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ToxicFrog posted:On top of that, a lot of the foundational big names of the genre -- not necessarily widely read now, but popular and influential in their day -- were quite obviously writing their SF books about hermaphroditic centaur transformations one-handed. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Which is, of course, not a mere hypothetical example: i recently re-read titan/wizard/demon and tbh i didn't feel any perv energy coming from the author. the titanides are presented very matter-of-factly, as perfectly normal, and over and over again in the books it's the humans who are shocked by like males with breasts or females with large penises that are depicted as having a problem. also keep in mind that these books were written 40 years ago, less than a decade after homosexuality was removed from the DSM and replaced by "Sexual Orientation Disturbance". nowadays having a bisexual woman as a main character and an ace woman as her second in command isn't a Big Thing but yeah i respect someone in 1979 writing books with characters who are sexually different from the norm and not making the book about the difference. that is something that a lot of authors still don't do very well. i could go on for a lot of words but one of the main themes of the series is challenging sex and gender norms with realistic, positive and respectful depictions of people who transgress them and the titanides fit right in with that4 Nomnom Cookie fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Jan 5, 2022 |
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Nae posted:I couldn't tell you why, but the Wizard's saliva is the line that sticks out to me as the most egregious. Who is the Wizard, and what makes his saliva so fertile??? The Wizard is a specific human from Earth, and the local god/AI made her saliva key to the reproduction process of the Titanides for... reasons, but basically as a troll, because she (the god) thought it would be pretty funny. ...The other books are about the slowly deteriorating mental state of them both, with the Wizard getting extremely tired of life but feeling obligated to continue because of her personal part in the race of the centaurs, and the god becoming insane due to general biological/robotic breakdown.
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Jan 5, 2022 02:35
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fritz posted:I re-read these last year or the year before and that's not the way I remember it at all. I thought the human fleet bombed the hell out of the meth world and there were hardly any left I forgot about that bit. BurningBeard posted:I’ve heard that they get divisive as you go on. What’s the generally agreed upon number of books in the series that are best quality? And, is there a cutoff point where if you’re just not digging it don’t bother to tough it out? If you don't bounce hard off the first one, then the one that loses most people seems to be Bleak Seasons. And it gets better right after that one. A few people dislike The Silver Spike, I can't figure that out. I'd skip books I'm not enjoying, I appreciate the conclusion and am happy with how it ended up.
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Jan 5, 2022 02:37
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Nomnom Cookie posted:i recently re-read titan/wizard/demon and tbh i didn't feel any perv energy coming from the author. the titanides are presented very matter-of-factly, as perfectly normal, and over and over again in the books it's the humans who are shocked by like males with breasts or females with large penises that are depicted as having a problem. also keep in mind that these books were written 40 years ago, less than a decade after homosexuality was removed from the DSM and replaced by "Sexual Orientation Disturbance". nowadays having a bisexual woman as a main character and an ace woman as her second in command isn't a Big Thing but yeah i respect someone in 1979 writing books with characters who are sexually different from the norm and not making the book about the difference. that is something that a lot of authors still don't do very well. i could go on for a lot of words but one of the main themes of the series is challenging sex and gender norms with realistic, positive and respectful depictions of people who transgress them and the titanides fit right in with that4 You know, I haven't read the books, so fair point I guess.
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Jan 5, 2022 02:38
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Benagain posted:The wizard is a she, and her saliva is integral to the process because the giant brain god space station she crashed on wanted to mess with her basically. John Lee posted:The Wizard is a specific human from Earth, and the local god/AI made her saliva key to the reproduction process of the Titanides for... reasons, but basically as a troll, because she (the god) thought it would be pretty funny. wow, I guess...that explains it?
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Jan 5, 2022 02:40
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Ya know that series gets poo poo on a lot but based on those descriptions that's pretty well done?
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Jan 5, 2022 03:36
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Nomnom Cookie posted:i recently re-read titan/wizard/demon and tbh i didn't feel any perv energy coming from the author. the titanides are presented very matter-of-factly, as perfectly normal, and over and over again in the books it's the humans who are shocked by like males with breasts or females with large penises that are depicted as having a problem. also keep in mind that these books were written 40 years ago, less than a decade after homosexuality was removed from the DSM and replaced by "Sexual Orientation Disturbance". nowadays having a bisexual woman as a main character and an ace woman as her second in command isn't a Big Thing but yeah i respect someone in 1979 writing books with characters who are sexually different from the norm and not making the book about the difference. that is something that a lot of authors still don't do very well. i could go on for a lot of words but one of the main themes of the series is challenging sex and gender norms with realistic, positive and respectful depictions of people who transgress them and the titanides fit right in with that4 Yeah the centaur stuff is bizarre but ultimately not a big part of the books at all. My issue with the Titan series was mostly that it was just really dull and forgettable. Varley IMO became a much better writer by the 1990s - The Golden Globe in particular is one of my favourite SFF books ever, just a fun picaresque adventure across the solar system with a really likeable first-person narrator. edit - IIRC in the Eight Worlds series people just swap biological sex and gender back and forth on the reg and think nothing of it, and the people who don't, and who are committed gay or committed straight rather than bi, are considered weird. edit 2 - on the other hand I also just remembered one of his short stories, Beatnik Bayou I think, in which "teachers" are a sort of parent/guardian/teacher role all rolled into one who raise kids one-on-one, which also involves sexually mentoring them when they're teenagers, so, yeah... freebooter fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jan 5, 2022 |
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Jan 5, 2022 04:21
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freebooter posted:Yeah the centaur stuff is bizarre but ultimately not a big part of the books at all. My issue with the Titan series was mostly that it was just really dull and forgettable. Varley IMO became a much better writer by the 1990s - The Golden Globe in particular is one of my favourite SFF books ever, just a fun picaresque adventure across the solar system with a really likeable first-person narrator. the golden globe really owns and is interesting to read either before or after the heinlein book double star
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Jan 5, 2022 04:31
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freebooter posted:edit - IIRC in the Eight Worlds series people just swap biological sex and gender back and forth on the reg and think nothing of it, and the people who don't, and who are committed gay or committed straight rather than bi, are considered weird. Steel Beach isn’t quite as fun as the Golden Globe, but it handles the protagonist transitioning m to f so well in the middle of the book and then just carries on. I remembered it being weirdly het with the character’s sexual preference changing along with the hormonal change, but on closer read that was considered “weirdly het” by everyone else in their society
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Jan 5, 2022 05:07
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If you want to talk about freaks perving out over centaurs, John Varley is a less obvious choice to me than Jack L. Chalker (and the centaur poo poo is downright wholesome compared to most of Chalker's other predilections).
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Jan 5, 2022 |
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Jan 5, 2022 06:17
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avoraciopoctules posted:Hmm, it's been a while since I caught up with this thread. Thank you to pradmer and everyone else posting book deals! Definitely found some nice stuff that way, I must have at keast a dozen books in my kindle backlog and many of them are quite solid. Also thank you to Cicero, you mentioned a few progression fantasies I really liked. Lastly, I would like to thank Graydon Saunders, Graydon Saunders, and Graydon Saunders for making me better aware of non-Amazon ebook sources.
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Jan 5, 2022 06:21
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While we're on Varley Chat was anybody else really disappointed by Irontown Blues, in which I felt that basically nothing happened? It really strongly smacked of a book that he'd been kicking around in the back of his head for literally 20 years and eventually decided that he just had to get it out, good or bad, or he was never going to write it at all. Which I can sympathise with but it was still kind of a bummer after how good Steel Beach and The Golden Globe were.
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Jan 5, 2022 06:42
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Nae posted:I couldn't tell you why, but the Wizard's saliva is the line that sticks out to me as the most egregious. Who is the Wizard, and what makes his saliva so fertile???  Maybe this won't help? On Varley I remember really being blown away by Opuichi Hotline and Steel Beach as a teen, mostly with the instant gender and DNA changing, the cloning and the other data the hotline provided. I've never reread them though
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Jan 5, 2022 11:35
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branedotorg posted:
oh my god lmao
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Jan 5, 2022 13:48
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branedotorg posted:On Varley I remember really being blown away by Opuichi Hotline and Steel Beach as a teen, mostly with the instant gender and DNA changing, the cloning and the other data the hotline provided. Do read The Golden Globe - everyone should read The Golden Globe because it's just genuinely great. Good, silly/serious fun.
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Jan 5, 2022 14:26
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branedotorg posted:
I wonder how many people who've obsessed over this are people who claim non-binary pronouns are 'too complicated'. Also I cannot understand how all the musical terminology involved wasn't a deliberate setup to titling it Mareway To Heaven.
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Jan 5, 2022 14:46
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Sham bam bamina! posted:If you want to talk about freaks perving out over centaurs, John Varley is a less obvious choice to me than Jack L. Chalker (and the centaur poo poo is downright wholesome compared to most of Chalker's other predilections). Yeah, I think I actually got Varley and Chalker mixed up in my post. Sorry!
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Jan 5, 2022 15:19
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ToxicFrog posted:Yeah, I think I actually got Varley and Chalker mixed up in my post. Sorry! See, now I want to hear what sick loving poo poo this "Chalker" guy was getting onto the Barnes and Noble shelves edit - ahh Jesus Christ I just saw his Wikipedia photo
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Jan 5, 2022 15:48
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freebooter posted:See, now I want to hear what sick loving poo poo this "Chalker" guy was getting onto the Barnes and Noble shelves You absolutely do not.
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Jan 5, 2022 15:59
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freebooter posted:Do read The Golden Globe - everyone should read The Golden Globe because it's just genuinely great. Good, silly/serious fun. The book is mostly this, but as fair warning to other folks there is some significant and monstrous child abuse early in the story. Golden Globe spoilers: Valentine repeatedly almost-drowning Sparky in the tub until he could perfectly recite Shakespeare was easily the most hosed up thing I've ever read from Varley by a country mile. Which is contextually presented as abjectly capital-W Wrong, and for somebody who wrote the books that required the Titanide sex chart I don't really feel like Varley's getting his rocks off while he writes in general. Just fair warning for folks who get bothered by that kind of thing.
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Jan 5, 2022 18:31
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grassy gnoll posted:The book is mostly this, but as fair warning to other folks there is some significant and monstrous child abuse early in the story. Golden Globe spoilers: Valentine repeatedly almost-drowning Sparky in the tub until he could perfectly recite Shakespeare was easily the most hosed up thing I've ever read from Varley by a country mile. Have you read this delightful Hugo award winning story?   [Mod edit: link deleted: let's not, not even as an example of a thing that is awful] Somebody fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jan 5, 2022 |
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Jan 5, 2022 18:43
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thotsky posted:Why does SF have the reputation for being horny/pervy? Aside from some use of rape for shock value, which seems pretty common in a lot of drama it seems like a pretty chaste genre to me. Did you see Sham bam bamina's link to a collection of Peter F Hamilton perviness a few pages back? That kind of thing: Though to be fair it's not as though non-sf isn't also infested with middle-aged male writers writing about hot teenage girls who want nothing more in life than to bang middle-aged men, so maybe there's some kind of literary snobbery thinking going on where Literary Writers write ~searingly honest~ exposes of the Male Libido but sf writers are mere filthy pervs.
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Jan 5, 2022 20:28
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freebooter posted:after how good Steel Beach and The Golden Globe were. I loved those two books back in the day, then read his next book Red Thunder and it absolutely sucked, I never even finished it, it felt like it was written by an entirely different person. Haven't read anything by him since.
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Jan 5, 2022 20:47
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SimonChris posted:Have you read this delightful Hugo award winning story? I saw that before it was deleted and holy poo poo I feel unclean
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Jan 5, 2022 21:01
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freebooter posted:See, now I want to hear what sick loving poo poo this "Chalker" guy was getting onto the Barnes and Noble shelves Here's Strix's rundown of one of his novels: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3900237&userid=184514&perpage=40&pagenumber=18#post517851659
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Jan 5, 2022 21:24
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SimonChris posted:Have you read this delightful Hugo award winning story? Sure haven't, and I think I'll keep things that way.
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Jan 5, 2022 22:55
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SimonChris posted:Have you read this delightful Hugo award winning story? boy with a foreword like that i bet googling and reading that isn't going to be an incredible mistake
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Jan 5, 2022 23:24
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The Black Company , The White Rose continues to be loving excellent. I went ahead and ordered The books of the South. Looking forward to those. Glad I found another books series to read that's so good. Next up after Glen Cook is definitely Gene Wolfe's Shadow and Claw I think that's a few books. Recommend me some old school Fantasy or possibly sci fi thats similar to Glen Cook. Please don't recommend Malazan I have no desire to read that.
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Jan 5, 2022 23:30
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Larry Parrish posted:boy with a foreword like that i bet googling and reading that isn't going to be an incredible mistake Reviews of it seem pretty positive, not being weird pedo apologia.
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Jan 5, 2022 23:53
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Is blindsight old school? I'm sure there's been a bunch of good talk about it in the past but I just did a reread of echopraxia while part way through listening to the former for my reread. These are my loving favorite books exceptayje for Anathem. The impact of finding out that the first story has been mostly generated by Rorschach in order to manipulate Siri's dad in second story when 70% through it has its own special feeling. I don't even know what else to say about them. Where to begin. If you haven't read, they are first contact stories that delve into consciousness and other philosophy stuff with various baseline and posthumans.
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Jan 5, 2022 23:56
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So I looked up the Behold Humanity! stuff someone mentioned earlier because I’m a sucker for pro primate propaganda and, uh, it’s quite a trip. It feels like the author was paying their self by the word, is in places so horrendously badly written that I wondered if it was AI-generated and yet runs along at a cracking pace and just has this immense manic energy to it. Still can’t decide if I actually like it or not but there’s something there for sure. E: example; just as a Saberhagen Berserker type craft has just jumped into a system ready to get breaking everything down and turning it into more of itself, it receives the mysterious communication “pssst, over here”. It reminds me of nothing so much as my 9yo at play; everything gets smashed up together with no consistency and this wild creativity results. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Jan 6, 2022 |
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Jan 6, 2022 03:04
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Beefeater1980 posted:So I looked up the Behold Humanity! stuff someone mentioned earlier because I’m a sucker for pro primate propaganda and, uh, it’s quite a trip. It feels like the author was paying their self by the word, is in places so horrendously badly written that I wondered if it was AI-generated and yet runs along at a cracking pace and just has this immense manic energy to it. I did as well and had much the same result as you. I also now understand people who saw Ready Player One as just constant nerd culture masturbation. Also the Confederacy is morally/ethically inconsistent.
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Jan 6, 2022 04:16
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Hollismason posted:Recommend me some old school Fantasy or possibly sci fi thats similar to Glen Cook. Please don't recommend Malazan I have no desire to read that. Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series was a big inspiration to Cook, particularly the Dread Empire series. Which you should get to eventually.
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Jan 6, 2022 04:30
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I'm pretty sure the modern HFY genre started off as short Tumblr fics about why vulcans follow humans around everywhere they go; it has always been silly positive nonsense. I wonder what The Deathworlders word count is up to these days.
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Jan 6, 2022 04:32
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mllaneza posted:Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series was a big inspiration to Cook, particularly the Dread Empire series. Which you should get to eventually. I haven't read any Fritz Leiber in decades. I wonder if they still hold up. I'll have to check out Cooks Dread Empire.
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Jan 6, 2022 04:55
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pseudorandom name posted:I'm pretty sure the modern HFY genre started off as short Tumblr fics about why vulcans follow humans around everywhere they go; it has always been silly positive nonsense.
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Jan 6, 2022 05:05
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Hollismason posted:I haven't read any Fritz Leiber in decades. I wonder if they still hold up. I'll have to check out Cooks Dread Empire. I like starting with what are technically the two prequel novels. They do a vast amount of work setting up the characters and world that the core trilogy will benefit from. https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07H47XK68 There are two CWs on the series. El Murid and his jihads are an expy for the actual Muslim conquests. And there's a shocking amount of exoticism in the portrayal of the Dread Empire as a super magical alt-China. What pulls both of those back from the edge is how humanized they are, they're more than faceless hordes of howling fanatics or grim, invincible legions of an empire unacquainted with defeat. Both are made up of flawed and aspiring people, just like their opponents. In all, you get about 30 or 40 years of turbulent history, as seen by the people who found themselves at the turning points. Sadly, I can't say any of them had their hands on the levers of history, the whole affair was a showpiece for the entertainment of jaded gods.
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Jan 6, 2022 07:33
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Beefeater1980 posted:So I looked up the Behold Humanity! stuff someone mentioned earlier because I’m a sucker for pro primate propaganda and, uh, it’s quite a trip. It feels like the author was paying their self by the word, is in places so horrendously badly written that I wondered if it was AI-generated and yet runs along at a cracking pace and just has this immense manic energy to it. IIRC the author refers to it as "stream-of-consciousness writing" in a few places, so I'm pretty sure it hasn't received any editing before being posted, which would explain a lot of the repeated words/sentences and typos (although some of them look more like they were posting from mobile and autocorrect went rogue). It's even more badly in need of a copyeditor than most online writing. And yeah, it does have a gleeful, manic "just opened a box containing random action figures spanning decades of media and now I'm smashing them against each other going PEW PEW" energy. It's not well written, but it is fun. And the idea of a post-scarcity, post-mortality humanity that, instead of the Culture, is a bunch of nerds doing Star Trek LARPs with actual loving starships is pretty great. That said, I felt the fun factor dropped off a lot as it started to focus more and more on the military SF side of things and less on the cultural and diplomatic interactions with the humans. "Who would win, the Saberhagen Berserkers, or a combined arms Battlefleet Gothic/Star Trek fleet done up in Hello Kitty colours" is inherently less fun to me than an alien going "what the gently caress is a cat and why does it keep doing that".
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Jan 6, 2022 15:41
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What the hell is "the HFY genre?"? Jack Chalker chat: the only positive thing I can <say> about his stories is that writing them kept him away from children. Chalker was a IRL teacher teaching children before his royalties & advance book contract payments allowed him to retire as a teacher. I will say that anyone who willing read more than one Jack Chalker book or Jack Chalker story collection in 2021/2022 without getting paid to do so is suspicious as hell. fun note: the first mention of Jack Chalker in the SF-LOVERS mailing list wasn't the skeeviness of his stories, no that level of skeevy slash WTF poo poo was omnipresent in scifi of the 1970s & 1980s apparently. One of Chalker's characters got universally nominated as the literary figure with the highest body count in fiction, surpassing God/Allah/Ahura Mazdā by a wide margin. That Chalker character universally nominated killed off/rebooted the universe at least two times in-book universe, and therefore had a body count of trillions of sextillions versus those lightweight Gods of Sol. This is why I've always gushed so positively about Christopher Stasheff's Wizard series and his other work. Yes, Stasheff's work is cookie cutter and went formulaic after the 2nd book in a series. Yes there was a overt Christian vibe in most of Stasheff's work. However, Stashefff never went skeevy, it was always kid/newbie friendly, and most daringly of all for fantasy-scifi of the '70s & '80s the main characters in his stories were Behold Humanity! stuff gives me a big early-career John Ringo vibe. Aka the John Ringo who wrote lots of pop-culture cutesy-ness into his stories before the success of his Posleen War and his e: forgot the word <say> quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Jan 6, 2022 |
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Jan 6, 2022 17:40
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"Humanity, gently caress Yeah!" I assume.
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Jan 6, 2022 19:35
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