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I'd heard that some personal tragedy made him depressed and that's why Hitchhikers went to poo poo but I looked it up and can't find anything 
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Jan 18, 2021 18:52
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I wonder what's Rothfuss' excuse is. "Oh wow, that nerd crap I invested in turned out to be a bust. I must shy from writing for the next decade."
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Jan 18, 2021 19:08
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I wonder what's Rothfuss' excuse is. 
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Jan 18, 2021 19:15
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nonathlon posted:Yes? I think if you add up all his books, you get two very good ones. Just that the second of those is spaced out over two Dirk Gentlys and three Hitchhikers. (my personal favorite thing he's ever written is that throwaway joke in Restaurant where the rockstar is "spending a year dead for tax reasons")
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Jan 18, 2021 19:24
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muscles like this! posted:I really don't get why he wrote Mostly Harmless because So Long and Thanks for All the Fish ending on God's Final Message to His Creation was the perfect way to send it off. He wrote it because he was contractually obligated to the publisher to do so, same as So Long. A significant chunk of Wish You Were Here (Nick Webb's D.A. biography) is spent describing Adams' increasing disinterest and desire to stop writing Hitchhiker books, starting with him hammering out the back end of "Life" in a rush in order to meet deadlines and to stop writing. It culminates in him needing to be hauled out to a hotel and locked in his room with a typewriter by his agent/manager in order to force him to write Mostly Harmless, which goes a long way to explaining why that book has such a hostile "gently caress this story, gently caress this setting ,and gently caress you most of all for reading this" attitude about it. There's an interview in Salmon of Doubt from shortly before his death where he talks about maybe wanting to go back and write another Hitchhiker book to send the series out on a less bitter note, but it apparently wasn't more than some scattered notes (as opposed to having actually written several chapters for a prospective Dirk Gently 3).
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Jan 18, 2021 20:45
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Are the Dirk Gently books anything like the show? FWIW I enjoyed it but boy did they make some bold decisions, especially the second season.
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Jan 18, 2021 20:58
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Strategic Tea posted:Are the Dirk Gently books anything like the show? FWIW I enjoyed it but boy did they make some bold decisions, especially the second season. The show does not follow the plot of the books in the slightest. It IS a quite good show, though - I will give it props for entirely changing the demeanor of Dirk, while still making him very noticeably Dirk. Just, in the show he's like twentysomething, straightforward, and often chipper, and in the books he's like mid-to-late-forties, depressed, and a broke trouper, and you could very easily track how the one became the other over the course of years.
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Jan 18, 2021 21:27
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I read a whole bunch - at least a hundred or so - of fantasy and sci fi books in a year or two long drunken blur of depression and escapism some 12-15 years ago and both Dirk Gently and some Dresden Files books were in that mix. I remember liking one and intensely disliking the other, but I can't remember which one was which. Whichever had a joke about a cursed car that turned every tape left in it onto Queen's Greatest Hits was the good one. Hope this helps. Ironically, the same blur ended up with me finding the Cross-Time Engineer books, reading the first couple of chapters, snapping out because of how intensely crappily creepy they were and and then hate reading another four of them or so, each one worse than the other. I gave up on speculative fiction after. edit: goddamnit. of course it was neither. a podcast for cats has a new favorite as of 22:35 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 22:28
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Tonton Macoute posted:I read a whole bunch - at least a hundred or so - of fantasy and sci fi books in a year or two long drunken blur of depression and escapism some 12-15 years ago and both Dirk Gently and some Dresden Files books were in that mix. I remember liking one and intensely disliking the other, but I can't remember which one was which. Whichever had a joke about a cursed car that turned every tape left in it onto Queen's Greatest Hits was the good one. Hope this helps. that was Good Omens, which is from neither of those series
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Jan 18, 2021 22:30
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Tonton Macoute posted:I read a whole bunch - at least a hundred or so - of fantasy and sci fi books in a year or two long drunken blur of depression and escapism some 12-15 years ago and both Dirk Gently and some Dresden Files books were in that mix. I remember liking one and intensely disliking the other, but I can't remember which one was which.
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Jan 18, 2021 22:33
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everything is stolen, you loving nerds, "originality" is extremely rarely real but is almost always an artifact of copyright law that should be treated with contempt artists are magpies button-pressing is how you write pulp and genre and that's good actually, except the 90% of it that's poo poo also 90% is a low number for how much of everything is poo poo also comparing bad present stuff to the past good stuff that survived is dumb also there's been at least one straight up fanfic that won a Hugo (and that alone is enough to tell you who the author was)
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Jan 18, 2021 22:49
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Day of the Triffid's was probably the first "adult" book I read as a kid, so I would love to hear about this terrible sequel. I read it. Or part of it? The Americans show up and their triffids are much bigger. I do not recall anything else at all.
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Jan 18, 2021 23:34
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Day of the Triffid's was probably the first "adult" book I read as a kid, so I would love to hear about this terrible sequel. It'd be awesome if it was; I love that guy. No, it's more boring and kind of icky than awful in any interesting way. He tries to ape Wyndham's style but only seems able to do it by randomly pastiching bits of all of Wyndham's novels, so you read it with a sort of "oh look that bit's The Chrysalids crossed with Chocky" kind of thing going on. And he also makes the... daring decision to go along with creepy eugenics university dude from the first book's plan of Society Must Collect Blind Women For Breeding Purposes which ha ha gently caress no what were you thinking. It's a whole loving thing in this book; it loves its regimented reproduction. I haven't read any other of Clark's books so I don't know if it's a Thing he does or whether he was trying to be A Fifties SF Writer/pastiche Wyndham's Consider Her Ways, but either way... It's set a couple of decades after Day ends, everything goes daaaark for Unknown Reasons and triffids come rampaging over the Isle of Wight SOMEHOW and Bill and Josella's son ends up in New York battling the Evil Slaveholding Dictator Torrance Yeah Him From The First Book He Got To The States Somehow. There's actually a couple of decent ideas in it - triffids forming giant floating sargasso rafts is a cool idea, and that most people have eaten enough mashed triffid to have some immunity to triffid venom is neat, but then it gets to SIXTY-FOOT TRIFFIDS ON THE RAMPAGE and yeah, I know that bit sounds as though it should be fun but believe me it's not.
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Jan 18, 2021 23:48
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I mean, we’re looking at literature in a different fashion than we did hundreds of years ago, so there’s bound to be differences. Best example I have is Georg Stiernhielm’s poem Hercules - it’s the usage of a classical allegory (Hercules at the crossroads, choosing between vice and virtue) that the readers already know, but the focus is on the artistry of the writing and the recontextualization of the modes of vice and virtue into something that appealed to the audience (relatively wealthy Protestant Swedes). The focus is not originality, but rather the language used and how it will be received by the readers. He’s also important because we can date his handwriting from before and after he lost an arm in a bar fight, which is something more authors should strive towards. I’m not suggesting that the cultural context is the same as a dude writing erotic Minecraft fanfiction in iambic pentameter, but that people use common references as tools to get their ideas across more easily, and that we’re just living in an era that’s commodified creative works in a way that’s tied to capital, and that gets tied into identity a lot more because - as others have said - the eternal furnaces of Content must be fed with consumers. More on-topic, I just finished reading The Fungus, which is a weird, terrible horror novel about England falling to supercharged fungal growth and somehow makes a ludicrous premise like that end up as boring, along with all the cliches of bad horror fiction - the protagonist is also an author who somehow specializes in whatever causes the premise, women are written as disposable and hindering men, lurid sexual descriptions, and an utterly baffling ending that resolves nothing and just kind of grinds the plot to a halt.
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Jan 19, 2021 04:18
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Both Dirk Gently books are good but in very different ways.
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Jan 19, 2021 05:40
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Noted bad book author Storm Constantine has died, aged 64. https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/19/fantasy-world-pays-tribute-to-storm-constantine?__twitter_impression=true
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Jan 19, 2021 14:18
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Rascar Capac posted:Noted bad book author Storm Constantine has died, aged 64. Only 64? I could have sworn they'd been pushing out books forever.
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Jan 19, 2021 17:25
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nonathlon posted:Only 64? I could have sworn they'd been pushing out books forever. First published in 1993 apparently. VVVV Whoops, you're right. VVVV Lemniscate Blue has a new favorite as of 20:25 on Jan 19, 2021 |
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Jan 19, 2021 20:10
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Lemniscate Blue posted:First published in 1993 apparently.
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Jan 19, 2021 20:20
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Sham bam bamina! posted:That's an omnibus; the first Wraeththu book was in 1987. She wrote better books! Unfortunately, the gay goth boys repelling aliens with giant crystals made of jizz was what the market wanted.
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Jan 19, 2021 20:59
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Rascar Capac posted:Noted bad book author Storm Constantine has died, aged 64. This is sad news. I recall being both entertained and horrified by the first Wraeththu book after I picked it up from the exchange bookshelf of a pub in Bath (and even more entertained and horrified by the spin-off RPG handbook, presumably now a valuable collector's piece). And yes, she did write better stuff than anemone-dicked Bowie clones...but it seems that if you hit gold as a writer of hair-metal vampires and The Jismatic Sacrament, the monkey's paw of success twitches, and you're stuck like that. Still, most people who dream of being writers never publish jack poo poo, and that cannot be said of her. RIP, Storm Constantine. Magic is optimism and hope.
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Jan 19, 2021 22:23
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Dabir posted:Both Dirk Gently books are good but in very different ways.
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Jan 20, 2021 08:58
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Wasn't Dirk Gently originally a Doctor Who script?
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Jan 20, 2021 09:06
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Gats Akimbo posted:And he also makes the... daring decision to go along with creepy eugenics university dude from the first book's plan of Society Must Collect Blind Women For Breeding Purposes which ha ha gently caress no what were you thinking. Weren't they the bad guys? Jesus christ.
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Jan 20, 2021 09:12
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I know it's low hanging fruit but I've been listening to that 372 pages podcast about 'Ready Player Two' and I honestly would think they were making it up if I didn't know differently. People throw their arms up about Twilight and Dan Brown and a lot of terrible best sellers but it's really inspiring disturbing thoughts in me that this man is making money off this, I don't want anything bad to happen to him but I do want him to understand he is bad.
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Jan 20, 2021 10:44
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Wasn't Dirk Gently originally a Doctor Who script? Not sure about Dirk Gently, but Life, the Universe, and Everything absolutely was.
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Jan 20, 2021 10:47
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Hedningen posted:More on-topic, I just finished reading The Fungus, which is a weird, terrible horror novel about England falling to supercharged fungal growth and somehow makes a ludicrous premise like that end up as boring, along with all the cliches of bad horror fiction - the protagonist is also an author who somehow specializes in whatever causes the premise, women are written as disposable and hindering men, lurid sexual descriptions, and an utterly baffling ending that resolves nothing and just kind of grinds the plot to a halt. This is giving me flashbacks to when I didn't know who James Herbert was and thought that THE RATS was going to be brilliant. If anyone has any recommendations for good 'rats are going to eat us all' books please send them my way.
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Jan 20, 2021 10:52
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Dirk Gently lifts from the never-finished (until it was, 5000 bloody times over, with animation/Tom Baker linking the bits together/ a "webcast" with Paul McGann) Doctor Who episode Shada. Life, the Universe, and Everything is a repurposed script for a proposed Doctor Who movie.
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Jan 20, 2021 10:53
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The lovecraft story "the rats in the walls" is good rat-involving horror. Also features The Cat Who Must Not Be Named which makes it OT for the thread too.
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Jan 20, 2021 10:55
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OwlFancier posted:The lovecraft story "the rats in the walls" is good rat-involving horror. That's a really good short story, like most of Lovecraft's short stories are. It's really made better the cat is named what it is because that's so intrinsic to Lovecraft's whole thing.
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Jan 20, 2021 11:28
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an overdue owl posted:That's a really good short story, like most of Lovecraft's short stories are. It's really made better the cat is named what it is because that's so intrinsic to Lovecraft's whole thing. Lovecraft stuff gets weird since while dude was obviously comically racist, a big theme is that anglo-saxon white people aren't actually anything resembling special in the big scheme of things besides maybe having the hubris to not understand their place in the universe.
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Jan 20, 2021 12:21
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Lovecraft stuff gets weird since while dude was obviously comically racist, a big theme is that anglo-saxon white people aren't actually anything resembling special in the big scheme of things besides maybe having the hubris to not understand their place in the universe. I mean, yes, of course. A HUGE amount of how he wrote was because he was racist, xenophobic, just generally petrified of 'the other', it just gets very boring when people always want to say 'oh but did you know he was racist' like this is some interesting thing to point out. Of course he was racist! Getting into it is fun because yes the 'mongrel races' don't do any better in the long run with the Elder Gods.
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Jan 20, 2021 12:27
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I suppose it depends on whether you read it and see the text or the subtext more clearly, because the text is that he is racist but also there are genuinely scary aliens. The subtext is that he is having an extended breakdown about how he saw a welshman the other day and fears that all conscious thought and human existence may collapse if nobody does anything about it. The latter is also funny in how absurd it is, if you don't take it personally but whether you do likely depends on your circumstances. OwlFancier has a new favorite as of 13:11 on Jan 20, 2021 |
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Jan 20, 2021 13:09
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Two Owls posted:Dirk Gently lifts from the never-finished (until it was, 5000 bloody times over, with animation/Tom Baker linking the bits together/ a "webcast" with Paul McGann) Doctor Who episode Shada. Specifically it's a mix of Shada and the excellent City of Death. The second one is all original. And more generally, Adams always wrote Ford as basically the Doctor if instead of saving the world, he went to parties to get drunk and meet girls.
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Jan 20, 2021 13:44
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an overdue owl posted:I know it's low hanging fruit but I've been listening to that 372 pages podcast about 'Ready Player Two' and I honestly would think they were making it up if I didn't know differently. People throw their arms up about Twilight and Dan Brown and a lot of terrible best sellers but it's really inspiring disturbing thoughts in me that this man is making money off this, I don't want anything bad to happen to him but I do want him to understand he is bad. I've been reading My Best Friend's Exorcism since the cover managed to hook me (though the library copy I got has a much more bland "industry" cover):   But it's relevant because it does a lot of similar "Hey Do You Remember The Eighties" asides where a ten year old gushes about how ET was the best movie ever or how important Madonna was to them, and yet Grady Hendrix's writing infinitely preferable to Ernest Cline's for two big reasons. First off, it actually makes sense to have your life revolve around ET when you are a ten year old in 1982, as opposed to being Wade Watts, 2045 Teen. More importantly though, whenever that stuff comes up it's always to a point, while in Cline's writing there's never a point, he's just making a reference to The Iron Giant because like, dude, remember Iron Giant? But Hendrix, by doing the literal bare minimum you'd expect of an author and having a reason to stick Madonna lyrics in his novel, effortlessly clowns on Cline's prose. e: no word on whether My Best Friend's Exorcism is Bad or Good yet, it's been decent so far but I've only gotten to the inciting incident in the whole exorcism thing Djeser has a new favorite as of 14:44 on Jan 20, 2021 |
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Jan 20, 2021 14:41
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Dabir posted:Specifically it's a mix of Shada and the excellent City of Death. The second one is all original. And more generally, Adams always wrote Ford as basically the Doctor if instead of saving the world, he went to parties to get drunk and meet girls. Given that we've seen the Doctor and the Master, it sounds like this Time Lord would have to be the Bachelor.
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Jan 20, 2021 15:02
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Weren't they the bad guys? Jesus christ. It's arguable how Wyndham sees it, I guess - the University guys have that meeting with the creepy old sociologist who goes on about racial survival and All Women Must Have Babies and it seems to have enough general support that Josella sees a busload of blind women and no men brought in, but I see it as one of the various coping responses people are having (blind guy's "ha ha no more patronising sighted assholes"; various people getting Stinking Drunk; Coker's "keep as many people alive for as long as possible until rescue comes even if it means chaining you selfish sighted fuckers up" plan, etc.) rather than being The One Wyndham Supports. I for sure find it convincing that the crisis response of a certain type of professor is "well of course the most important part of post-apocalypse planning is collecting a busload of young women and telling them they have to keep my dick wet Or Else".
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Jan 20, 2021 15:03
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Lovecraft stuff gets weird since while dude was obviously comically racist, a big theme is that anglo-saxon white people aren't actually anything resembling special in the big scheme of things besides maybe having the hubris to not understand their place in the universe. The idea that Western civilisation (and civilisation in general) is a beautiful but rare and fragile aberration that is doomed to be snuffed out by the bestial, unthinking savagery that surrounds it is popular, internally consistent, and extremely racist. Where did you think slogans like the Fourteen Words came from? Hell, fascism itself was hardly born from a mindset of optimism and self-confidence.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:15
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an overdue owl posted:I know it's low hanging fruit but I've been listening to that 372 pages podcast about 'Ready Player Two' and I honestly would think they were making it up if I didn't know differently. People throw their arms up about Twilight and Dan Brown and a lot of terrible best sellers but it's really inspiring disturbing thoughts in me that this man is making money off this, I don't want anything bad to happen to him but I do want him to understand he is bad. This is exactly how I feel about EL James. It's not just that she's a godawful writer, it's also that she's, by all reports, a terrible person to work with or to be around. She was getting into petty drama with anyone who left a negative review back when 50sog was Masters of the Universe on ff.net, and she was an established professional with a career! A TV executive!! I will also forever hold a grudge against Vintage and everyone who pushed that garbage through to publication. Ditto for Wattpad's publishing wing for putting out the After series aka the series that used to be a Harry Styles romance fanfic.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:29
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an overdue owl posted:I mean, yes, of course. A HUGE amount of how he wrote was because he was racist, xenophobic, just generally petrified of 'the other', it just gets very boring when people always want to say 'oh but did you know he was racist' like this is some interesting thing to point out. Of course he was racist! Getting into it is fun because yes the 'mongrel races' don't do any better in the long run with the Elder Gods. They seem to have a much better time than the white guys; drugs, orgies, big ol' bonfire parties out in the swamps, hunting down and murdering WASPs who've Seen Too Much, dwelling amidst wonder and glory forever etc. Presumably this is just because in Lovecraft's mind they lacked the delicate sensibilities that torture the pure Anglo-Saxons who can realise how cosmically insignificant they are and what a terrible, mind-destroying thing it is not to be the most important thing in the universe, but then again, as with so many horror writers, the bad guys seem to have by far the most fun.
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Jan 20, 2021 23:34
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