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MisterBear posted:Mostly still processing and working out which parts are real (if any) - who/what exactly is Neith and if she’s not wholly real then what exactly was being investigated by the real investigator. Was Neith just a layer of Hunter (is Hunter real?). Did the system really originate as it did in the Artist’s story? The list goes on… Neith is not 'real'. Hunter is real, and not only is she real, she isn't even dead. There was no 'real investigator'. There was no death in custody. Almost the entire book takes place inside Hunter's head - the book is showing us the interrogation Hunter is undergoing. Neith's perspective is the counter-narrative inserted into Hunter's mind by The Perfumed Smith to break Hunter's narrative blockade. Hunter subverted the counter-narrative, turned it to her side, and used it to transmit the keys which can allow someone to make changes to the System - because Neith herself was created by the System in response to Smith's requirements, like a very deeply faked person, so she is also a direct conduit to transmit the keys to the System. By the end of the novel, Hunter appears to be willing to incorporate Neith into herself along with the other narratives that made up her own blockade because she found enough sympathetic in Neith to keep her around - and Neith did act against the System in the end. The System was in part Hunter's own creation, her and Smith - the part about the Artist's story does seem to show the actual origin of the System. After they turned one of their colleagues into Lonnrot through invasive neurosurgery, Hunter regretted her work and turned her back on Firespine, the Fire Judges, and the System. Diana Hunter does appear to be the Artist's daughter, and the conversation between Hunter and The Perfumed Smith implies that Smith is in fact the one we know from the Artist segments as Colson, her ex-husband, who took a much greater interest in security after the firebombing. The coda from the titular Gnomon itself at the very end of the book implies that Gnomon is also real, and that the book and indeed the entire story in the novel is actually a gambit by Gnomon to escape the end of its universe and evert into our own, creating a tiny version of itself in the reader - one that the reader can draw on, if they so desire, to use as a source of strength in the face of annihilation of identity and self in the sort of situations the novel's characters found themselves in. Kesper North fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Jul 1, 2023 |
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Jul 1, 2023 02:12
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unattended spaghetti posted:Man, Silverberg. There’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time. I actually haven't read them yet. But I was advised to watch out for Dying Inside, Hawksbill Station, Nightwings, and The Book of Skulls. He's got tons of books so I'm sure there are more.
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Jul 1, 2023 04:20
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From the discussion a couple pages back, PARADISE-1 is currently a quid on Amazon UK. (May be on offer on other Amazon global stores)
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Jul 1, 2023 10:26
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unattended spaghetti posted:Man, Silverberg. There’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time. Book of skulls is very dated and ultimately the characters are hard to care about but it was justified in being nominated for everything and a big name book for him. I enjoyed the majipoor fantasy novel series but haven't read one in at least 20 years so YMMV. Nightwings and Thorns were both worth a read too. Like most of the original grand masters of sci-fi the work hasn't necessarily aged well as it reflects the society and time it was written in, not the sikverberg was as overtly creepy on the page as some of his contemporaries
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Jul 1, 2023 14:22
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Silverberg wrote industrial amounts of porn on the QT so maybe that helped him get it out of his system. I wasn't impressed by the World Inside, and I read it at an age where I was embarassingly impressionable. Never sought more of him.
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Jul 1, 2023 14:36
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smackfu posted:Ugh, Upgrade didn’t work for me. Who writes another version of Limitless in 2022? In Upgrade, I was hoping for some kind of mental degradation like in Flowers for Algernon.
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Jul 1, 2023 16:35
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Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XD75HGV/ The City We Became (Great Cities #1) by NK Jemisin - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MFKQDJM/ The Way of Shadows (Night Angel #1) by Brent Weeks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E0V112/
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Jul 1, 2023 16:42
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Kuiperdolin posted:Silverberg wrote industrial amounts of porn on the QT so maybe that helped him get it out of his system. He did? Reference?
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Jul 1, 2023 16:43
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Thanks all for the recommendations. My girlfriend just got me watching the tv version of The Magicians, which I find incredibly cheesy and kinda tedious but still sorta entertaining, and I’m revisiting the books to refresh myself because there was lots in the show I had either forgotten or had been reconfigured for TV and now I’m intent on finishing them, but as soon as I do I’m moving onto one of those Silverbergs, so the recs are appreciated a bunch. Now that I’m reading The Magicians again, I can’t help absolutely hating every character in it, which I think is by design but this particular subset of humanity is painful to observe as written. Sheesh.
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Jul 1, 2023 16:47
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sebmojo posted:He did? Reference? http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/interview-robert-silverberg/ ctrl+f "erotica" Ninja: writing quickie porn, westerns, gothics, etc., to cover your rent was a pretty standard thing for writers to do for money, especially since in the late 50s the sf market slumped. Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jul 1, 2023 |
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Jul 1, 2023 16:52
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Safety Biscuits posted:http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/interview-robert-silverberg/ Ok wow
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Jul 1, 2023 16:58
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Haha good for him TBH, get paid. Silverberg freely admits he spent years and years making bank writing absolute garbage.
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Jul 1, 2023 17:04
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BRB changing my username to Beatnik Wanton.
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Jul 1, 2023 17:10
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If you look around that database, other people who wrote smut for that series are Donald Westlake, EdMcBain, Lawrence Block etc.
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Jul 1, 2023 17:18
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I call Expense Account Sinner. Yeah, that looks like around 158 books right there, with imprints ranging from Sundown Reader to Evening Reader
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Jul 1, 2023 17:23
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Runcible Cat posted:BRB changing my username to Beatnik Wanton. "reefer brawls"
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Jul 1, 2023 17:58
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Alternate Wife
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Jul 1, 2023 18:35
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I finally got around to reading Blindsight and hated almost every aspect of it, sorry to say. The vampire never stopped making me cringe and the sheer density of pseudo-profound technobabble in the dialogue and main character's thoughts was like nails on chalkboard. Honestly it made me pine for Alastair Reynolds' massive infodump monologues. On the flipside, I read both Dogs of War books a while ago and like the trans-nonhumanist aspects of it. The first one has a somewhat underwhelmingly generic military thriller plotline but the character development makes up for it.
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Jul 1, 2023 19:13
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eXXon posted:I finally got around to reading Blindsight and hated almost every aspect of it, sorry to say. The vampire never stopped making me cringe and the sheer density of pseudo-profound technobabble in the dialogue and main character's thoughts was like nails on chalkboard. Honestly it made me pine for Alastair Reynolds' massive infodump monologues. The Tchaikovsky ones?
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Jul 1, 2023 19:17
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genericnick posted:The Tchaikovsky ones? Yeah. Bees is cool.
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Jul 1, 2023 19:18
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eXXon posted:I finally got around to reading Blindsight and hated almost every aspect of it, sorry to say. The vampire never stopped making me cringe and the sheer density of pseudo-profound technobabble in the dialogue and main character's thoughts was like nails on chalkboard. Honestly it made me pine for Alastair Reynolds' massive infodump monologues.
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Jul 1, 2023 20:09
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Megazver posted:If you look around that database, other people who wrote smut for that series are Donald Westlake, EdMcBain, Lawrence Block etc. Okay, now we need Leng and General Battuta to point us at their "pays the mortgage" porn books.
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Jul 1, 2023 20:38
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unattended spaghetti posted:Man, Silverberg. There’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time.
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Jul 1, 2023 20:58
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The classic "my dad wrote porn" article for those who haven't seen it (I guess it got expanded to a book at some point, and I thought I read this on a different site so it might not be the exact same excerpt) - https://www.menshealth.com/trending-news/a19519427/dads-secret-porn-author/
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Jul 1, 2023 21:13
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My Dad Wrote A Porno is a decently funny podcast.
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Jul 1, 2023 22:13
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Tars Tarkas posted:The classic "my dad wrote porn" article for those who haven't seen it (I guess it got expanded to a book at some point, and I thought I read this on a different site so it might not be the exact same excerpt) - https://www.menshealth.com/trending-news/a19519427/dads-secret-porn-author/ I remember reading that and being surprised the writer didn't find out until after his father's death, because Andrew Offutt being a porn author was a pretty open secret when he was alive.
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Jul 1, 2023 22:22
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Selachian posted:I remember reading that and being surprised the writer didn't find out until after his father's death, because Andrew Offutt being a porn author was a pretty open secret when he was alive. Maybe I'm in the minority here but if I had even the vaguest inkling that my dad wrote industrial quantities of smut for a living then I'd go to great lengths to flush that particular piece of information out of my brain, so I can't really fault the guy for claiming not to have known.
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Jul 1, 2023 23:21
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I'd start every conversation with "hey, Dad! How's the smut?"
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Jul 1, 2023 23:59
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Leng posted:Next up: I can either try and give RF Kuang another chance with The Burning God because Yellowface has like 50293841 people ahead of me on the reserves, A Day of Fallen Night, or maybe it'd be an experience to read The First Binding without having read The Name of the Wind. Ooooorrr I could try In the Shadow of Lightning which might be nice since I did like Powdermage even if I wasn't a fan of how Vlora and Ka-Poel were handled. Oooooooor I could go to the library and pick up my copy of The Grace of Kings that just came in. Hmmmmn. I ended up starting on In the Shadow of Lightning. Read six chapters before dinner and it's been kind of eh. The opening isn't as strong as Promise of Blood and the constant use of "glass_____" or "____glass" got grating fast. We get female POVs though, and so far those are much improved! But every time a battle-hardened veteran shouts "glassdamn" or "piss and poo poo" as a swear (which was often) made me eyeroll so I read the third Sanderson secret project instead and withak posted:Baru obviously. Baru was most definitely the correct answer and I shall be rectifying my error in judgment today.
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Jul 2, 2023 00:37
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Leng posted:I ended up starting on In the Shadow of Lightning. Read six chapters before dinner and it's been kind of eh. The opening isn't as strong as Promise of Blood and the constant use of "glass_____" or "____glass" got grating fast. We get female POVs though, and so far those are much improved! But every time a battle-hardened veteran shouts "glassdamn" or "piss and poo poo" as a swear (which was often) made me eyeroll so I read the third Sanderson secret project instead and So In the Shadow of Lightning the battle-hardened veterans curse like Yosemite Sam? Well, that's a... choice. Just starting in on Dust, the first book in Ari Marmell's Obelisks series. Before we even leave space we get racism that makes me want to apologize to the main character on behalf of other white people.
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Jul 2, 2023 01:08
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I feel like fake swearing in books is almost always a bad choice. Either the cadence is off so it doesn't sound like an expletive, the meaning is off so it doesn't actually sound like it's actual swearing, or it's a frak/frell/frag/etc type thing that mostly draws attention to the fact that you're not actually swearing. The end result is almost always something like Brandon Sanderson tries to write a grizzed old foul-mouthed veteran soldier, but the fact that the soldier's cursing is limited to variations on "storming" means that at best he sounds like Yosemite Sam and at worst like Ned Flanders getting all diddly ding dong upset.
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Jul 2, 2023 03:53
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Khizan posted:I feel like fake swearing in books is almost always a bad choice. Either the cadence is off so it doesn't sound like an expletive, the meaning is off so it doesn't actually sound like it's actual swearing, or it's a frak/frell/frag/etc type thing that mostly draws attention to the fact that you're not actually swearing. Sanderson actually uses "real" swears in Mistborn...which doesn't really work, because "drat" and "hell" imply particular religious concepts that the setting doesn't really seem to have.
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Jul 2, 2023 03:59
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Incidentally, I remember reading that while the Deadwood production did do a lot of historical research about era-appropriate swearing, they dumped it in favor of modern parlance because they felt the original would be incomprehensible to a modern audience, and definitely not have the same bite.
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Jul 2, 2023 04:00
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Fake swearing is like trying to make fetch happen.
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Jul 2, 2023 04:03
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Incidentally, I remember reading that while the Deadwood production did do a lot of historical research about era-appropriate swearing, they dumped it in favor of modern parlance because they felt the original would be incomprehensible to a modern audience, and definitely not have the same bite. iirc they shot some scenes with period-appropriate profanity and showed it to test audiences and the audiences thought it was hilarious, which is what prompted them to use modern profanity.
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Jul 2, 2023 04:08
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I think there was a quote from someone involved who said that the authentic swearing sounded to everyone like Yosemite Sam.
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Jul 2, 2023 04:11
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Khizan posted:I feel like fake swearing in books is almost always a bad choice. Either the cadence is off so it doesn't sound like an expletive, the meaning is off so it doesn't actually sound like it's actual swearing, or it's a frak/frell/frag/etc type thing that mostly draws attention to the fact that you're not actually swearing. I’m so sick of fantasy characters going “Saints!” when they’re upset. Becky Chambers “Stars!” is kinda grating also.
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Jul 2, 2023 04:11
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pseudorandom name posted:iirc they shot some scenes with period-appropriate profanity and showed it to test audiences and the audiences thought it was hilarious, which is what prompted them to use modern profanity. I would love to see those scenes. 
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Jul 2, 2023 04:12
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Khizan posted:I feel like fake swearing in books is almost always a bad choice. Either the cadence is off so it doesn't sound like an expletive, the meaning is off so it doesn't actually sound like it's actual swearing, or it's a frak/frell/frag/etc type thing that mostly draws attention to the fact that you're not actually swearing. I thought "frak" worked pretty well in BSG because you could actually conjugate it like "gently caress." "Were you frakkin' her?" It worked a lot better than "felgercarb" "storming" or "karabast."
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Jul 2, 2023 04:13
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The Divide, a 2 book series by J.S. Dewes that I am currently enjoying, keeps using "Void!"
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Jul 2, 2023 04:14
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