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Serephina
Nov 8, 2005

恐竜戦隊
ジュウレンジャー

SimonChris posted:



This won a Hugo.

arghhh

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Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose
No me gusta. NO ME GUSTA

Carthag Tuek
Oct 15, 2005

Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
slægt skal følge slægters gang



whatta you mean "hes not a pedophile" :confused:

SimonChris
Apr 24, 2008

The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.
Grimey Drawer

Carthag Tuek posted:

whatta you mean "hes not a pedophile" :confused:

He works at a freighter that travels at relativistic speeds, so that decades pass on earth while the trip only lasts a few months for him. Therefore, he grooms kindergarten girls before take-off, so they will be adults when he returns. See, it's not pedophilia at all! I bet you feel pretty silly now.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
So much classic sci-fi is just the author's hosed up sexuality spilling onto the page.

Carthag Tuek
Oct 15, 2005

Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
slægt skal følge slægters gang



SimonChris posted:

He works at a freighter that travels at relativistic speeds, so that decades pass on earth while the trip only lasts a few months for him. Therefore, he grooms kindergarten girls before take-off, so they will be adults when he returns. See, it's not pedophilia at all! I bet you feel pretty silly now.

:allbuttons:

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat
Cool story bro

Domus
May 7, 2007

Kidney Buddies
…that makes no sense. I mean beyond the creepiness, think about the people of the opposite gender in your early life. Would you want to date any of them in your 20’s, if they were the same age? Maybe a friend or a classmate, but the teacher? The postman? Your neighbor? Just having known someone as a child doesn’t mean you’re attracted to them.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

and like not even the neighbor you see every day, but the neighbor who you interacted with for a short time as a child and then they moved away for twenty years, and suddenly show up looking the same and wanting to take you on a date?

there's a song i really like specifically warning about taking back people who just show up in your life again after being gone for years, lol

christ science fiction authors are hosed up

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I sometimes feel like the concept of fiction is just bad for people because you umoor their brains from the constraints of reality and for a lot of them it seems to drift off into the worst places.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

John Varley is the same dude who wrote at least one novel about many-gendered gently caress-centaurs, and I'm really impressed that someone managed to find something of his skeevier than that

IshmaelZarkov
Jun 20, 2013

Antivehicular posted:

John Varley is the same dude who wrote at least one novel about many-gendered gently caress-centaurs, and I'm really impressed that someone managed to find something of his skeevier than that

I'm not even going to pretend that I wouldn't read a book if someone came up to me and said, "Zarkov, this book is about many-gendered gently caress-centaurs.". That's an elevator pitch that guarantees curiosity.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I just looked at Wikipedia for plot synopses of the gently caress-centaur books, and OH BOY:

Wikipedia on John Varley's "Wizard" posted:

During the trip, the reader begins to learn what drove Cirocco to her alcoholism. As the price for the discontinuation of the Angel/Titanide War, Gaea has made the Titanides dependent on Cirocco to have children. Only her saliva can activate the eggs they produce, so that they can be implanted in a host mother to grow. The responsibility for an entire race's survival is more than Cirocco can bear; with resignation from her position as Wizard impossible and suicide ruled out by her love for the Titanides, her only release is alcohol-fueled oblivion.

John Lee
Mar 2, 2013

A time traveling adventure everyone can enjoy

Those books are not as lighthearted as you might be led to believe

Pretty fuckin' grim, really

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

MY WEIRD SEX IDEAS with a side of drama.

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat
So the Titanides all have FAS, right?

IshmaelZarkov
Jun 20, 2013

Antivehicular posted:

I just looked at Wikipedia for plot synopses of the gently caress-centaur books, and OH BOY:

Issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the gently caress-centaur author. you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"

C.M. Kruger
Oct 28, 2013
oh yeah John Varley is kinda infamous.

(unedited chart, if you dare: https://www.tor.com/2019/11/20/the-sex-chart-that-changed-my-life-spectrums-of-sexuality-in-john-varleys-wizard/)

Also a goon in the SFF thread read a insane libertarian kangaroo piss fetish/genocide novel a while back:

StrixNebulosa posted:

Web of the Chozen is the weirdest loving book and I don't even know where to begin explaining it.

It's by Jack L Chalker, who is known for writing weird transformation into basically everything.

The concept is, in the far future humanity has mastered FTL and everything is a perfect utopia run by megacorps - everyone has universal healthcare and income, and it's only weirdos like our protagonist who wants to escape and do something different. (It's written from his pov so expect disparaging anti-socialism comments and "you're on the dole, ugh". That sucks!)

So he's a scout, and he finds planets that could be colonized.

So he finds a planet with an old colony ship in orbit around it, and finds a one word warning written on the wall: "Don't"

But he goes to the surface anyways, and rapidly his equipment melts away, and soon he begins to transform into a herbivore. A kangaroo/mule thing with no hands, that sees through sonar, has to hop everywhere, and speaks on a higher frequency.

He meets others who have been transformed, and their offspring... and he discovers that the species is forced to go into heat every year or so, and so there are LOTS of these weird herbivores on the planet.

I still haven't read far enough in to understand why this is happening, but it's SO WEIRD and vaguely disturbing and :psyduck:

StrixNebulosa posted:

I finished Web of the Chozen last night and it continued to be an absolute trip, and it asked some weird questions.

SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE drat THING FOLLOW.

Our hero, who will spend the rest of the book transformed into this kangaroo thing, ultimately winds up being the near-death of humanity. How?

- After experiencing the heat himself and winding up with an egg in his pouch, he teams up with another kangaroo dude named Gregory. Gregory was one of the original Christian colonists on this planet, and he's also a biogeneticist. He agrees to help our hero talk to the AI in the colony ship.

- The virus that turned them into kangaroo THINGS is yes, made by an AI that's trying to protect humanity and give them utopia. By turning them into what it calls "Chozen", it's guaranteed that they have immortal lifespans, perfect regenerating health, easy to feed, and it can control their population by influencing when/how they go into heat.

- Also the virus can infect plants too and basically turn them into a super-fast farm. Any stretch of organic matter can be turned into a potato factory that will perfectly feed the Chozen.

- So the hero's ship was encased in web, because the Chozen can also spit web. yep. Anyways to dissolve the web you have to pee on it.

- The hero gets into his ship with Gregory and oh, gently caress. No hands. Fortunately - and this is really cool - he's psychically linked with his ship, and can remote pilot it with his mind. These parts of the book are cool, with the Choz figuring out how to use human ships and equipment with hooves.

- To cut a long story short, the AI is hostile, they call in human help, the humans go "what the gently caress" and while they fail to destroy the AI's ship, they DO nuke the Chozen homeworld.

- Aaand our hero, Gregory, and their two eggs are the last remaining Chozen. Dun dun dun!!!

- This is where I have to take a moment to reassure the reader that there is no incest. Because that happened off-screen earlier in the novel (as the heat cycle is uncontrollable) and Gregory is still really upset about it. There will be no incest for the Chozen, so help him god.

- Our hero and Greg convert their ship into a mini-Chozen home, with potatoes growing in the lower deck, and they raise their eggs and get two kids who they teach.

- They quickly realize that they need more space, and there are no safe places to land. Humanity will keep expanding and finding terraformable planets and they will nuke again, so... they hatch a plan to hijack a terraforming supply ship that'll have two people on it and supplies.

- To no one's surprise the two people on the ship are both women. One goes completely insane while being turned into a Chozen so they have to kill her, but the other one is the hero's true love. :sigh:

- Capturing the ship and dealing with its robots and working its controls is written to be really fascinating and fun, as they have no hands and can't speak on human frequencies. This is also a neat way to see the kids interact with human stuff and that's neat alien psychology - as well as anti-human racism that the hero has to try and nip in the bud. Yes the humans nuked their homeworld, but they're not all bad, etc etc.

- So Gregory, now with the aid of (briefly) human hands (she has a day or two before she's transformed) figures out how to control the virus, influence the heat cycle (there will be NO INCEST, GOD DAMNIT), and speed up/slow down the infection cycle. They can make infinite food! They can disintegrate human tech, if they want to!

- Several years later, they have a thousand Chozen living on the ship, and they strike back at humanity by sending a raiding party to a planet.

- Cue a freaky sequence of radio clips from that planet as humans get, well, infected. World's worst pandemic, everyone turns into kangaroo things.

- And our heroes realize that... no. The humans will not negotiate. They will use this planet as a lab to figure out how to get rid of the Chozen. Which means that the only way for the Chozen to ultimately survive is to hit every single human planet.

- Which they do. The Choz virus is so awful that you can drop it basically anywhere on a planet and it'll infect everything given time.

- By the end of the novel our hero has a wife and kids and freedom to do whatever the hell he wants, there are only protected pockets of humanity, and the Chozen are everywhere.

- This is weirdly framed as better for humanity as... here we come back to the insane moralizing of the story. Listen up: if you're on welfare and on the dole, you're going to be lazy and do nothing. Most of humanity will be useless. Only a special few will decide not to be lazy and become scouts or whatever, like our hero did. The violent transformation of humanity into the Chozen killed off the weak ones, the lazy ones who couldn't adapt, so humanity got a "fresh start" with only the smart, adaptable humans surviving. Which is good for the species?

From my perspective, the only good result here is that the virus broke the megacorps, but even this is iffy as, well, the megacorps are depicted as being unambiguous good guys. They provide welfare, they don't war on each other (military exists because it's fun and because they might find aliens), they employ people to go scout new planets for expansion, and so on.

So - the Chozen are monsters, but also if you become one you are guaranteed immortality and good health. And with the aid of robots (which humanity has! and the Chozen can use!) they can get around the lack of hands problem.

In conclusion: absolutely bonkers book with an insane morality system. I devoured the entire thing in one day and am still thinking about it. Highly recommended if you like buckwild sci-fi stories.

Inspector Gesicht
Oct 26, 2012

500 Zeus a body.


These days if a writer has some weird-hangups and a transformation-boner they can just eject that poo poo on deviantart.

Actually, what non sci-fi books but attempts at serious literature read as the authors writing blatantly one-handed? Your Amis's and your Oates etc.

Inspector Gesicht has a new favorite as of 08:44 on Oct 22, 2021

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Sounds too much like Chozo, and those mostly wholesome space burbs and good adoptive parents don't deserve that association.

Inspector Gesicht
Oct 26, 2012

500 Zeus a body.


Ghost Leviathan posted:

Sounds too much like Chozo, and those mostly wholesome space burbs and good adoptive parents don't deserve that association.

Except for that one guy.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander
Mar 14, 2007

Is a man not entitled to the haw of his maw?
Grimey Drawer

Inspector Gesicht posted:

These days if a writer has some weird-hangups and a transformation-boner they can just eject that poo poo on deviantart.

Actually, what non sci-fi books but attempts at serious literature read as the authors writing blatantly one-handed? Your Amis's and your Oates etc.

Only one I can think of at the moment is Johnathan franzen. I haven't read his books but I've read some interviews and seen some tweets where the guy is so far up his own rear end it's almost trumpian. Don't think he's sci fi, more like just general fiction. I remember some big hubbub where a character in a book he wrote discovered the meaning of life after playing with a turd from the toilet, or something to that effect.

Runcible Cat
May 28, 2007

Ignoring this post

There's a ton of "hot young chick inexplicably into cynical old writer" stuff out there...

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

Inspector Gesicht posted:

These days if a writer has some weird-hangups and a transformation-boner they can just eject that poo poo on deviantart.

Actually, what non sci-fi books but attempts at serious literature read as the authors writing blatantly one-handed? Your Amis's and your Oates etc.

John Updike, according to reputation.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

Runcible Cat posted:

There's a ton of "hot young chick inexplicably into cynical old writer" stuff out there...

There's already a stereotype of every lit professor wanting to write The Great American Novel about that.

SimonChris
Apr 24, 2008

The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.
Grimey Drawer
Haruki Murakami is notorious for constantly throwing in scenes where his middle-aged protagonists need to have sex with magical realist teenagers. I am particularly fond of this scene from "Kafka on the Shore", where a college girl lectures the protagonist about philosophy while giving him a blowjob:

Kafka on the Shore posted:

"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."
Hoshino looked up, mouth half open, and gazed at her face. "What's that?"
"Henri Bergson," she replied, licking the semen from the tip of his penis.
"Mame mo memelay.""
I'm sorry?"
"Matter and Memory. You ever read it?"
"I don't think so," Hoshino replied after a moment's thought. Except for the special SDF driver's manual he was forced to study—and the books on Shikoku history he'd just gone through at the library—he couldn't remember reading anything except manga.
"Have you read it?"
The girl nodded. "I had to. I'm majoring in philosophy in college, and we have exams coming up."
"You don't say," Hoshino said. "So this is a part-time job?"
"To help pay tuition."
She took him over to the bed, stroked him all over with her fingertips and tongue, getting another erection out of him. A firm hard-on, a Tower of Pisa at carnival time.
"See, you're ready to go again," the girl remarked, slowly segueing into her next set of motions. "Any special requests? Something you'd like me to do? Mr. Sanders asked me to make sure you got everything you want."
"I can't think of anything special, but could you quote some more of that philosophy stuff? I don't know why, but it might keep me from coming so quick. Otherwise I'll lose it pretty fast."
"Let's see.... This is pretty old, but how about some Hegel?"
"Whatever."
"I recommend Hegel. He's sort of out of date, but definitely an oldie but goodie."
"Sounds good to me."
"At the same time that 'I' am the content of a relation, 'I' am also that which does the relating."
"Hmm..."
"Hegel believed that a person is not merely conscious of self and object as separate entities, but through the projection of the self via the mediation of the object is volitionally able to gain a deeper understanding of the self. All of which constitutes self-consciousness."
"I don't know what the heck you're talking about."
"Well, think of what I'm doing to you right now. For me I'm the self, and you're the object. For you, of course, it's the exact opposite—you're the self to you and I'm the object. And by exchanging self and object, we can project ourselves onto the other and gain self-consciousness. Volitionally."
"I still don't get it, but it sure feels good."
"That's the whole idea," the girl said.

SimonChris has a new favorite as of 14:21 on Oct 22, 2021

RoboRodent
Sep 19, 2012

I own Varley's whole space centaur trilogy, I've read it a couple times, and it is very insane, but in a way I find entertaining. Other things in the books include:

  • A separatist lesbian space colony where they teach girls that all men are rapists and I think they're all wiccans too
  • All the lady characters end up in relationships with other women except for the one from the lesbian space colony who ends up falling in love with a dude after she learns that not all men are rapists
  • Living blimps
  • Living fighter jets
  • A war between the centaurs and a race of "angels" who are weird bird people
  • A climactic scene in which a fifty foot Marilyn Monroe wrestles with a giant albino anaconda while a marching band of centaurs play John Philip Sousa's Liberty Bell March

I've never read anything else by Varley. I'm a little afraid to.

LegionAreI
Nov 14, 2006
Lurk

RoboRodent posted:


  • A climactic scene in which a fifty foot Marilyn Monroe wrestles with a giant albino anaconda while a marching band of centaurs play John Philip Sousa's Liberty Bell March


Okay what? Do I even want to know the context for this?

RoboRodent
Sep 19, 2012

LegionAreI posted:

Okay what? Do I even want to know the context for this?

It's been a few years, but iirc, the intelligence that controls Titan, the wheel-shaped structure in orbit around saturn where the series takes place, is insane and a little bit obsessed with old earth movies, so she makes a body for herself that is Giant Marilyn Monroe. By the third book, everyone's pretty much in agreement that she needs to die, like for real, because she's an insane god tyrant making everyone's lives miserable, so war is inevitable. During their attack on Giant Marilyn, a pet snake that escaped into the wilds of Titan in the previous book re-emerges, turned giant, white, and intelligent (for a snake) by its experiences in this weird world, and joins the battle. The centaurs are very musical, need to have a musical score for everything they can, and Sousa is their favourite Earth composer.

There are reasons for everything, but none of those reasons make the story any less insane.

Captain Hygiene
Sep 17, 2007

You mess with the crabbo...



Vincent Van Goatse posted:

John Updike, according to reputation.

What's Updike?

Ambitious Spider
Feb 13, 2012



Lipstick Apathy

SimonChris posted:

Haruki Murakami is notorious for constantly throwing in scenes where his middle-aged protagonists need to have sex with magical realist teenagers. I am particularly fond of this scene from "Kafka on the Shore", where a college girl lectures the protagonist about philosophy while giving him a blowjob:

Murakami is one of my faves, but when they finally translated his first two novels into english, the second one Pinball 1973 is about the protagonist (the same guy from wild sheep chase, and dance dance dance) being obsessed with pinball, and living and sleping with these two twins who mysteriously show up at his house one day. Like dude, come on. I also like(d?) Dave eggers a lot, but Hologram for the king was definitely his novel in the category. Schlubby business man keeps hooking up with out of his league ladies. Goddamn nonsense.

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

I was reading a trash sci-fi book (The Right Hand of Dextra) where the concept is fine, it's pulp paperback trash but "human colony ship lands on dextroprotein planet and humans have to fight the native ecosystem to survive" is an interesting enough concept you could do a couple things with it. It's just that what the author chose to do is go hard in on making it about miscegenation and racism.

Now, I don't think the author necessarily likes these things. They're presented in a lurid and sensationalizing way, but the same way you'd present like, "Here's the real gritty version of what things were like in the past. People kept slaves and that was normal and you only think it's weird because of your culture." The viewpoints of the characters are meant to be morally ambiguous and kind of relativistic. There's a whole Wouldn't It Be Weird if... thing where the women are the warriors and expendable fighters where the men are frail and sheltered.

But while I don't think the author found what he was writing titillating it's so unpleasantly lurid about everything that I just stopped reading. Even if loving dextroprotein underage faun aliens with literally underdeveloped minds isn't his kink, he still felt it worth writing a book where there's a will they won't they thing between a seventeen year old girl and one of the ambiguously aged aliens who work as slaves.

On the plantation.

You see, in Roman times, chattel slavery was actually common...
:goonsay:

BaldDwarfOnPCP
Jun 26, 2019

by Pragmatica
The Right Hand of Dextra is right up there with Manos: The Hands of Fate for redundancy.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

If we're still talking about skeevy litfic, I've always thought John Irving's stuff had an uncomfortable layer of slime on it. I've only read two of his books, but the fact that they both involved extended episodes where the adolescent protagonist learns various sexual and life lessons from a group of simultaneously earthy and pitiful Berlin prostitutes meant I was done.

Also Philip Roth wrote an entire novella about a dude who transforms into a giant, sapient single breast, and a non-trivial amount of that is just flashbacks to the protagonist's pre-breast life as a neurotic literature professor, so... that's a thing that exists.

Captain Hygiene
Sep 17, 2007

You mess with the crabbo...



I know it's come up here before, but I read The Wise Man's Fear not too long ago, and god....the whole section where the main character wanders into the fae world and instantly goes from virgin to the greatest gently caress god the fairy queen has ever known its one of the cringiest things I've read.

I was mostly rereading those books out of curiosity after having a discussion about problematic elements in them, and they're very mixed. There are some things I like in them, but there are definitely tons of issues, and that's either the worst or at least the most embarrassing.

packetmantis
Feb 26, 2013

RoboRodent posted:

[*] All the lady characters end up in relationships with other women except for the one from the lesbian space colony who ends up falling in love with a dude after she learns that not all men are rapists
[/list]

:nallears: A lot of lovely writers have this kind of weird
"rubbing it in your face" type of creepiness and I hate it.

Shwoo
Jul 21, 2011

I read a story in an anthology once where a man meets a little girl and gets caught up in her escape from evil government guys, and they're chasing her because it turns out she ages very rapidly. He eventually drops her off at his mother's, I think, to keep her safe from the bad guys, and later on he comes back and she's an adult, and you can guess what happens based on what thread this is and the John Varley talk.

Then she gets captured by the bad guys anyway, but I think manages to send him the kid she'd had by that point (he's the father), who maybe has the same condition as her.

Wish I could remember what it was called, or who wrote it. Ick.

Cornwind Evil
Dec 14, 2004


The undisputed world champion of wrestling effortposting
The last few pages make me think of the one "Geek Social Fallacy /r Sex" that I remember offhand.

quote:

GSFS 2: The weirder your sex, the more enlightened you are.

The short of it is: geeks have a tendency to mistake “less mainstream” for “better,” and to conclude that sex that least resembles the mainstream is both the sexiest and the most virtuous. So polyamory gets seen as more enlightened than monogamy, kink gets seen as sexier than vanilla, and monogamous vanilla geeks get a big steaming pile of “I guess you’re just not very open-minded.”

Because nothing quite hits the jackoff trifecta as "Having the upper hand in the power game", "Thinking you're so much more advanced than all those other plebs" and "Women are just bitches."

Capilarean
Apr 10, 2009
Some time back a gave a try to Dangerous Visions, and I'm honestly not sure if that's really what passed for transgressive or if it's just one big troll by Harlan Ellison.
Now, it of course has the infamous "In the barn" story, one that particularly stuck with me was one where this guy discovers the existence of a planet that nobody wants to acknowledge, it's found on no maps etc.
So he makes a trip there to see what's the big deal and finds a veritable utopia, everyone is healthy,happy prosperous and wise.

So do you know what the reason is for this prosperity?
It's free love.
Specifically incestuous free love. And very specifically dad-daughter incestuous free love.
And yes,the author had daughters,why do you ask? :barf:

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Brawnfire
Jul 13, 2004

🎧Listen to Cylindricule!🎵
https://linktr.ee/Cylindricule

"I yearn for a different world, a better one!"

Oh man, me too.

"I'll write about what my ideal world would be like!"

Awesome, this is pretty-- oh

Jesus Christ um

We have... very different concerns I think

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