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Carthag Tuek posted:re things that put you off books before you even read them: Similarly, if a book has something like a mood-setting in-universe poem or song verse at the start of its chapters, I will absolutely skip over it 100% of the time.
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Jun 23, 2023 20:02
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An excerpt from the Encyclopedia Galactica, though... Hell yeah
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Jun 23, 2023 20:08
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Carthag Tuek posted:where is that parody, its like "N.N. woke to the buzzing of his clever awakening-machine, and rose from his sleeping pad. Soon, he would have to board the air-car to travel at subsonic speeds to the other end of the continent — a trip that only took 5 hours, quite an invention indeed. Presently he arrived and as soon as a ground-car arrived on its smooth metal tracks, which had beeen some improvement over the primitive rubber wheels the primitives had used previously, he took his indicated seat on the rich corinthian leather. At his destination, he reached out to indicate to the chauffeur" etc Is it David Weber Orders a Pizza
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Jun 23, 2023 20:10
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General Battuta posted:Is it David Weber Orders a Pizza no, but at the end it links to the one i was thinking of so thx lol: quote:If all stories were written like science fiction stories
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Jun 23, 2023 20:13
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Lol, that's pretty great. I didn't recognize it from the description, but I do remember reading it at some point now.
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Jun 23, 2023 20:28
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this is the most fantastical part: "When they arrived at the San Francisco airport, agents of the airline company helped them out of their seats and retrieved their luggage, checking the numeric tags to ensure that they were given to the right people." Roger paid for some good loving tickets if they got him his luggage for him.
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Jun 23, 2023 20:58
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Arivia posted:Roger paid for some good loving tickets if they got him his luggage for him. He picked the earliest flight instead of the cheapest, he's rich
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Jun 23, 2023 21:12
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Roger is played by Cary Grant, and Jane is played by some young starlet
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Jun 23, 2023 22:08
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wheatpuppy posted:I read a book recently that had a "cast list" at the beginning, sorted into groups. One of the groups was "deceased people" and it included the name of a character who was alive at the start of the book and whose death 2/3rds in was clearly meant to be a shock to the reader. Still haven't figured that one out. Did they assume nobody reads those so it's ok to post spoilers? Was it originally meant to go in the end of the book and got moved? Is this you mocking Shakespeare publications, or am I not getting the joke? Cuz I sure as heck remember reading Hamlet in HS and trying to figure out why out of cast of a few dozen people, two nobodies are listed under "survivors", and thinking "is it some sort of cool group"?
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Jun 24, 2023 01:53
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Serephina posted:Is this you mocking Shakespeare publications, or am I not getting the joke? Cuz I sure as heck remember reading Hamlet in HS and trying to figure out why out of cast of a few dozen people, two nobodies are listed under "survivors", and thinking "is it some sort of cool group"? I wasn't referring to Shakespeare or any actual play where a cast list would make sense. It was just a "paranormal/urban fantasy" novel that, for some reason, opened with a long list of every named character. They were listed out like: quote:Werewolves wheatpuppy has a new favorite as of 05:07 on Jun 24, 2023 |
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Jun 24, 2023 04:22
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every book i write is like [cool] - Ol' Billy Shakespeare [not cool] - Dad, can't see so good
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Jun 24, 2023 05:01
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Carthag Tuek posted:Ann had changed into her travelling outfit, which consisted of a light shirt in polycarbon-derived artifical fabric, which showed off her pert figure, without genetic enhancements, and dark blue pants made of textiles. Her attractive brown hair was uncovered. […] A game girl, and intelligent as well! lmao the author of this knows how to twist the knife
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Jun 24, 2023 08:28
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A ton of the fun of fantasy/sci-fi settings is the little touches of how people use technology/magic in their everyday lives, is the thing. But I think it's just one of those things where good writers do it well, and use it to make points of what the world is like, what's similar and different, and show differences between people and cultures within the setting that say something about them. And the hack writers imitate that without understanding why or having any actual ideas about it, and so it stands out and grates.
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Jun 24, 2023 08:43
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GhastlyBizness posted:lmao the author of this knows how to twist the knife And how! :pose for camera:
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Jun 24, 2023 08:57
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Ghost Leviathan posted:A ton of the fun of fantasy/sci-fi settings is the little touches of how people use technology/magic in their everyday lives, is the thing. But I think it's just one of those things where good writers do it well, and use it to make points of what the world is like, what's similar and different, and show differences between people and cultures within the setting that say something about them. It's a show vs tell thing. Good writers know how to deliver information/exposition in a creative way while also propelling the story. A lot of fantasy/scifi writers seem more interested in worldbuilding than they do making a story work. It's all about the care and craft, some writers are just lazy artists who don't care about craft in the least. Recently I read two Lovecraftian books, 14 by Peter Cline and The Fisherman by John Langan. Both were very similar, but what made the latter better than the former was its use of metaphor. 14's metaphors were merely functional, just to get the idea across, while Fisherman's metaphors were emotive and evocative and helped to elevate the story or at least contribute to the dispositions of the characters. Since I am as lazy as the people I criticize, I will not be including passages of either book to support my point. Eat my rear end.. 14 wasn't bad per se, although it had enough pop culture references to make it feel like Ready Player One.
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Jun 24, 2023 10:59
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On "As you know" dialog I liked how Star Trek DS9 handled it - it was Jadzia bringing Worf up to speed on an adventure that the audience had already seen, and it was just played as her having fun gossiping about Quark's Klingon Ex-Wife. Like "And then, you won't believe what happened next, it was amazing..."
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Jun 24, 2023 11:44
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Captain Monkey posted:Come on down to the terrible books thread if you don't mind the quality dip involved. thanks for the invite, i'll pop on in!
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Jun 24, 2023 11:49
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Carthag Tuek posted:where is that parody, its like "N.N. woke to the buzzing of his clever awakening-machine, and rose from his sleeping pad. Soon, he would have to board the air-car to travel at subsonic speeds to the other end of the continent — a trip that only took 5 hours, quite an invention indeed. Presently he arrived and as soon as a ground-car arrived on its smooth metal tracks, which had beeen some improvement over the primitive rubber wheels the primitives had used previously, he took his indicated seat on the rich corinthian leather. At his destination, he reached out to indicate to the chauffeur" etc One of my favourite books has one of those sections at the start that has a guy catching a London to Houston flight, plugging his laptop in to charge and get connectivity, and he books a car for when he lands. Given it was written in the mid sixties, I've always found it pretty impressive.
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Jun 24, 2023 14:52
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Gideon the Ninth has vocab, pronunciation guides, and dramatis personae lists. I didn't read them until I finished the book, though, because I didn't see a point. Then I think the next one Muir put it all at the end, which was a better choice. A series I love, Alien Chronicles (The Golden One, The Crimson Claw, and The Crystal Eye) had a bit of information about the different aliens in the book that I found useful. I think like anything else, errata like that is about how it's used. I have seen it done poorly, and I have seen it used to great effect! The footnotes in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are pretty fun, for instance.
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Jun 24, 2023 19:07
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All the Tiffany Aching books after the first have a glossary of the Scottish-based slang the Feegles use, just to catch you up. They're written in-universe from the perspective of one of the characters, too.
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Jun 24, 2023 19:26
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don longjohns posted:The footnotes in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are pretty fun, for instance. I've only "read" that one in audio form. I eventually grew to love it on my second try, but man, that footnote-centric format is really not well-suited to the audio medium. You get used to it, but it really takes you out of the story much more than the regular print version. Actually, I do a ton of audiobook listening, and there are quite a few particular things I find entertaining but aggravating in how they translate from print to narration. Things like pages of code numbers or paragraphs of nonsense words spoken by an insane character are fine in a book because you can just scan by in a couple seconds to get the gist of what the author wanted, but they come across as annoying when it's a narrator reading everything out verbatim. Similarly, techier stories that involve lots of emails or web citations get old really fast when the narrator is reading out the email details and time stamps every time, or reading out "h t t p colon forward slash forward slash w w w dot website address dot com forward slash subdirectory name" for every web source. I'm sure it's because a subset of readers will complain if you don't have everything exactly verbatim from the print release, but I'd much rather have a thoughtful edit for the audio version. Captain Hygiene has a new favorite as of 20:08 on Jun 24, 2023 |
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Jun 24, 2023 19:46
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Dabir posted:All the Tiffany Aching books after the first have a glossary of the Scottish-based slang the Feegles use, just to catch you up. They're written in-universe from the perspective of one of the characters, too. I enjoy that "burned bannock" is a food  And also their equivalent of a bard/skald is named after william mcgonagall.
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Jun 24, 2023 19:48
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Captain Hygiene posted:I've only "read" that one in audio form. I eventually grew to love it on my second try, but man, that footnote-centric format is really not well-suited to the audio medium. You get used to it, but it really takes you out of the story much more than the regular print version. Reminds me of the bit in Disco Elysium where several voice lines quote the case number in full. I ain't skipping that. I ain't skipping anything my best friend Kim wants to say.
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Jun 24, 2023 20:05
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don longjohns posted:How dare you besmirch Ursula K. Le Guin and the Earthsea series I think the collected edition of Earthsea had a foreword from LeGuin in which she confesses to making up a lot of the early details and only later having to stitch it all into a complete world and map.
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Jun 24, 2023 23:53
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Dabir posted:All the Tiffany Aching books after the first have a glossary of the Scottish-based slang the Feegles use, just to catch you up. They're written in-universe from the perspective of one of the characters, too. That kinda thing works when it's extra angles for jokes, too. Adds texture and thus room for flavour, like ruffled chips.
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Jun 25, 2023 00:36
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nonathlon posted:I think the collected edition of Earthsea had a foreword from LeGuin in which she confesses to making up a lot of the early details and only later having to stitch it all into a complete world and map. I love her so much 😭
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Jun 25, 2023 03:27
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Surely she was making up all the details. It's fiction
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Jun 25, 2023 08:05
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don longjohns posted:The footnotes in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are pretty fun, for instance. I recently re-read the book and the footnotes were much less charming the second time. The long ones with "here is a half-page anecdote about a magical incident that happened in 1678" in particular.
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Jun 25, 2023 10:11
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don longjohns posted:I love her so much 😭 The foreword was quite interesting. She confesses that she didn't really want to write a children's book, didn't really have a plan going in, just some vague ideas and a desire not to talk down to children. Really, she craps all over most other fantasy authors.
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Jun 25, 2023 10:45
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nonathlon posted:The foreword was quite interesting. She confesses that she didn't really want to write a children's book, didn't really have a plan going in, just some vague ideas and a desire not to talk down to children. Really, she craps all over most other fantasy authors. Is that the same one where she also admits to knowing jack-poo poo about sailing?
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Jun 25, 2023 14:00
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The really funny thing is that the guy who wrote the Aubrey-Maturin novels didn't know how to sail either
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Jun 25, 2023 17:01
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Usually chapters opening with some non-plot-related gubbins would piss me off, but when I read the five Vance Demon Princes books they turned out to be the stuff I enjoyed most, that Jack Vance and his worldbuilding 
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Jun 25, 2023 21:56
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nonathlon posted:* SF novels set in the far future, featuring Space Russia at war with Space America, characters in same novel being obsessed with very specific period in history, i.e. modern day USA, talking about the music or namedropping politicians and celebrities. Because I'm always thinking about the Dark Ages and Aethelraed The Unready. The best example is Rama II basically going, "Oh all those space colonies mentioned in the first book? They are no longer a thing and everybody just decided to move back to Earth." It couldn't be more blatant that the co-author needed the crutch of relying on the stereotypes of different nations and couldn't be bothered to adjust his writing to the setting.
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Jun 25, 2023 22:33
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Stuporstar posted:Please tell me this is not hyperbole River God is set in ancient egypt and really feels like two books in one. There's a big even halfway through and the characters need to leg it out of Egypt and the second half of the book is wandering and having adventures in Africa. I love it. The sequel, seventh scroll, is set in the 1980's and is about a generic wilbur smith manly man doing an adventure to find a tomb that the characters in book one made. It's meh. Nothing super terrible, but not amazing. Some twenty odd years later, the next book in the series, Warlock, turns up and genuinely made me wonder if smith had had a stroke or joined a cult. The main character and narrator from River God, a eunuch slave named Taita had a tragic romance with the female main character, Lostris. She goes on to become queen and has a tragic romance with a guy named Tanus, Taita's protégé. It's all very sad in a noble sacrifice kind of way. It made me cry the first time I read it. Warlock throws all that away because Taita has gone off to learn true magic, grows his penis back, has a magic duel with an evil wizard complete with shooting magic beams from their dongs at each other (the bad wizard looses because he climaxes) and discovers Lostris has been reincarnated and is now a totally hot sixteen year old who is super into ancient old wizard junk and this is the point where I literally threw the book out the window.
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Jun 25, 2023 23:11
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King Doom posted:River God is set in ancient egypt and really feels like two books in one. There's a big even halfway through and the characters need to leg it out of Egypt and the second half of the book is wandering and having adventures in Africa. I love it. The only way this could be funnier if it turned out Lostris reincarnated not into a sixteen-year-old girl, but a sixteen-year-old horse who immediately died of old age after somehow confessing her love for sorcerer dong. Poor old Lostris, thought of mage dick and died.
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Jun 25, 2023 23:16
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King Doom posted:River God is set in ancient egypt and really feels like two books in one. There's a big even halfway through and the characters need to leg it out of Egypt and the second half of the book is wandering and having adventures in Africa. I love it. OMG  (the first one sounds right up my alley tbh) Screaming Idiot posted:The only way this could be funnier if it turned out Lostris reincarnated not into a sixteen-year-old girl, but a sixteen-year-old horse who immediately died of old age after somehow confessing her love for sorcerer dong. lmao
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Jun 26, 2023 00:17
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It was indeed Warlock that I started reading, good to know that my sensors for detecting when someone's going to be weird about a sixteen year old are accurate. My personal favorite vaguely ancient Egypt-related fantasy novel is Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates, which is about a time-travel tourist trip to 1800's London that goes wrong and then they're fighting evil sorcerer clowns who have to wear stilts because sorcery is moon magic so touching the earth hurts them. Eventually there's a big showdown in Egypt with the head sorcerer guy, who has to live in a giant sphere so he doesn't go flying off into space, because he's so moon-aligned that he's gravitationally bound to the Moon but not to Earth. You can tell Tim Powers has a thing for Romantic poets, but as male genre fiction author hyperfixations go, it's not a fetish, so he's already ahead of the curve.
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Jun 26, 2023 00:56
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 Longarm is sent in to texas to investigate the murder of a Cattle rancher. Of course he can't let a little thing like making his train get in the way of some action, and that's when I realized how relentlessly horny this book is. when he sleeps with a waitress who just follows him around, because he has that effect on women. Full of explicit sex. Anyway, the main plot is that there's a cabal of european business men trying to take over the texas cattle industry. Jesse's father discoevred some of their shadier dealings, and they killed him for it. they're also led. by a gay frenchman. But Jesse, the daughter of the rancher, and her ninja sidekick Ki (who spun off into their own series) are there to help Longarm and put a stop to the shenanigans. Jesse is also there is to sleep with Longarm a few times as well. Now the book is mostly pulpy fun, but does have some iffystuff. The cabal thing is pretty alex jonesy. It's revealed the frenchman is gay when he doesn't sexually assault our heroine. and she insults him for it.  Lots of slurs thrown at her ninja sidekick, though all by villains, and our cowboy hero doesn't take kindly to people calling him "chinaman". There's also a problematic fight between Ki and a cherokee assassin.At one point longarm and Jesse are captured by the frenchman and just get down while waiting to be rescued by the ninja. The ninja also hooks up with some lady, and while he also loves Jesse, his bushido code will not let him act on it. This book is very much a post shogun novel, and has a whole being trained by a samurai backstory for our ninja protagonist--I know, and it's kind of handwaved that he also secretly trains as a ninja while being trained by a samurai. The book isn't written by a scholar by any means, but whoever wrote it certainly at least read shogun and watched a bunch of kurosawa movies. That said it's not really as offensive as an early 80s pulp western could be. It's ambiguous (at least in this book) as to whether Longarm was confederate or union, but he doesn't like that the European business men are also slave trafficking. There's also a pretty progressive take on Japan and it's conqiering of Okinawa, though it's probably a bit of lingering ww2 resentment and 80s fear of the japanese economic menace. Jesse and him don't end up together, as she's got her father's little black book of shady european business men to take down before settling down as a proper woman. I would probably check out some other books in either series as even this double length adventure is under 300 pages, and it's kind of a breeze. It's definitely inspired by the Charles Bronson/Toshiro Mifune joint Red Son. On the one hand it's less offensive than that flick, on the other this book doesn't have the Mifune Bronson bromance to carry it either. I don't hate it, but I really wish it was better. Maybe some of the other books are. Between the Longarm and Lonestar series there are hundreds of books, and they were both pumped out by house writers under a pseudonym. So while maybe skip this one, pick up another if incredibly horny cowboys and ninjas sounds like a good time.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:04
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Tim Powers is pretty great in general. The writers of the first Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movie had the idea to adapt On Stranger Tides early in their production, but went in another direction until they did it in the fourth movie, although not well. It also inspired the Monkey Island games. The main antagonist is a complete incel, despite the fact that it was written in 1987 way before that became an organized thing.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:05
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Djeser posted:My personal favorite vaguely ancient Egypt-related fantasy novel is Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates, which is about a time-travel tourist trip to 1800's London that goes wrong and then they're fighting evil sorcerer clowns who have to wear stilts because sorcery is moon magic so touching the earth hurts them. Eventually there's a big showdown in Egypt with the head sorcerer guy, who has to live in a giant sphere so he doesn't go flying off into space, because he's so moon-aligned that he's gravitationally bound to the Moon but not to Earth. I read that one a year or two back and enjoyed it, man does it get weird though. Maybe it's just me, but Tim Powers feels weirdly unknown. I only knew about him because On Stranger Tides because it helped inspire other pirate stuff I like, and I don't think I'd heard of Anubis Gate before am offhand mention here.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:19
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