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I discovered Hyperion by Dan Simmons in my twenties and it quickly became my favourite book. I was overjoyed when I discovered his other works. Then I read them. It was a bad couple weeks. Just quickly, I'm so glad this thread has movement again. It's the thread - or maybe an earlier iteration - that got me to buy an account and it's my legit fav thread on these forums. Time for a reread of the John Ringo horror Let's Read.
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Mar 13, 2022 09:34
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| # ? May 17, 2024 13:29 |
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IshmaelZarkov posted:I discovered Hyperion by Dan Simmons in my twenties and it quickly became my favourite book. I was overjoyed when I discovered his other works. Then I read them. People are saying 9/11 really scrambled Simmon's brains, which I think is maybe giving Simmons too much credit for not being a piece of poo poo to begin with. Is it true his earlier books are really worth a read? Do they have any women characters with any agency? It's a little bit hard to believe but I do know how much people love Hyperion
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Mar 13, 2022 14:15
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Jokerpilled Drudge posted:People are saying 9/11 really scrambled Simmon's brains, which I think is maybe giving Simmons too much credit for not being a piece of poo poo to begin with. I'll go to bat for Hyperion, although I acknowledge it's a book I've loved for years and I am exceptionally biased. There's one female POV character who's a hardbitten noir detective, but the entire book is kinda bout whether anyone has agency at all, so it's hard to really determine how much agency she has. There's a technically secondary female character that either has a ton of agency or none depending on how you look at it, but I'm happy to err on the side of good in this case. I'd recommend giving it a go if you're a sci-fi reader. Just remember that there are no sequels and Simmons never picked up a pen again in his life after finishing it.
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Mar 14, 2022 03:47
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The Terror is pretty good but it does only have like two female characters, one who barely ever actually appears "on screen" and the other one is mute.
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Mar 14, 2022 03:53
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That was a dramatisation of the Franklyn expedition, which ended up with a load of frozen dead dudes. Inevitably there would be little to no women present.
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Mar 14, 2022 10:50
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IshmaelZarkov posted:I'd recommend giving it a go if you're a sci-fi reader. Just remember that there are no sequels and Simmons never picked up a pen again in his life after finishing it.
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Mar 14, 2022 13:25
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Grain of salt because it’s been a while, but I liked Hyperion, The Terror, and Drood. I’d recommend avoiding everything else
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Mar 14, 2022 14:05
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I thought Drood was fine up until the end when the plot just completely falls apart. For those who haven't read it Drood follows Wilkie Collins, a British novelist from the 19th century and his friendship with Charles Dickens. Dickens tells Collins that he saw something strange after surviving a train crash and they both get involved with this mystery involving secret societies and a mysterious figure named Drood. Then near the end of the book Collins discovers that everything they investigated was set up by Dickens as some kind of elaborate prank.
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Mar 14, 2022 14:37
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I didn't really think Fall Of Hyperion was that bad, although it's been about a decade since I read it. Endymion was loving god awful and creepy.
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Mar 15, 2022 05:35
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muscles like this! posted:Then near the end of the book Collins discovers that everything they investigated was set up by Dickens as some kind of elaborate prank. Not gonna lie, being totally unfamiliar with the author and works being discussed, this sounds kinda fantastic in a vacuum.
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Mar 15, 2022 10:12
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Jokerpilled Drudge posted:I had some kind of an inkling about that when they all went to an empty post-apocalyptic Jerusalem and there were loudspeakers blasting "KILL THE JEWS" in Arabic. I checked in on the goodreads.com page for book 2 yeah it goes way beyond just making killbots to kill the jews. The second book also reveals that evil Muslims killed off most of the earth’s population via a virus designed to kill Jews but the dumb Muslims got it backwards so it killed all the non Jews. Also the evil Muslims designed some kind of black hole bomb to kill the whole planet.
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Mar 15, 2022 15:22
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No, the black hole bomb was invented by the French, they just gave it to the evil Muslims because they were cowards. I wish I was making this up.
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Mar 19, 2022 20:22
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Rockman Reserve posted:Not gonna lie, being totally unfamiliar with the author and works being discussed, this sounds kinda fantastic in a vacuum. It doesn’t come off. It’s rushed and the motivation isn’t conveyed well. Agree that it’s not a bad idea.
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Mar 19, 2022 20:32
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Groke posted:No, the black hole bomb was invented by the French, they just gave it to the evil Muslims because they were cowards. 
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Mar 19, 2022 20:45
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Still stands as my worst disappointment, bookwise. I'd actually quite liked the first one, was pretty far into classical mythology and poo poo at the time, and had read and liked a bunch of Simmons before then... sure with hindsight you can see the clues of crackpottery in the first book but the second just blew everything wide open.
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Mar 19, 2022 21:32
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Yeah I also managed to completely miss all the chuddery in Illium because I was far more interested in the setup for the high-tech Trojan heroes vs the gods storyline and largely found all the Tempest stuff boring, so the second book was one of the more dramatic letdowns around.
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Mar 19, 2022 21:37
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lmao they do hightech tempest after the Illiad? miss me with that poo poo
Jokerpilled Drudge has a new favorite as of 00:45 on Mar 20, 2022 |
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Mar 19, 2022 23:23
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the tempest owns though
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Mar 19, 2022 23:31
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Imagine being that broken up by an attack that frankly barely impacted life in the US, not that that stopped you whipping yourselves into a neo McCarthyist frenzy. Meanwhile other countries have whole cities razed by artillery and bombing campaigns and are back to optimistic reckless capitalism within a few years. Someone so loving clueless isn't even capable of turning out writing of value, and probably never was.
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Mar 20, 2022 00:21
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Jokerpilled Drudge posted:lmao they do hightech tempest after the Illiad? miss me with that poo poo
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Mar 20, 2022 02:00
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If you want a book with batshit crazy Muslims and black holes, and it's actually pretty good, I'd recommend Dark Rising by Greig Beck. Main character is kinda like if you had Captain America but he has an anger problem and PTSD. It's book two. Book one is the same dude vs some giant lovecraftian horror in the arctic. It's a popcorn airport thriller kind of book but it's entertaining.
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Mar 20, 2022 08:24
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AlbieQuirky posted:It doesn’t come off. It’s rushed and the motivation isn’t conveyed well. Agree that it’s not a bad idea. That's just the ending of every Professor Layton game.
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Mar 20, 2022 11:35
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It has recently come to light that M. A. R. Barker, the creator of the classic Tekumel fantasy setting, wrote a novel called Serpent's Walk back in 1991, using a pseudonym. Let's take a look at this forgotten work by the kind, old professor: Oh... https://www.facebook.com/groups/16107501733/permalink/10158183532566734/ Statement from the Tekumel foundation. It turns out he was also editing a Holocaust denial journal.
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Mar 21, 2022 20:42
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The left half got me towards the end, and even that did not prepare me for the right half 
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Mar 21, 2022 20:51
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Captain Hygiene posted:The left half got me towards the end, and even that did not prepare me for the right half I hit "Turner Diaries" and knew this was going to be a shitshow.
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Mar 21, 2022 21:27
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PJOmega posted:I hit "Turner Diaries" and knew this was going to be a shitshow. Yipes, I did not recognize that reference. Yeah, that's a real "I'm out" moment if you know what it is.
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Mar 21, 2022 21:32
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The Turner Diaries is IMO the most despicable piece of fiction ever written.
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Mar 21, 2022 21:39
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Yeah. If you want to learn a bit more about it, here's a good video going through it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Rg8V4g3ak
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Mar 21, 2022 22:00
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Lumbermouth posted:The Turner Diaries is IMO the most despicable piece of fiction ever written. The other book mentioned, "Hunter" which is by the same author is pretty bad also. In that one the hero is a white supremacist who just drives around with a rifle murdering interracial couples. Don't worry, he quickly learns that it is the Jews that are behind all the issues he has with society.
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Mar 21, 2022 22:40
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Dabir posted:Yeah. If you want to learn a bit more about it, here's a good video going through it: The thing that really got me once you got past the endless torrents of horrible poo poo is how grey and joyless the book is. None of the characters seem to have any sort of passion, even the lunatic passion of the murderous racist. They nuke most of the world in the end and then basically sit surrounded by the ashes, almost like they're resigned to their own deaths as well. Even 'winning' does nothing for them. They're empty shells at the start and at the end, and so void of everything they can't even realize THAT.
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Mar 26, 2022 03:00
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In this respect, it is a perfect distillation of fascism as it pans out, versus how it is lionised by its adherents.
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Mar 27, 2022 16:55
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"If you liked this book, you may enjoy the turner diaries" is a spectacular 0-100 acceleration into bugfuck crazy.
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Mar 27, 2022 18:07
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Cornwind Evil posted:The thing that really got me once you got past the endless torrents of horrible poo poo is how grey and joyless the book is. None of the characters seem to have any sort of passion, even the lunatic passion of the murderous racist. They nuke most of the world in the end and then basically sit surrounded by the ashes, almost like they're resigned to their own deaths as well. Even 'winning' does nothing for them. They're empty shells at the start and at the end, and so void of everything they can't even realize THAT. That kind of reminds me of a sci-fi series I read a while back, Theirs Not To Reason Why. It's five books, but to give a very brief summary: The protagonist is born with exceptionally strong precognitive abilities (psychics are reasonably common in this universe), and sees that all life in the galaxy will be extinguished by an apocalyptic invasion coming in a few centuries. She sees that there's only one particular sequence of events that give life a chance to survive, and the books are basically about her setting up the dominoes in exactly such a way that those events will come to pass after her death. For the most part I actually kind of liked the series. But one part of her big master plan was the complete genocide of a particular alien species. It's a constant throughout the series that this is coming, and it goes to great lengths to point out that pretty much all other sentient species in the galaxy are fine and dandy and coexist peacefully, this one in particular is just irredeemably evil and impossible to coexist with. A lot of hay is made about how her prescience shows explicitly that only a genocide will work and there's absolutely no other way to solve the galaxy without it. And then in the last book the genocide finally happens and it's just... completely perfunctory. There's a short chapter about a bioweapon killing most of them and then the protagonist destroying their home planet, and that's it. It's not framed as a particular tragedy or triumph, nor used as an impulse for introspection. The whole run-up to it takes up a significant amount of screentime (including a particularly distasteful scene of the protagonist psychically torturing somebody into going along with the genocide), but in the end it serves pretty much no narrative or thematic purpose. The theme that the protagonist will do literally anything to ensure her plan comes through has already been established more effectively in the first few books and didn't really need any more reinforcement at that point. It really felt like like the author went into the series with the idea of "gotta have a genocide to make it gritty and hardcore" and then just plain didn't really know what to do with it.
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Mar 27, 2022 19:51
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Loomer posted:In this respect, it is a perfect distillation of fascism as it pans out, versus how it is lionised by its adherents. Which is kind of funny, considering the Turner Diaries is one of the most famous works of fascist lionisation.
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Mar 28, 2022 12:54
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Yep. Even in their wildest dreams of victory, the hollow void is left unfilled and the land and people reduced to an ashen hellscape. Fascism eats its heroes and its young so it’s no surprise that its most Unfiltered fiction ends in nightmares of brutalisation and alienation.
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Mar 28, 2022 14:00
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Perestroika posted:That kind of reminds me of a sci-fi series I read a while back, Theirs Not To Reason Why. It's five books, but to give a very brief summary: The protagonist is born with exceptionally strong precognitive abilities (psychics are reasonably common in this universe), and sees that all life in the galaxy will be extinguished by an apocalyptic invasion coming in a few centuries. She sees that there's only one particular sequence of events that give life a chance to survive, and the books are basically about her setting up the dominoes in exactly such a way that those events will come to pass after her death. So it's like dune ( all 6 books) but really lovely
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Mar 28, 2022 14:40
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But dune is also really lovely
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Mar 29, 2022 09:19
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Jokerpilled Drudge posted:So it's like dune ( all 6 books) but really lovely Pretty much yeah. The inspiration was very obvious, but without the sort of introspection that Dune (at least the first couple books) manages. In its favour I'll say that the author does write pretty entertaining space battles, and she does manage to make the galaxy feel interesting and well lived-in. But even apart from the whole genocide thing, it does run facefirst into the issue of "how do you generate tension when the protagonist is functionally omniscient?" and the answer was pretty much "you don't". Early on there are some more upsets as the protagonist still learns how to use her power and occasionally her gambles go the wrong way, but as the story goes on that's eventually discarded. Especially the last book contained a lot of "Remember this thing the protagonist was planning to make happen? It happens just as expected, no surprises here because she literally cannot be surprised anymore".
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Mar 29, 2022 09:45
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So someone took the 4th dune book but missed the point and dragged it into five books, gotcha. I know it's cheating using pulp fiction, but I read all the Witcher books last year since I'm a consumer sheep with no taste. It's mostly cheerful schlock, except when it gears up for the multi-book extravaganza of the mythical young girl Ciri, heir to some bloodline. All of that is bad. The entire conflict is a bunch of people obsessed with a 14 y/o girls virginity, with a lot of awkward "doesn't count as losing my virginity, tee hee!" scenes. Like when she gets rescued, the rescuer tries to rape her, but another woman chases him off and Ciri is delighted to have hot lesbian sex with her as a reward. I'm serious. I'm trying to read more serious fiction nowadays, but all that means is that the awful sex stuff is gonna blindside me even harder.
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Mar 29, 2022 11:25
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I think one of the obvious signs of a bad story is when a character has lesbian sex out of the blue. Never showed interest in the same sex in any way, no foreshadowing, just out of nowhere. It never seems to happen with male characters. Don’t get me wrong, I have no issues with two girls having sex. I just hate when it seems thrown in at the last minute for no narrative reason.
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Mar 29, 2022 20:09
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