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Serephina posted:Please tell me if this isn't the right place to post it, but while on the topic of writers being terrible about sex/rape, I'm curious about other people's opinions on Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series. I started to read them on recommendation from friends, hit that scene and dropped them instantly. Not really interested in reading a guy's thoughts on how bad he feels for brutally raping a young girl. Also the treatment of leprosy as a disease seemed a bit weird and anachronistic to me at the time but to be fair I was a teenage girl and may just not have paid attention to that in among all the other stuff.
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Apr 20, 2022 11:37
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Yeah same. I got to the rape and decided I didn't want to keep reading a book about a rapist. Don't really care if he felt bad after.
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Apr 20, 2022 14:01
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Kchama posted:That section is amazing as that is actually just a short story plopped into the middle of the book with minimal editing. It was, in fact, the piece Rothfuss wrote first and won him super accolades and got him his contract for the books. I read Eifelheim by Michael Flynn some time ago, which was overall pretty good. One thing annoyed me though, which was the frame story (in present time) was very bad compared to the main story (in the middle ages). Just garbage writing with a lovely unlikable protagonist. Turns out the frame story was published in 1986 and the rest of the book was published in 2006 lol. I would honestly have preferred if the frame was left out entirely. Carthag Tuek has a new favorite as of 18:29 on Apr 20, 2022 |
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Apr 20, 2022 18:27
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Serephina posted:Please tell me if this isn't the right place to post it, but while on the topic of writers being terrible about sex/rape, I'm curious about other people's opinions on Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series. His sci fi Gap series is all about rape. It is a central and frequently described key part of the plot. It is deeply unpleasant, unless you want to read about rape.
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Apr 20, 2022 22:05
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The impression I got of Donaldson is that while he writes rape as horrible and traumatic and all that, it's because that's how he likes it. Danger - Octopus! posted:His sci fi Gap series is all about rape. It is a central and frequently described key part of the plot. It is deeply unpleasant, unless you want to read about rape. And this is entirely why. Convenant's moaning afterwards about it is just part of the appeal to the author. EDIT: And this is actually why I think Donaldson is worse about it, because it being awful and traumatic is the sexy part to him.
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Apr 21, 2022 06:24
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Wanted to thank the goons who recommended Gideon the Ninth earlier, because they got me to look it up and it was excellent. One thing I noticed is how often it takes massive cues from pop culture, but it doesn't feel stale or uninspired. Like, the opening is pure Dune, the skeleton abomination with glowing weakpoints seems straight out of Dark Souls, the ending seems like a mixture of Terminator and The Forever War and the epilogue is weirdly reminiscent of Revenge of the Sith's last scene.. But it feels like an artist that makes really good use of samples: fresh and interesting rather than unoriginal. I went in completely blind and had a blast. Highly recommended.
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Apr 23, 2022 10:00
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If you're gonna steal, steal from the best.
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Apr 24, 2022 17:06
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Thread: https://twitter.com/liza/status/1206368537641701377 https://twitter.com/liza/status/1206751201318047744 And here is the entire book: https://archive.org/details/ostrichfordefenc00hile/mode/2up
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Apr 25, 2022 18:54
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SimonChris posted:Thread: appears to be two twitter threads, even
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Apr 25, 2022 21:34
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So I went back on my previous Dan Simmons post and dived back in for one more when I saw that he'd written another historical novel, The Abominable. It actually mostly manages to sidestep the specific gripes with him I complained about earlier, but I really need to talk about it somewhere because what it does instead is go to some real places. The early and midsections of the book are actually pretty decent, an ostensible memoir about a guy involved with a small group that was one of the earliest western attempts to conquer Mt. Everest back in the 1920s. But what bugged me for a while was the title clearly placing it in the context of The Terror's mix of natural and supernatural horror, whereas this book is almost exclusively concerned with the real-life concerns of dangerous mountain expeditions up to this point. While it briefly alludes to the yeti mythos early on, nothing comes of it for most of the book. Until the 2/3 point, when it suddenly tries to set up the idea that yetis attacked and killed a bunch of the expedition's Sherpa crew, only to reveal within about 20 pages that there was no supernatural element, it was all just badguys with guns and monster suits trying to kill or scare off that group. But that's not the wild part. In the last ~20% of the story, it's suddenly revealed that the entire expedition was secretly an orchestrated sham to get to a dead guy way up near the top of Everest, who had incriminating photos in his pocket of up-and-coming politician Adolph Hitler having sex with young boys. And there's a bunch of proto-nazis chasing the group up the mountain, culminating in an armed fight somewhere up above 28,000 feet before the heroes win. And then the protagonist gradually makes his way back down and eventually gets to England to turn in the photos to a 1920s Winston Churchill. And also, T. E. Lawrence is there, and so is Charles Chaplin, who gives a funny performance for the group. And then it just kind of winds down with a hand-wavey early WWII history saying that the photos' blackmail potential was the whole reason Germany didn't invade Great Britain? Just......WHAT? What did I read? Did I dream the whole thing? This feels like it's beyond a  response, it needs a full on 
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Apr 28, 2022 22:28
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That reads like the best episode of Scooby-Doo we never had.
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Apr 28, 2022 22:54
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Apr 28, 2022 22:57
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Captain Hygiene posted:the title clearly placing it in the context of The Terror's mix of natural and supernatural horror, whereas this book is almost exclusively concerned with the real-life concerns of dangerous mountain expeditions up to this point. While it briefly alludes to the yeti mythos early on, nothing comes of it for most of the book. Until the 2/3 point, when it suddenly tries to set up the idea that yetis attacked and killed a bunch of the expedition's Sherpa crew, only to reveal within about 20 pages that there was no supernatural element, it was all just badguys with guns and monster suits trying to kill or scare off that group. It's been a while but doesn't he do the winky "So, it was just guys in monster suits...Or was it?!"
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Apr 28, 2022 23:45
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As the monster passes the camera, we see the back of his suit. There, the telltale line of a zipper, complete with pull. However, as the scene closes the monster reaches back--as if to scratch an itch--and dislodges the zipper from its fur. Dun dun DUNNNNNNNNN
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Apr 28, 2022 23:53
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Ambitious Spider posted:It's been a while but doesn't he do the winky "So, it was just guys in monster suits...Or was it?!" There might be a bit of a wink, but there's definitely people doing a lot of it (unfortunately I actually do a lot of these as audiobooks due to insomnia, so I'll occasionally zone out to miss some specific details, and it's much tougher to go back and check for a specific detail in the text)
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Apr 28, 2022 23:58
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I consigned all Dan Simmons books to the charity bin on moving house after this thread reminded me how bad everything apart from Hyperion was, and how angry The Terror made me as one of the few books I've never finished. I stubbornly read all of the Hyperion and Olympos series books and I don't really know how or why I did that.
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Apr 29, 2022 00:54
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Captain Hygiene posted:There might be a bit of a wink, but there's definitely people doing a lot of it (unfortunately I actually do a lot of these as audiobooks due to insomnia, so I'll occasionally zone out to miss some specific details, and it's much tougher to go back and check for a specific detail in the text) Actually it came back to me. Might be a little off but it's essentially they see the guys in disguise, But something happens and our heroes need to be rescued...and they see what they think are some of the disguised dudes. So when they wake up after passing out and go to thank the disguised dudes for saving them, they're like "we didn't do it, you were already at this village before we got back here." So there's a "maybe they do exist!" kind of thing.
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Apr 29, 2022 01:06
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Reviving this dead thread 'cuz I'm reading something so staggeringly, weirdly bad it's like a car crash: Triptych by Karin Slaughter. I was looking for a kinda trashy paperback to read around a pool and it was what I grabbed. I'm like two thirds of the way in and the ~big twist~ has finally been revealed, which is good, because Karin Slaughter trying to be subtle and clever was a lot like watching a pack of spider monkeys playing with power tools - weirdly enthralling but it's definitely not going to end well, and you're not going to end up being happy you stuck around to watch. But what really drags it down is the pervasive racist and classist dog whistles and weird Karenesque authorial voice. like quote:It had started with pot. There was a reason after all that Nancy Reagan told kids to just say no. That is a line in reference to a character that was convicted of raping and murdering someone as a teenager in a book published in 2016. It is wild. I'm really only even posting about it because I see there's some mid-budget current TV show being made about Will Trent, the detective from this (and presumably other?) novels. (He's not neurodivergent like the OTHER pulpy modern detectives - he has dyslexia instead of autism!!!! ugh.)
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Mar 30, 2023 20:00
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Ooh I have a terrible one: This is a classic travelogue. Only this guy is a creepy weirdo who hates his wife and love’s cheating on her. Loves talking about his weird fetishes. He gets sad at a 14 year old being in arranged marriage, then angry when she turns him down after an attempt at “seduction” masturbating over his violent fantasies of assaulting her. Additionally he’s constantly angry at people not understanding his poo poo Japanese. It’s a piece of work and full of orientalist and horrible misogyny. No idea how it’s as acclaimed as it is unless you go in knowing it’s a portrait of a creepy weirdo.
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Mar 30, 2023 21:56
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I read Gene Wolfe, A Borrowed Man a while ago, which I thought had a fun premise: libraries have clones of authors & our hero is a mystery writer clone who is checked out to solve a murder. It's really really bad though. I've not read anything else by him, but from the way the female characters are written, I honestly it was forgotten trash pulp from the 1940s or 50s until it mentioned the internet. Like not Chandler or Hammett, but some no-name. Looking it up now, I guess Wolfe was going for that, but it didn't came across as pastiche or homage, just plain tonedeaf. Though I guess the most positive thing I can say is it's the worst book I've bothered finishing in years, as I've gotten much better about just noping out instead of being obsessive about finishing books I start.
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Mar 31, 2023 16:53
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Carthag Tuek posted:I read Gene Wolfe, A Borrowed Man a while ago, which I thought had a fun premise: libraries have clones of authors & our hero is a mystery writer clone who is checked out to solve a murder. The killer was an evil author clone, who had foolishly been checked out when a kid was writing a WWII history report.
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Mar 31, 2023 17:05
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Tunicate posted:The killer was an evil author clone, who had foolishly been checked out when a kid was writing a WWII history report. honestly when i think about it more, it doesnt even matter that hes an author clone, the mystery doesnt have anything to do with cloning or authors or libraries, its an entirely separate thing about wormhole diamonds and family squabbles lmao why maybe it was two ideas/drafts that got merged but never integrated 
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Mar 31, 2023 17:46
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Carthag Tuek posted:I read Gene Wolfe, A Borrowed Man a while ago, which I thought had a fun premise: libraries have clones of authors & our hero is a mystery writer clone who is checked out to solve a murder. Book of the New Sun is one of the best fantasy/sci-fi novels ever.
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Mar 31, 2023 18:22
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Groovelord Neato posted:Book of the New Sun is one of the best fantasy/sci-fi novels ever. Checked wikipedia, I remember I actually started reading that maybe 10 years ago but stopped after the first couple chapters because I disliked it. I can't remember exactly why any more, maybe it's just something about his authorial voice I dislike?
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Mar 31, 2023 18:38
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Possible, Wolfe is fairly unique in style.
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Mar 31, 2023 19:12
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Oh hi, thread, good to have you back. I've been continuing to amuse myself with lots of short story collections, the kind that show up on kindle unlimited because nobody's actually going to pay for them. It's always nice to find some gems mixed in, but I'm also entertained by all the terrible writing that's out there and seeing commonalities between bad authors. Horror is my favorite, one of the things I see is that a lot of these authors seem to think that having the idea of a scary thing or surprise twist is enough, you don't have to explain or justify it. I think this mostly spawns from reddit nosleep-style short horror communities, but so many of them do this. One of my current favorites is a story focused on a character who takes their dog out for a run. The dog gets away, but they can still hear its collar jingling, so they start jogging after it. Then things get weird, the whole forest trail they're on starts turning into this long, unending maze that seems to be trapping them in, but they can still hear the dog collar up ahead so they keep going and trying to figure out what's happening. But then suddenly, on the last page, someone runs up behind them and stabs them to death - it was an unmentioned serial killer who murdered the dog offscreen at the beginning and was running along holding its dog collar to lure the main character the whole time! What about that whole mysteriously changing location that was being set up as the central plot? gently caress you, it was a serial killer story all along! 
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Mar 31, 2023 19:15
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Those are my favorite Scooby Do episodes.
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Mar 31, 2023 19:40
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Captain Hygiene posted:One of my current favorites is a story focused on a character who takes their dog out for a run. The dog gets away, but they can still hear its collar jingling, so they start jogging after it. Then things get weird, the whole forest trail they're on starts turning into this long, unending maze that seems to be trapping them in, but they can still hear the dog collar up ahead so they keep going and trying to figure out what's happening. But then suddenly, on the last page, someone runs up behind them and stabs them to death - it was an unmentioned serial killer who murdered the dog offscreen at the beginning and was running along holding its dog collar to lure the main character the whole time! What about that whole mysteriously changing location that was being set up as the central plot? gently caress you, it was a serial killer story all along! i mean if the serial killer can teleport, it stands to reason they can alter the landscape as well
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Mar 31, 2023 19:53
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Captain Monkey posted:Possible, Wolfe is fairly unique in style. i dont mean to harp on this, but can you elaborate? people say that about lots of authors but im never sure what it even means
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Mar 31, 2023 19:55
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Carthag Tuek posted:i mean if the serial killer can teleport, it stands to reason they can alter the landscape as well Honestly, there might be a good story there. By someone else.
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Mar 31, 2023 20:54
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Captain Hygiene posted:Honestly, there might be a good story there. By someone else. robert aickman could probably pull it off
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Mar 31, 2023 21:20
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Carthag Tuek posted:i dont mean to harp on this, but can you elaborate? people say that about lots of authors but im never sure what it even means A lot of unreliable narrators that require the reader to pay a lot of attention to actually figure out what the story means or what's actually going on. Plus usually a first person perspective with the intended bias of the story being presented from within that framing. He's just a very difficult read and that can make him really unsatisfying if you're after something a little more pulpy like sci-fi usually is. He's not the only person to use unreliable narrators or to focus on subtext or anything he does really. But the mixture of 'weird poo poo is going on' plus 'you can't even trust the words you're reading to be accurately describing the story' makes him very hit or miss.
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Apr 1, 2023 06:42
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okay i know unreliable narration, im not 5 years old, and i did get that there was something deeper behind the story as it was presented in the opening chapters. just please dont call that unique ever again tia
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Apr 1, 2023 10:53
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I am also on Team “Gene Wolfe Was Not That Great at 1930s Noir Pastiche”. There’s one of his later books where several characters go on and on about Green Goddess salad dressing as if it was the height of culinary elegance. It is a mayonnaise dressing with about the same finesse as ranch. Now, maybe this was a failed attempt at pointing out how we never know which thing people in the future will pick up on as a touchstone from the past, but I think the dude just liked Green Goddess dressing. The Book of the New Sun is exceptional, though. I think a lot of his other work that isn’t related to that universe gets unwonted luster from that reflected glory.
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Apr 1, 2023 13:31
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I've never gotten on with his prose and I don't think it's that he is just too darn smart and complicated for me. I just don't enjoy how he puts sentences together. And it's definitely not that he's bad, just not my thing. I keep trying Book of the New Sun, maybe one day it'll click.
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Apr 1, 2023 13:49
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i like thisAlbieQuirky posted:unwonted luster from that reflected glory thats how you post about books right there in the moonlight shade, keyboard keys shading on the soft white skin where the moon isnt already shinging aka lustless typin' Carthag Tuek has a new favorite as of 16:07 on Apr 1, 2023 |
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Apr 1, 2023 16:04
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AlbieQuirky posted:The Book of the New Sun is exceptional, though. I think a lot of his other work that isn’t related to that universe gets unwonted luster from that reflected glory. I think a lot of authors have one absolute banger and the rest are fairly middling, and the window shifts depending on how hard their best book bangs. I read Starless Sea for book club and it was terrible. Erin Morgenstern can't write a cohesive plot, which is a shame because the setting was neat.
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Apr 1, 2023 18:00
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Carthag Tuek posted:I read Eifelheim by Michael Flynn some time ago, which was overall pretty good. One thing annoyed me though, which was the frame story (in present time) was very bad compared to the main story (in the middle ages). Just garbage writing with a lovely unlikable protagonist. Turns out the frame story was published in 1986 and the rest of the book was published in 2006 lol. I would honestly have preferred if the frame was left out entirely. It's been a few years but it's rushing back to me: the frame was two annoying hyper-specialized academics working on two different things that both related to the central mystery, which they'd have figured out almost immediately if they weren't both the kind of person who defines a conversation as an irritating noise that happens between getting to talk
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Apr 1, 2023 21:51
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Carthag Tuek posted:okay i know unreliable narration, im not 5 years old, and i did get that there was something deeper behind the story as it was presented in the opening chapters. idk, talking about not liking an author typically called unique and responding to an explanation of why - especially within the genre - he's considered to be something of a unique author with some weird whiny nonsense seems kinda 5 years old to me, fyi. it's ok that you don't like it, he's not my favorite author either. if you're gonna whine at someone for answering your questions, maybe just google them next time, tia
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Apr 2, 2023 00:00
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Captain Monkey posted:idk, talking about not liking an author typically called unique and responding to an explanation of why - especially within the genre - he's considered to be something of a unique author with some weird whiny nonsense seems kinda 5 years old to me, fyi. sorry, i came in swinging there a bit lol. i just meant those authorial traits are a bit of the opposite of unique in my experience A HUNGRY MOUTH posted:It's been a few years but it's rushing back to me: the frame was two annoying hyper-specialized academics working on two different things that both related to the central mystery, which they'd have figured out almost immediately if they weren't both the kind of person who defines a conversation as an irritating noise that happens between getting to talk wow that was a while ago. yeah i remember thinking soemthing like "come on! at least just mention what youre working on in passing, ffs you live together"
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Apr 2, 2023 00:21
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