2020 01:17
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Sham bam bamina! posted:A fake edit that's actually a real edit that accidentally ended up as a double post is a hell of a thing. But it's perfect in a discussion of A Scanner Darkly.
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Dec 11, 2020 02:03
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Courts of Chaos - Wasted Opportunity lord of light was fantastic and courts of chaos was a fitting ending to the corwin novels
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Dec 11, 2020 02:15
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Lord of Light has some stuff that's now pretty unfortunate (transphobia etc) but is otherwise excellent.
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Dec 11, 2020 02:25
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Sham bam bamina! posted:A fake edit that's actually a real edit that accidentally ended up as a double post is a hell of a thing. I was gonna write this "blah blah" post about what a "fake edit" is but it occurred to me and it's more thread relevant. I recently and for the first time read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I'd seen the theatrical cut of Blade Runner on television as a small child and then fell in love with the director's cut on DVD. But never read the source material which is really interesting on a bunch of levels. PKD's love of animals comes heavily in to play, Deckard isn't quite the screwup we see in the movie. Well he screws up but just in different ways. But the one interesting thing I noticed about his flying cop car was the timeline on him flying out of LA to find a frog in southern Oregon. I did a little mental math and it was just barely subsonic. The frog unfortunately was the bad kind of frog.
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Dec 11, 2020 02:25
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catlord posted:lord of light this is one of my favorite books. the tricky part is that zelazny did the same thing eco did in foucault's pendulum, where the first part of the book happens right before the climax. the rest of lord of light is chronological, thankfully, and it's a very good novel e: foucault's pendulum is my favorite novel and zelazny is my favorite author freemandela has a new favorite as of 11:49 on Dec 12, 2020 |
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Dec 11, 2020 02:30
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The Lone Badger posted:Lord of Light has some stuff that's now pretty unfortunate (transphobia etc) but is otherwise excellent. oh poo poo i forgot about that the conversation between sam and the first brahma? e: i can't find my copy 
freemandela has a new favorite as of 02:49 on Dec 11, 2020 |
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Dec 11, 2020 02:31
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I keep forgetting how great "the fragrance of a gibbous moon" is. It's certainly better than the fragrance of a GBS moon.
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Dec 11, 2020 02:50
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I was going to make a joke about cut-flower fragrance, but cut flowers actually smell like something
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Dec 11, 2020 02:59
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This one is mostly very tame compared to the worst stuff you can see in books, but after mulling it over in my head for a long time I felt it'd fit here. There's a Finnish book called Karvat ja Kaikki ("Fur and All") that I read as a kid. Simply put, it's a YA novel that tells the story of a dog who gains human-level sentience & intelligence because his mother was fed deermeat from deers contaminated by the Chernobyl fallout and ends up becoming a rockstar; he tells the story from a posthumous autobiographical perspective. The book has a fairly neat dry style of storytelling that includes some obvious joke setups and such (for example, there's a scene where the band ends up on a field with flying cows and the book goes through a full explanation as to why the entire field is full of four-leaf clovers and how the cows could possibly be flying ("...and cows fly" is the Finnish equivalent of "when pigs fly")), but also the kind of details and introspection you might expect in an actual biography; when the dog is born, there's e.g. a bunch of discussion about how swollen his head was due to the mutation caused by radiation and the book thoroughly describes how everything had to be set up for a dog to be able to perform music. Related to that last thing comes the first kind of odd thing in the book: it's surprisingly dark for a YA novel. The dog's owner has a kindly but drunkard husband who ends up dying (either by liver cirrhosis or in an accident involving alcohol), and a slimy dude from the same town who had a lifelong grudge for not getting to marry the dog's owner marries her; he's a complete dickbag and for example hits the dog with his car and explains it to the owner as the dog's fault, and ultimately the dog's owner drugs the slimeball's beer when he's going to sauna to murder him. The owner later dies of leukemia and believes it was retribution for the murder. The dog also dies at the end of the book completely out of the blue during a New Year's celebration when some random drunk hits him with a baseball bat. Stuff like that. At one point the dog... loses consciousness? I'm not sure why that happens, possibly as a result of the aforementioned being-hit-by-a-car. The dog gets a prophetic vision during that and visits hell. Specifically the hell of rock artists, I think. There he meets, uuhh, I think saint Peter? There're a bunch of jokes about how hell is actually kinda dull and what kind of pension benefits one would get by going to heaven. In the end the dog finds a tower made out of leather; this is a reference to an old Finnish classic where a character gets a similar vision, but since this is Rockers' Hell, the leather is specifically from leather pants. In the tower live musicians who wasted their potential and/or died "too soon". Elvis is there, among others (I don't remember other specific artists), and there's an empty spot for an upcoming legendary musician (foreshadowing, ooo.) I guess the point of this vision is that the dog would end up there if he would happen to go to hell after dying. The dog of course becomes famous and meets various legendary musicians. At one point he meets Kurt Cobain and the book makes it very obvious that the reserved spot in rocker hell's tower of artists who wasted their potential is for Kurt. So uh, yeah, that's the author's opinion on suicide then, I suppose. :/ Having leafed the book later, there's a kinda bizarre streak of christianity going on in the book's themes and I guess this is related. In the last third of the book the story goes into an even more bizarre direction; the dog is in an interview on live TV and various factors contribute to him biting the interviewer. This leads to the dog having to do community service for some time (there might've been some confusion as to how legally treat a talking dog who does crimes.) The dog ends up as a service dog for a blind woman... she might also have been mute? Anyway, the dog ends up actually enjoying the service dog gig quite a lot and iirc the dog & the woman sing together or somesuch. Now then... earlier on in the book two members of the band the dog was in started a relationship, and the guitarist(?) was basically the dog's best friend and she got him into the whole band thing initially. The dog observes himself feeling oddly sad/angry when he hears the couple making out, but doesn't really know what the feeling is exactly and the moment passes. I guess you can see what's being implied. So with that and other stuff... the dog sees a dream of the woman he's working for; in the dream they're swimming naked. After that (or before it, I don't have the book handy atm) they fall in love and, as the book puts it (paraphrasing), "do the most beautiful thing a woman and a dog can do together". So uuuuh, yup, that's a thing that happens. And then the woman has a kid, who turns out to have some doglike qualities (the baby concentrates heavily on smells is one thing I can recall.) Some people realize what's going on and there's some negative talk about it but I'm not sure if anything actually comes out of it; if I recall correctly, the dog's owner realizes what the situation is before dying and says basically something to the effect of "that's really odd but who am I to judge". It might be that the dog is actually separated from the woman by people who don't agree to their romance? Either way, the dog dies pretty soon thereafter and iirc goes to dog (and/or rocker) heaven. As a kid I didn't really stop to consider the exact implications of things and the morbidity of the scenes felt "mature" in a way that was interesting. Looking at it now, I'm pretty sure this is the most bizarre and creepy book I've read, most probably. Again, could've been worse, but still, eughh.
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Dec 11, 2020 03:08
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It is hard to judge PKD too harshly seeing as he came up in a time when genre writers had to churn books/short stories out to make a living. The fact that he was able to put out genuinely good stuff says more than the bad works.
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Dec 11, 2020 03:14
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Antivehicular posted:I haven't delved too deeply into Vance, but the impression that I've gotten is that he's one of those authors whose idiosyncrasies spawned tons of imitators, few to none of whom could pull it off. (See also: Tolkien and conlangs/worldbuilding, Cummings and irregular grammar/capitalization in poetry) This. I've read some decent Vance pastiches; Michael Shea's for example, but most of them just think the style is long-involved-words-o-rama and fail miserably. Hempuli posted:So with that and other stuff... the dog sees a dream of the woman he's working for; in the dream they're swimming naked. After that (or before it, I don't have the book handy atm) they fall in love and, as the book puts it (paraphrasing), "do the most beautiful thing a woman and a dog can do together". So uuuuh, yup, that's a thing that happens. And then the woman has a kid, who turns out to have some doglike qualities (the baby concentrates heavily on smells is one thing I can recall.) Some people realize what's going on and there's some negative talk about it but I'm not sure if anything actually comes out of it; if I recall correctly, the dog's owner realizes what the situation is before dying and says basically something to the effect of "that's really odd but who am I to judge". It might be that the dog is actually separated from the woman by people who don't agree to their romance? Either way, the dog dies pretty soon thereafter and iirc goes to dog (and/or rocker) heaven. PYF terrible book: they do the most beautiful thing a woman and a dog can do together
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Dec 12, 2020 11:17
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How is a nose inquisitive?
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Dec 12, 2020 15:40
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"Nosy" and "sticking your nose in things" are direct pejoratives for being inquisitive.
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Dec 12, 2020 22:05
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Vance’s prose is pretty much a James Branch Cabell pastiche, so if you like Vance, read Jurgen.
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Dec 12, 2020 22:49
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Gats Akimbo posted:PYF terrible book: they do the most beautiful thing a woman and a dog can do together please someone find an actual quote of this sort from the book, it is artistically necessary
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Dec 12, 2020 23:54
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divabot posted:please someone find an actual quote of this sort from the book, it is artistically necessary Who did you piss off to get that redtext? Some bitcoin billionaire who figured out how to translate his wealth into :tenbux:?
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Dec 13, 2020 01:14
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Who did you piss off to get that redtext? Some bitcoin billionaire who figured out how to translate his wealth into :tenbux:? s*r*ph, who appears to be attempting to fund the new SA personally,  at a time
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Dec 13, 2020 01:53
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Pastry of the Year posted:The dedication page in A Scanner Darkly (my favorite, I think, of his books) is haunting. quote:These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy. Possibly my favorite and most comforting paragraph in the English language. I hope if there’s anything after that they’ve all found some kind of comfort and peace. A lot of my friends growing up are gone from their mistake in playing Ugly In The Morning has a new favorite as of 02:44 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 02:39
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Strom Cuzewon posted:How is a nose inquisitive? Spend any time around a dog (not in the way the author of Karvat ja Kaikki would prefer, mind you), and you'll soon find out the answer.
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Dec 13, 2020 02:45
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Kierena posted:
PJOmega posted:There is no way the book can hold a tenth of the horror that note brings. This is from about 40 pages back, but I have just read this thread and it can absolutely be at least as horrible as the annotations suggest. The first romance novel I ever read was The Spitfire by Bertrice Small. It's set in early Tudor era Scotland. I had just seen Highlander and had read a Jean Plaidy book set in the same period. I was in the 8th grade. It begins with a Scottish woman telling her English lover, Jasper, she's pregnant, so he gives her to his soldiers to gang rape to death because he has been fixed up with English heiress Arabella ( the titular Spitfire). I was expecting a strong independent woman, but she is actually 12. There's a scene where he spanks her and her arousal is graphically described. He decides to seduce her mother because her mother is not even 30 and a widow so, why not? Actually, I think her mother offers herself as a distraction hoping Jasper will wait to have sex with Arabella and I seem to recall he plans nothing of the sort but has fantasies about getting them in bed at the same time. Before Arabella and Jasper can get married, though, Arabella is kidnapped by Tavis, a Scottish nobleman, as revenge for his fiancee's murder in the prologue. They are married while she is naked because she got mouthy about her dress. Tavis waits to consummate his marriage to Arabella until she's 14 ("she was stretched and stuffed beyond bearing") because his mother advised him to but he (a man of 30) would have been fine to go ahead otherwise. Between the sex scenes they have a daughter and there's a plotline about Arabella's inheritance being held by the evil Jasper, who has by now married Arabella's mother. Arabella hates her mother for this but then feels a little bad when her mother dies in childbirth. Tavis fails to regain her inheritance in England, so Arabella divorces him, a move which requires her to have sex with the King of Scotland, not the gay (per this novel) James but his manly newly-crowned son. For political reasons, she goes to France and has to ingratiate herself with a French courtier. This means letting herself be seduced by him. While incredibly graphic, the sex is all from her POV and gets weirdly described in parts. The Frenchman declares, "You have unmanned me!" because Arabella is so sexy during their first encounter. I was not sure if he lost his erection or came in his pants, but the next night he surprises her with his identical brother for a threesome she objects to, not that she is taken seriously. She blacks out at orgasm because there are just so many hands everywhere. Her lover congratulates her and by extension himself and his brother the next morning. She runs to England to follow through with her political schemes in order to quid pro quo herself Henry Tudor's support in regaining her property. For once she doesn't have to bang anyone. There's a final conflict with Jasper, and Tavis helps because he loves her after all, plus he still hates Jasper. This should be the romance novel ending, but then they all get the plague and the daughter everyone forgot dies. Arabella is maybe 18 at the end of the story. It has been 30 years since I read this terrible book.
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Dec 13, 2020 02:56
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Unless Kaikki is the name of a character or group in the book, it's "Karvat ja kaikki"
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Dec 13, 2020 04:45
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BarbarousBertha posted:The Spitfire by Bertrice Small I'm amazed that someone else has not only read this loving book, but that it was someone else's first romance novel. Wild.
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Dec 13, 2020 15:29
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