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I finished The Blacktongue Thief last night. It was pretty good, though not quite as good as Between Two Fires. If he wrote more books in this universe I would definitely read them.
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Apr 7, 2022 00:04
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Opopanax posted:That and his literal insertion into the books and making a huge part of the story about the accident A better response to getting run over would've been to make a Maximum Overdrive sequel with a gary stu self insertion character who hunts down and kills every last car
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Apr 7, 2022 00:17
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Clark Nova posted:A better response to getting run over would've been to make a Maximum Overdrive sequel with a gary stu self insertion character who hunts down and kills every last car We already have a Maximum Overdrive sequel - the Cars franchise.
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Apr 7, 2022 01:22
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TOOT BOOT posted:I finished The Blacktongue Thief last night. It was pretty good, though not quite as good as Between Two Fires. If he wrote more books in this universe I would definitely read them. You're in luck, I think he's been contracted for 3 books in that world.
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Apr 7, 2022 01:28
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TOOT BOOT posted:I finished The Blacktongue Thief last night. It was pretty good, though not quite as good as Between Two Fires. If he wrote more books in this universe I would definitely read them. I loved The Blacktongue Thief because it reminded me a lot of Ffafrhd and the Grey Mouser stories. I'm reading Between Two Fires now.
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Apr 7, 2022 03:15
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Everyone posted:Plus "9-11 is somehow a good thing because it'll destroy the nasty rock or something." I remember playing in some weird Gunslinger RPG on RPoL where its theme was that since the nasty rock got smushed, it let all the evil out and now our world had the War on Terror and werewolves and other weird poo poo now. sorry, the what?
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Apr 7, 2022 03:20
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:I feel like Harry Potter works because it's not just "fantasy." The HP books have equal measures of mystery, drama, horror, a little romance, and of course some action. They also sprinkle the worldbuilding. As opposed to the worst offenders of lore bloat, Harry Potter books will just introduce something like, say, a magical invention or candy, say what it does, show someone use it, and move on. It doesn't linger on the magical candy, telling you when it was invented, who invented it, what the inventor's whole life story was, etc. The first three books don't really waste your time all that much, which is great for kids and people who can't really get into heavier fantasy. If the HP books had worldbuilding stuff in them I'd actually have nostalgia for them.
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Apr 7, 2022 05:07
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moonmazed posted:sorry, the what? One of the later Dark Tower books had Roland's Ka-Tet come into possession of an evil orb called Black Thirteen (which is implied to be related to the good orb from The Talisman). They secure it by locking it in a storage area under the World Trade Center pre-9/11. I don't think that this was supposed to be a "9/11 was good", but rather "the curse on this evil orb caused 9/11" one.
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Apr 7, 2022 06:21
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 Orb did 9/11
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Apr 7, 2022 06:34
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Apr 7, 2022 06:55
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FPyat posted:If the HP books had worldbuilding stuff in them I'd actually have nostalgia for them. Yeah as soon as you venture beyond the boarding school the adult world sort of falls apart; everyone's just a shopkeeper or a public servant. (Which I guess is also very English, in a sense.) One of the many things I liked about Lev Grossman's The Magicians is that it actually shows you what happens to wizards once they graduate and are just kicked out into the world with limitless power - they basically go insane doggedly pursuing their own private obsessions, not unlike today's American billionaires.
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Apr 7, 2022 08:47
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I remember rereading the early HP books at some point and being slightly surprised that at least as much stuff actually happens in the thin books as in the later doorstoppers. The "worldbuilding" definitely suffers later. Most things are the way they are because it's a children's story about wizards, which is fine early on but it feels like later on we're expected to take the setting more seriously, and it just doesn't work. Groke posted:As an aside, translations of Blytonesque stuff used to be a fairly big success in Norway. In fact one of the bigger things in children's fiction (including movies) back in the 1950s and 60s was an adapted translation of Anthony Buckeridge's "Jennings" series, relocated to Norway. Which has basically no boarding school tradition, they just pretended for the sake of the story. These were pretty old-fashioned by the time I was in the target age group in the 80s, and now my kids are in that age range and I don't think anyone reads that poo poo anymore. I loved the Jennings books as a kid, even if it wasn't anything like my school life.
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Apr 7, 2022 10:41
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TOOT BOOT posted:I finished The Blacktongue Thief last night. It was pretty good, though not quite as good as Between Two Fires. If he wrote more books in this universe I would definitely read them. Between Two Fires is outstanding, his best work imo. Looking at my Kindle history, I purchased The Lesser Dead on March 3, and now I've read all his books, and enjoyed them all. I love it when you find a new author you like and can just rip through their whole catalog. I did start the Blacktongue Thief and it is good, but I might shelve it and wait for the rest of the series to come out, I really hate waiting for books when I'm in the middle of a series.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:19
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Finished Last Exit. I understand a lot of the praise but I don't think it was for me - Stephen King but actually mostly college flashbacks + introspection about how bad the world is.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:23
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Qwertycoatl posted:I loved the Jennings books as a kid, even if it wasn't anything like my school life. Even in the heyday of british boarding school stories, the vast majority of readers were children who didn't go to boarding schools. There are good examples of the genre on Project Gutenberg - Angela Brazil for girl's stories, and early P.G. Wodehouse for boy's. Both are worth reading, just expect some WTF-level casual racism occasionally in the latter.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:32
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Oh also I finished the Species Imperative series by Julie Czerneda. Worth a read but you can pretty much skim the first 25% of books 1 and especially 2 before the aliens show up. She writes these awesome alien species and interactions with them and decent overall plotting, but the inter-human stuff is pretty dire, particularly the love interest. Also 1 year ago I was apparently posting here about struggling with a different Czerneda series for exactly the same reason. 
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Apr 7, 2022 16:33
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Hobnob posted:Even in the heyday of british boarding school stories, the vast majority of readers were children who didn't go to boarding schools.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:35
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AARD VARKMAN posted:Finished Last Exit. I understand a lot of the praise but I don't think it was for me - Stephen King but actually mostly college flashbacks + introspection about how bad the world is. Yeah I'm about a third of the way through it and I'm chugging along but it didn't grab me the way, say, The Craft Sequence did. It's... fine.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:58
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Hugo finalists are out: https://locusmag.com/2022/04/2021-hugo-astounding-and-lodestar-awards-finalists-2/ Best novel and novella categories: https://twitter.com/chicagoworldcon/status/1512083387535671304 a friendly penguin fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Apr 7, 2022 |
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Apr 7, 2022 17:11
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FPyat posted:If the HP books had worldbuilding stuff in them I'd actually have nostalgia for them. The series had world building. It just happened to build a world that was, roughly, "all others exist to serve our whims and should be happy to do so. Or else." The wizarding world is the Glorious Brittish Empire and muggles, elves, goblins, demihumans, etc are all colonials who should be grateful to serve under such wonderful rulers. A muggle-POV book in the HP setting would probably work as a horror story. Though it'd be very short and end very badly for the POV character.
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Apr 7, 2022 17:31
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The world building in Harry Potter took a real racist nosedive once the Pottermore stuff started coming out. I assume Rowling has a tight grip on it and was the reason why all of Africa has like, one magic school of note while Europe gets four. Plus all the accepted magic slavery. It's so easy to not put slavery into your world building as a whimsical feature.
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Apr 7, 2022 18:23
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Evil Fluffy posted:A muggle-POV book in the HP setting would probably work as a horror story. Though it'd be very short and end very badly for the POV character. sadly it's also unfinished and that really was the best part about it.
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Apr 7, 2022 18:57
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Just finished Children of Dune. I'd read the first one ages ago and it was good but didn't really stick with me, but I loved the new movie so it got me looking at the rest of the series. Pretty impressed so far, I've heard there are diminishing returns but I'd say I liked this better than Messiah. There's definitely some odd pacing, with big long chapters where nothing much happens followed by short chapters where major stuff happens in two sentences, or big things happening off screen. Also weird how many of the major characters are sidelined and do next to nothing, especially since there's a significant time jump in the next one as I understand it. I'm going to keep going with them anyways, I have a good tolerance for bad sci fi/fantasy and even the low points are better than a lot of stuff out there. I at least want to get through the Frank Herbert ones and then I'll see how it goes with the son, but so far I feel like things have been better than I'd been made to expect.
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Apr 7, 2022 19:19
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Opopanax posted:I at least want to get through the Frank Herbert ones and then I'll see how it goes with the son, but so far I feel like things have been better than I'd been made to expect. I know that people say this all the time but it's really true in this case: don't read those books. Everything you like about the Herbert books is tossed out the window for a boring rear end by-the-numbers space opera that strips all the mysticism and wonder from the Frank books. It doesn't help that his co-author is the worst Star Wars EU writer, which is saying something. (it also has that EU disease where every single thing from the originals has some significance going back centuries or some sort of secret relationship to a major character or family. )
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Apr 7, 2022 19:54
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zoux posted:I know that people say this all the time but it's really true in this case: don't read those books. Everything you like about the Herbert books is tossed out the window for a boring rear end by-the-numbers space opera that strips all the mysticism and wonder from the Frank books. It doesn't help that his co-author is the worst Star Wars EU writer, which is saying something. (it also has that EU disease where every single thing from the originals has some significance going back centuries or some sort of secret relationship to a major character or family. ) My rule for having a good time with Dune books is simple: only read the ones that got Bruce Pennington covers. You can trust Bruce. This also has the advantage of including the National Lampoon's Doon and the Dune Encyclopedia, which is gloriously batshit and very highly recommended (by me).
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Apr 7, 2022 20:20
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The advice I've been sticking to is "keep reading them until you want to quit because it's not going to get any better"
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Apr 7, 2022 20:35
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That's probably gonna be about halfway through God Emperor
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Apr 7, 2022 21:22
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a friendly penguin posted:Hugo finalists are out: https://locusmag.com/2022/04/2021-hugo-astounding-and-lodestar-awards-finalists-2/ Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather is really good.
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Apr 7, 2022 21:28
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Yeah, having read the original Herbert books way back in the day the OG is a true classic with Messiah/Children/God Emperor are all solid in their own ways. IIRC God Emperor reaches a solid denouement to the overall plot. Having been willing to read any Star Wars stories as a very nerdy teenager, even I learned to stay far the gently caress away from KJA after a couple books. That dude is loving awful at his craft.
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Apr 7, 2022 21:39
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I'll go in to bat for KJA's writing on the Tales of the Jedi comic. Is it good? God no. It's melodramatic and weirdly paced and kind of silly. But is it satisfyingly janky and fun in a 90s Comics kind of way? Yeah absolutely. Plus the art is really gonzo in a way that makes up for a lot of not very good writing. But also yes, every other bit of the Star Wars EU he touched was awful.
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Apr 7, 2022 21:42
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zoux posted:That's probably gonna be about halfway through God Emperor but then you'll miss the weirdest orgasm in the books??
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Apr 7, 2022 21:43
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cptn_dr posted:But also yes, every other bit of the Star Wars EU he touched was awful. I liked Lando going to the blob races. It's pretty much the only decent part of any of his books.
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Apr 7, 2022 22:04
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a friendly penguin posted:Hugo finalists are out: https://locusmag.com/2022/04/2021-hugo-astounding-and-lodestar-awards-finalists-2/ Do not know what is weirder - owning all but one of the nominees for Best Novel (I can't remember how long since I've even been remotely interested in more than two), the several [Not a Hugo] Hugos, or the Fanzine nominee who blocked me on twitter after they melted down when they posted racist trash
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Apr 7, 2022 22:17
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a friendly penguin posted:Hugo finalists are out Decent nominations by and large although the popular media nominations are trash as usual and Tor/Uncanny heavily dominate their categories.
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Apr 7, 2022 22:18
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I go with "read an even number of dune books" because Messiah is an important coda to Dune, God Emperor actually shows you the golden path that Leto spend all of Children angsting about, and if you've made it to Heretics you might as well do Chapter house. Also if you read book 7 I want you to read book 8 because you are a bad person and I want you to suffer. However this: Opopanax posted:The advice I've been sticking to is "keep reading them until you want to quit because it's not going to get any better" Is accurate, and has the advantage that you can quote that epigraph: "Dune teaches the principle of the knife - cutting of what is incomplete and saying" now it is finished, because it ended *here*"
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Apr 7, 2022 23:49
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The Empire's Ruin (Ashes of the Unhewn Throne #1) by Brian Staveley - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CG65NKZ/
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Apr 7, 2022 23:52
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What's additionally funny/terrible is KJA's dune stuff is basically his saga of the seven suns series re-written and slightly tuned for the dune universe (kind of). It hits all the same storybeats with roughly the same plot. Yes, I read most of them; it was a dark, desperate time in my life.
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Apr 8, 2022 00:01
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cptn_dr posted:But also yes, every other bit of the Star Wars EU he touched was awful. The Young Jedi Knights series KJA and his wife did are pretty good, as long as you remember that they're children's books.
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Apr 8, 2022 01:25
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Just finished reading The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck. I was really looking forward to this after enjoying her collection Jagganath (this novel is actually an expansion of the story "Augusta Prima" from Jagganath). Unfortunately, I found it pretty disappointing. It sits in an awkward gap between children's and adults' fantasy--the premise of plucky children wandering through the multiverse is reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones, but there are some pretty grim scenes of child abuse that make it inappropriate for kids. The plot is meandering and inconsequential. Tidbeck has this minimalist style of never describing characters' emotions directly, which worked well in short stories but here it just makes the novel feel flat and affectless.
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Apr 8, 2022 09:35
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Tars Tarkas posted:Fanzine nominee who blocked me on twitter after they melted down when they posted racist trash Which one?
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