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Caesar Saladin posted:I read Lord of Light and found it to be one of the most awesomely creative sci fi books I've read. What else of his is good? he has a short story called Today We Choose Faces that is one of my favorites of all time. it's sometimes printed with Bridge of Ashes which is another amazing novella of his edit: the novels he co wrote with Philip K Dick are also real good i've never read a bad Zelazny
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Mar 28, 2022 16:56
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When I first picked up the wheel of time books, like 25 years ago, the description on the back of the books led me to believe that the main characters were being born again and again in different ages in each book. A sort of epic battle across deep time. The books were certainly long enough each for that to make sense. That would probably have been much more interesting then the actual result.
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Mar 28, 2022 17:01
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Okay, I've never actually read Wheel of Time, but I keep hearing that it's like 5 percent substance and 95 percent filler. What precisely is Jordon having his characters do during these thousands of wasted pages? Also, I recalled something that I think says it all about ol' Terry Goodkind, he of the 'deep philosophical reach' and 'hatred of moral clarity'. You can argue the whole 'kicking the girl's jaw off' is something that the character would do, all other reasons in universe and out aside. You can argue that the 'feed a kid molten metal' and 'make rats chew through a woman' are just showing how depraved the villains are. You can even argue the chicken thing is just a serious misfire, which even good writers have. I think what really sums up what really goes on in his head is what (looks up her name) Kahlan talks about when she talks about the history of her lineage, the Confessors. Confessors basically have a 'once a day' magic touch that if a Confessor touches someone, they become utterly and slavishly devoted to them, and will do absolutely anything they command. By anything, I mean anything. Confessors, it seems, are all female. Richard asks if there are male Confessors. Kahlan says yes, male children can be born to Confessors and they can have the same power, but in their case it can be even stronger, not requiring a recharge period at all. This in the distant past resulted in terrible things, so now any Confessor couple who has a male child must more or less immediately put the child to death. Okay, horrible enough already, but you could argue if you squint that it sounds like some barbaric tradition that was started because of horrible crimes, but said crimes are now so far in the past that now basically still going by inertia. You'd think, it's not this infant's fault it was born this way. How do they kill them? Give them a fast acting poison, maybe? There's magic in the world, maybe a spell that causes crib death, the infant going to sleep and never waking up? Hell, worst comes to worst, maybe a quick stab with a blade in a precise spot? No. Instead, the male child is laid on a platform, a metal rod is placed across its neck, and the husband of the pairing has to get up on the platform and STAND ON BOTH ENDS. THAT'S how they prevent the possible rise of male Confessors. That pretty much says it all when it comes to Goodkind's mind.
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Mar 28, 2022 17:13
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What you have to understand about Wheel of Time is that Jordan has a real knack for writing hundreds of pages in which literally, actually nothing happens. I know it's like "wow, the books were a thousand pages each, even if they're all filler there must be so many events!" and it's like... no, there aren't. Books 7 and 10 come dangerously close to having literally only a couple things in them There's a lot of redundant talking about stuff and arguing NB: i like the WoT books
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Mar 28, 2022 17:17
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precision posted:NB: i like the WoT books Why?
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Mar 28, 2022 17:21
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Zelazny was the best of the New Wave sci-fi authors by a mile. He wasn't perfect, he milked the Amber series a bit too hard, but he made so much awesome stuff.
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Mar 28, 2022 17:21
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poisonpill posted:Why? exposure at an impressionable age
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Mar 28, 2022 17:22
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Random Stranger posted:Zelazny was the best of the New Wave sci-fi authors by a mile. He wasn't perfect, he milked the Amber series a bit too hard, but he made so much awesome stuff. whats his kink
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Mar 28, 2022 17:22
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ChubbyChecker posted:whats his kink Powerful, clever men doing cool things.
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Mar 28, 2022 17:30
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I legit don't think Zelazny books have any weird sex stuff in them. I think he was just Regular Horny.
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Mar 28, 2022 17:30
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Is zelazny the amber guy? I remember reading the first one of those and thinking all the women were exceptionally flat and lifeless but it was a long time ago
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Mar 28, 2022 17:34
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Killingyouguy! posted:Is zelazny the amber guy? I remember reading the first one of those and thinking all the women were exceptionally flat and lifeless but it was a long time ago Yes
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Mar 28, 2022 17:39
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Killingyouguy! posted:Is zelazny the amber guy? I remember reading the first one of those and thinking all the women were exceptionally flat and lifeless but it was a long time ago there's actually a reason that most characters in Amber are "flat", it's not just the women
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Mar 28, 2022 17:48
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(that said, he WAS a golden age sci fi writer so his stuff does skew a bit towards "cool guys and the girls that swoon after them", i just don't think it's nearly as much a problem as in his peers' work)
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Mar 28, 2022 17:49
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precision posted:(that said, he WAS a golden age sci fi writer so his stuff does skew a bit towards "cool guys and the girls that swoon after them", i just don't think it's nearly as much a problem as in his peers' work) Maybe! It was like 2010 and I'd found some 'the greatest list of the greatest fantasy series' list as decided on by reddit so I'm not sure what the contemporaneous writing was like
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Mar 28, 2022 17:51
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precision posted:What you have to understand about Wheel of Time is that Jordan has a real knack for writing hundreds of pages in which literally, actually nothing happens. I know it's like "wow, the books were a thousand pages each, even if they're all filler there must be so many events!" and it's like... no, there aren't. Books 7 and 10 come dangerously close to having literally only a couple things in them I don't understand how someone spends the time writing and writes nothing happening. The fun part of writing is when things happen.
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Mar 28, 2022 17:53
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precision posted:I legit don't think Zelazny books have any weird sex stuff in them. I think he was just Regular Horny. In Amber, a little person did gently caress a unicorn, but it mainly came up as a "how does that work?" take on weird foundational myths rather than strange kink. precision posted:(that said, he WAS a golden age sci fi writer so his stuff does skew a bit towards "cool guys and the girls that swoon after them", i just don't think it's nearly as much a problem as in his peers' work) Zelazny was New Wave which is about twenty to thirty years after gold age sf.
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Mar 28, 2022 17:53
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Random Stranger posted:In Amber, a little person did gently caress a unicorn, but it mainly came up as a "how does that work?" take on weird foundational myths rather than strange kink. ah right. I tend to lump all pre-90s sci fi into one big pile, and forget that the guys in the 50s were even worse
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Mar 28, 2022 17:59
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Groovelord Neato posted:I don't understand how someone spends the time writing and writes nothing happening. The fun part of writing is when things happen. Stuff happened, but there was an insane amount of durdling that didn't really do anything to move the overarching plot of the books forward. Lots of relationship drama, court intrigue, and arcane minutia that didn't actually affect the relative positions of the forces of good and evil. It was almost like what I imagine soap operas to be like, where you can stop watching for a year and when you pick it back up there might be some surprises like "oh those two hate eachother now for some reason" but the gist of the show is pretty much identical.
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Mar 28, 2022 18:11
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The Moon Monster posted:Stuff happened, but there was an insane amount of durdling that didn't really do anything to move the overarching plot of the books forward. Lots of relationship drama, court intrigue, and arcane minutia that didn't actually affect the relative positions of the forces of good and evil. It was almost like what I imagine soap operas to be like, where you can stop watching for a year and when you pick it back up there might be some surprises like "oh those two hate eachother now for some reason" but the gist of the show is pretty much identical. Is it circular drama? Like, they just keep repeating the same issues without either resolving them or breaking up? Also, while the very first Shannara book was a LOTR clone to the extreme, and people say that it was just the same story repeated over and over, I will give one credit to the writer: in the second set of books, a quadrology, the second and third have some REALLY good setpiece locations, in a "This is an area of horror and death and you'll need to be at your absolute best to survive". Edit: Went and looked them up. The city of Eldwist, and the island of Morrowindl. And I'll note that the book with said island predates the Elder Scrolls game by a decade. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Mar 28, 2022 |
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Mar 28, 2022 18:26
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OzyMandrill posted:The first one is such a blatantly transparent rip off of the lord of the rings, just utterly shameless. Yes. I felt like my intelligence was insulted by how little it tried to hide it.
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Mar 28, 2022 18:41
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I'm sure it was on this forum someone said they'd read The Sword of Shanarra first, and then reading LOTR and being completely WTF!
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Mar 28, 2022 18:50
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other people have talked about it better elsewhere, but there's a sort of ourobouros that happens with fantasy. broadly (and incorrectly) speaking, people only know Tolkien and reference that, and then reference references to that. again, that's not a good summary, but it explains some of the creative bankruptcy that sometimes shows up.
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Mar 28, 2022 19:08
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Empty Sandwich posted:other people have talked about it better elsewhere, but there's a sort of ourobouros that happens with fantasy. broadly (and incorrectly) speaking, people only know Tolkien and reference that, and then reference references to that. I'm more into The Worm Ouroboros Ouroboroses.
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Mar 28, 2022 19:25
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its all just tolklien and D&D
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Mar 28, 2022 19:26
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This sounds like a joke, and I promise that it isn't: I think 95% of what people think of as fantasy is D&D. Now, D&D is a soup made of 75% LOTR; with the other 25% being a hodgepodge of golden and new wave authors. But that means that the platonic ideal of fantasy is a couple of fairly dodgy elements that people are consciously adhering to, or unconsciously adhering to, or consciously running from. A fantasy world has: overpowered wizards, elves/dwarves/orcs, a small group of adventurers seeking a goal, overthrow of an ancient, embodied evil entity, a mythic past which is lost to the present, which is a weird mix of late medieval and early modern culture/technology level, etc., etc.. Importantly, these are all elements of LotR but they're actually distilled through things like Shannara and D&D and video games, so you've got that filter. It also means you've got a bunch of could-have-beens for foundational fantasy texts that just never happened, and so we're down a weirdly specific road for what bad fantasy books look like. What if Poul Anderson's the Broken Sword had been the book everyone read, instead of the Fellowship of the Ring? They aren't actually that much different from each other. Anyway I'll have a chocolate frosty and large fries (I like to dip them)
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Mar 28, 2022 19:31
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poisonpill posted:
In the chocolate frosty?? No no no vanilla is the only correct option for this application
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Mar 28, 2022 19:33
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I was just poking around recently and found this piece lamenting the genre stuff that sort of ossified: https://www.enworld.org/threads/who-killed-the-megaverse.666204/
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Mar 28, 2022 19:43
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"We weren't that inspired by Tolkien" says man who was forced to replace the word "hobbit" with "halfling" for legal reasons.
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Mar 28, 2022 20:13
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Killingyouguy! posted:In the chocolate frosty?? No no no vanilla is the only correct option for this application wtf
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Mar 28, 2022 20:14
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The Moon Monster posted:I'm more into The Worm Ouroboros Ouroboroses. I read that once but don't remember much about it other than it being weird.
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Mar 28, 2022 20:23
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Groovelord Neato posted:I don't understand how someone spends the time writing and writes nothing happening. The fun part of writing is when things happen. Agreed, but Goodkind’s writing (along with it’s other flaws) is a good example of the opposite problem of Jordan: when your writing is so sparse that it’s *nothing* but things happening in sequence. In many ways, fantasy stories live or die on immersive description. It can be overdone, but if you’re intending to immerse your reader into an exotic imaginary world, you need prose that feeds the senses as well as carry the story forward. LeGuin hits the sweet spot, Tolkien overdoes it a bit, Jordan overdoes it a LOT. There’s many authors who could pull off a minimalist style, like Hemingway or Murakami. But that only works because their stories were contemporary to their time, so most readers came to his work with at least a baseline of how his settings work. Minimalist writing falls flat with most fantasy because you’re assuming a world where the setting and daily routines of life are so radically different, they need some detail to be relatable. Goodkind’s description of the physical setting is so sparse that it may as well all take place in a black box theater.
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Mar 28, 2022 20:30
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Gatto Grigio posted:Goodkind’s description of the physical setting is so sparse that it may as well all take place in a black box theater. Perhaps a… Sensory deprivation theater, where you never know when - or where - the next delicious lick of the cat-o-nine-tails will land, always prepared but never truly ready to feel it rake across your nubile flesh, leaving trails of raw fire in its wake?
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Mar 28, 2022 20:36
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.random posted:Perhaps a… Sensory deprivation theater, where you never know when - or where - the next delicious lick of the cat-o-nine-tails will land, always prepared but never truly ready to feel it rake across your nubile flesh, leaving trails of raw fire in its wake? I assure you my flesh ain't nubile and hasn't been for a long time.
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Mar 28, 2022 20:41
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.random posted:Perhaps a… Sensory deprivation theater, where you never know when - or where - the next delicious lick of the cat-o-nine-tails will land, always prepared but never truly ready to feel it rake across your nubile flesh, leaving trails of raw fire in its wake? You have come to a theater called Gor! *whip crack* … Knowing that Goodkind spoke in interviews in exactly the same way he wrote fiction, he probably saw elaborating your thoughts as “effeminate.” (The only permissible emotions for Randians are anger and disdain.)
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Mar 28, 2022 20:43
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i'm sorry but dipping french fries into a vanilla frosty is just too weird even for this thread in fact vanilla frostys, in general, suck and should be avoided or destroyed
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Mar 28, 2022 21:20
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precision posted:i'm sorry but dipping french fries into a vanilla frosty is just too weird even for this thread Given the thread I think I have to challenge you to a duel of blades now
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Mar 28, 2022 21:21
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Killingyouguy! posted:Are they still just searching for the sword over and over or whatever? Even mother loving dragon ball had the good sense to be like 'we had a few good searches now finding the things is trivially easy and covered with a time skip' now I want a fantasy series about a legendary world-save holy sword that uses its power to avoid the hero and everyone else because it doesn't wanna go through with its deal, and the villain has to stop their evil and team up with the hero to find the goddamn thing
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Mar 28, 2022 23:20
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Killingyouguy! posted:Are they still just searching for the sword over and over or whatever? Even mother loving dragon ball had the good sense to be like 'we had a few good searches now finding the things is trivially easy and covered with a time skip' Having read a distressing number of these books in my teenage years, I seem to recall the actual Sword only factoring into the plot of like...three? out of the dozen or so of these I'm familiar with. Usually some other magical macguffin is being looked for/destroyed/exists as a burden/gift for whichever member of the extended Omsford family is the main character this time. All because the loser main character from the second book used the magic elf rocks for too long so they irradiated his sperm and now all his descendants down through the centuries are sufficiently innately magical enough to be useful protagonists whenever something vaguely sinister needs a gaggle of gently caress-ups to solve it
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Mar 28, 2022 23:29
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I feel like Elfstones was alright. I tried rereading 80's fantasy classics a few years ago to see how they held up. Dragonlance, Feist, Eddings etc There was a whole lot of DNF, Dragonlance in particular was basically unreadable as an Adult. But I still quite enjoyed Elfstones.
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Mar 28, 2022 23:41
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