PYF terrible book: Freud molesting a thesaurus.

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Lemniscate Blue: Apr 21, 2006; Here we go again.

Kchama posted:

The entire point of the book originally was to connect the original Ender’s Game short story to the Speaker of the Dead, which were originally unrelated stories.

Also, the kids become bloggers thing is amazing because somehow world leaders listened to these two idiot kids because they knew how to use sockpuppets.

It's very "early dream of the Information Superhighway", in a way. I don't think Card was on ARPAnet the way a lot of future SF writers of the era were but I definitely get the feeling he was super impressed with what he heard about it from people who were.

# ? Jul 12, 2023 14:13

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# ? May 21, 2024 07:47

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

yeah i don't fault the Kids Become President By Posting Good part of the story. the novel is from 1985 and the internet (the WWW wouldn't even be invented for another eight years!) was something radically different back then. you can't fairly judge its depiction of the internet against what it turned into over the next forty years.

compare it to the depiction of cyberspace in gibson's novels. when writing neuromancer he had never used the internet, and he just wrote what he imagined it could be in the future. after the book was published, he had all kinds of nerds coming up to him at sf conventions telling him that it was a cute idea but you'd never be able to transmit full-color images over the internet because there couldn't possibly be enough bandwidth, and poo poo like that.

gibson's idea was broadly correct. card's guess was not, but it was if anything more plausible, since the internet community at the time was much smaller, broadly more intellectual, and was yet to be crammed full of rent-seekers. oh well

Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 17:53 on Jul 12, 2023

# ? Jul 12, 2023 17:51

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

I�m pretty sure they only become president in the later books. Though I guess technically Speaker of the Dead came first, but I don�t think they�re president in it. It�s still pretty absurd even in the context of the book because while he seems to have a good idea what blogs would be, he somehow pictured them as �everyone in the world will hang on the word of bloggers� which doesn�t even happen for big-time newspapers or TV stars.

There�s a reason why actors or journalists aren�t the most common profession for president. Also I will say: It was actually full of rent-seekers even then.

Also in silly stuff, Graff surviving his court martial because he convinced a judge that the prosecution had to prove that Ender would have never done any of his crimes without Graff and Mazer�s training. Which is silly to begin with, but his first murder was before he received any training�

Kchama has a new favorite as of 18:41 on Jul 12, 2023

# ? Jul 12, 2023 18:06

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Kchama posted:

For A, yes that is what he's been told, but he starts to notice that things aren't lining up for that in the lead-up to the final battle.

And B) Never made sense as that is exactly what he was training to do. It's why he had the Doctor Devices, to wipe out the 'Buggers'. He even brings this up about using them on the homeworld before the final battle because it is what he was planning to do. Mazer tells him to think hard before deciding to do it because 'the Buggers never targetted civilians, which sure doesn't match up with the Scouring of China convincing everyone that the Buggers will kill them ALL. (I know in sequel books he lays out that the 40 million they killed and the agriculture they wiped out were somehow only military, but uhh...) He could have just decided to fail there, in fact, he contemplated it, but he decided to fail by winning too hard I guess. Which is apparently what Mazer and Graff were counting on, I guess.

So I pulled out a copy of the book to reread that chapter, and yeah, I'm not seeing it. Going into and during the final battle he appears to be 100% convinced -- based both on his interactions with others and the narration of his mental state -- that this is still a simulation, the "final exam" of his training:

quote:

The simulator field cleared. Ender waited for the game to appear. What will happen if I pass the test today?

Is there another school? Another year or two of grueling training, another year of isoiation, another year of people pushing me this way and that way, another year without any control over my own life? He tried to remember how old he was. Eleven. How many years ago did he turn eleven? How many days? It must have happened here at the Command School, but he couldn't remember the day. Maybe he didn't even notice it at the time. Nobody noticed it, except perhaps Valentine.

And as he waited for the game to appear, he wished he could simply lose it, lose the battle badly and completely so that they would remove him from training, like Bonzo, and let him go home. Bonzo had been assigned to Cartagena. He wanted to see travel orders that said Greensboro. Success meant it would go on. Failure meant he could go home.

He convinces himself to stay because he's been told constantly that he's their most promising candidate, and if he flunks out, they won't have time to train a replacement before the alien fleet arrives at Sol. (He also has a recurring suspicion that previous candidates who failed late in the process were killed, rather than simply being sent home; this isn't mentioned in this passage but it's on his mind earlier in the chapter.)

He makes a spur of the moment decision to destroy the planet once the "simulation" loads in and he realizes that the "test" is completely unfair:

quote:

He heard his squadron leaders breathing heavily; he could also hear, from the observers behind him, a quiet curse. It was nice to know that one of the adults noticed that it wasn't a fair test. Not that it made any difference. Fairness wasn't part of the game, that was plain. There was no attempt to give him even a remote chance at success. All that I've been through, and they never meant to let me pass at all. [...]

I don't care anymore, thought Ender. You can keep your game. If you won't even give me a chance, why should I play? [...]

And Ender also laughed. It was funny. The adults taking all this so seriously, and the children playing along, playing along, believing it too until suddenly the adults went too far, tried too hard, and the children could see through their game. Forget it, Mazer. I don't care if I pass your test, I don't care if I follow your rules, if you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly -- I'll beat you unfairly first.

If I break this rule, they'll never let me be a commander. It would be too dangerous. I'll never have to play a game again. And that is victory.

He does ask about the Doctor's effect on planets just before the battle, but there's zero evidence this is something he's been planning for a long time; rather it seems a natural reaction to being told that the battlefield will include an element (a planet) that he's never encountered in the simulator before.

The claim that "that is what he was being trained to do" has some support; he explicitly equates his all-out, do-or-die attack against the planet with the human-shield attack against the enemy gate he performed early in training, and that to me implies that the training was structured that way, at least in part, in the hopes that anyone going through it would, if put in this situation, reflexively target the enemy homeworld rather than seeking victory entirely in an orbital fleet action. But that's not a connection Ender ever makes, it's something for the reader to infer.

Even as the battle approaches its climax he still thinks he's playing against Mazer Rackham in a simulation, and even speculates that attacking the planet itself is something so unthinkable they didn't consider programming in support for it:

quote:

The enemy sees now, thought Ender. Surely Mazer sees what I'm doing.

Or perhaps Mazer cannot believe that I would do it. Well so much the better for me. [...]

One, two, four, seven of his fighters were blown away. It was all a gamble now, whether any of his ships would survive long enough to get in range. It would not take long, once they could focus on the planet's surface. Just a moment with Dr, Device, that's all I want. It occurred to Ender that perhaps the computer wasn't even equipped to show what would happen to a planet if the Little Doctor attacked it. What will I do then, shout Bang, you're dead?

And of course, after the battle he expects all the spectators to be angry rather than jubilant, and when Mazer tells him it wasn't a game, he was controlling real fleets, his first reaction is that it's an extremely ill-considered joke by Mazer. And once it does sink in he walks blankly out the room and spends the next few weeks? months? basically comatose.

It's a book with a lot of problems and I don't think claims like "Ender won because he was so compassionate" are supported well or indeed at all by the text, but AFAICT there is no evidence that he's starting to suspect it's anything but a simulation prior to Mazer telling him after the final battle, nor any evidence that he consciously realized the training was priming him to consider "attacking a planet" as a possible route to victory.

ToxicFrog has a new favorite as of 19:08 on Jul 12, 2023

# ? Jul 12, 2023 19:05

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

ToxicFrog posted:

So I pulled out a copy of the book to reread that chapter, and yeah, I'm not seeing it. Going into and during the final battle he appears to be 100% convinced -- based both on his interactions with others and the narration of his mental state -- that this is still a simulation, the "final exam" of his training:

He convinces himself to stay because he's been told constantly that he's their most promising candidate, and if he flunks out, they won't have time to train a replacement before the alien fleet arrives at Sol. (He also has a recurring suspicion that previous candidates who failed late in the process were killed, rather than simply being sent home; this isn't mentioned in this passage but it's on his mind earlier in the chapter.)

He makes a spur of the moment decision to destroy the planet once the "simulation" loads in and he realizes that the "test" is completely unfair:

He does ask about the Doctor's effect on planets just before the battle, but there's zero evidence this is something he's been planning for a long time; rather it seems a natural reaction to being told that the battlefield will include an element (a planet) that he's never encountered in the simulator before.

The claim that "that is what he was being trained to do" has some support; he explicitly equates his all-out, do-or-die attack against the planet with the human-shield attack against the enemy gate he performed early in training, and that to me implies that the training was structured that way, at least in part, in the hopes that anyone going through it would, if put in this situation, reflexively target the enemy homeworld rather than seeking victory entirely in an orbital fleet action. But that's not a connection Ender ever makes, it's something for the reader to infer.

Even as the battle approaches its climax he still thinks he's playing against Mazer Rackham in a simulation, and even speculates that attacking the planet itself is something so unthinkable they didn't consider programming in support for it:

And of course, after the battle he expects all the spectators to be angry rather than jubilant, and when Mazer tells him it wasn't a game, he was controlling real fleets, his first reaction is that it's an extremely ill-considered joke by Mazer. And once it does sink in he walks blankly out the room and spends the next few weeks? months? basically comatose.

It's a book with a lot of problems and I don't think claims like "Ender won because he was so compassionate" are supported well or indeed at all by the text, but AFAICT there is no evidence that he's starting to suspect it's anything but a simulation prior to Mazer telling him after the final battle, nor any evidence that he consciously realized the training was priming him to consider "attacking a planet" as a possible route to victory.

I wasn't saying he was planning it for a long time. Just that when he realized there'd be a planet, that he could blow it up, and his first instinct was to ask "Can I blow it up?" Also it really doesn't make sense that he EXPECTS everyone to be angry at him for it, since as far as everyone else knows, and this is something HE KNOWS they are led to believe, they're locked in a genocidal war to the death. He's one of the few people who know that the third invasion wasn't going to happen. Mazer knows it too, for example. So why would they be angry at him for doing it, especially if he does believe that it is a training exercise? He won, with the weapon provided for him to win WITH.

Like I think it hurts a lot of its own intent with the whole "only he can win through compassion" because it's been shown that others are just as compassionate if not more so. Mazer could just lead the battle and win if he wanted. But he doesn't, because he wouldn't be able to pull the trigger on the Doctor Device like Ender did because he knew it wasn't a training exercise. He explicitly tells Ender this. That he was too decent a person to do it knowingly.

quote:

"And it had to be a child, Ender," said Mazer. "You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know."

Really, all of Ender Game's 'ENDER IS SO AMAZING OH MY GOD" kind of falls flat when it becomes clear that yeah, they actually knew all of this and could have easily just won themselves, but Graff and Mazer simply conspired to fob off the actual genocide on a little boy they felt they could trick. 'The enemy's gate is down' doesn't even really matter, and is mostly just there because it was the catchphrase of the short story.

Though it's not like any of them KNEW what warfare was. None of them were fighter pilots on the ground. I think Mazer was legitimately the only one with combat experience, and he deliberately refused to talk Ender out of shooting the Doctor Device, just saying the really dumb thing about how the Buggers/Formics never targeted civilians despite the fact that the thing that made the Buggers/Formics so guilty-feeling and more or less accepting of their coming genocide was that they had killed shitloads of civilians before they understood what civilians were. Like I guess he could have been referring to how they didn't know what civilians were and thus they could never have deliberately targeted them, but well, I guess that is the sort of manipulation this book loves.

# ? Jul 12, 2023 20:44

Jokerpilled Drudge: Jan 27, 2010; by Pragmatica

It's going to rule when absolutely no one is reading OSC books anymore and everyone is just like "oh thats some weird fashy 20th century slop, dont bother". Looking forward to that being the case with handful of other prominent scifi/fantasy authors

# ? Jul 13, 2023 12:51

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

Jokerpilled Drudge posted:

It's going to rule when absolutely no one is reading OSC books anymore and everyone is just like "oh thats some weird fashy 20th century slop, dont bother". Looking forward to that being the case with handful of other prominent scifi/fantasy authors

Does anyone read his current slop? I thought Hamlet's Father ruined most of his good name.

# ? Jul 13, 2023 13:01

Brawnfire: Jul 13, 2004; 🎧Listen to Cylindricule!🎵
https://linktr.ee/Cylindricule

Kchama posted:

Does anyone read his current slop? I thought Hamlet's Father ruined most of his good name.

quote:

Hamlet's Father is a 2008 novella by Orson Scott Card, which retells William Shakespeare's Hamlet in modernist prose, and which makes several changes to the characters' motivations and backstory. It has drawn substantial criticism for its portrayal of King Hamlet as a pedophile who molested Laertes, Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the implication that this in turn made them homosexuals.

What the gently caress? Why write this

# ? Jul 13, 2023 13:51

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

I assume there is something in the brain of SF authors that just make them start writing hosed up sex stuff after a while.

# ? Jul 13, 2023 13:55

quantumfoam: Dec 25, 2003

Did nobody mentioned Rudy Rucker and his WARE series yet?

Reading the WARE books made want to cleanse myself with kerosene.

# ? Jul 13, 2023 14:06

neongrey: Feb 28, 2007; Plaguing your posts with incidental music.

Brawnfire posted:

What the gently caress? Why write this

it's because he's a bigot

# ? Jul 13, 2023 14:24

Unkempt: May 24, 2003; ...perfect spiral, scientists are still figuring it out...

quantumfoam posted:

Did nobody mentioned Rudy Rucker and his WARE series yet?

Reading the WARE books made want to cleanse myself with kerosene.

I read at least two a long time ago, and all I remember is a drug that makes people melt and the main guy gets his brain put in a robot body.

# ? Jul 13, 2023 14:29

Tunicate: May 15, 2012

OwlFancier posted:

I assume there is something in the brain of authors that just make them start writing hosed up sex stuff

# ? Jul 13, 2023 14:36

Runcible Cat: May 28, 2007; Ignoring this post

Unkempt posted:

I read at least two a long time ago, and all I remember is a drug that makes people melt and the main guy gets his brain put in a robot body.

I remember the evil AI that disguised itself as an ice cream van, but as for the rest...

# ? Jul 13, 2023 14:36

Runcible Cat: May 28, 2007; Ignoring this post

Oh, and in hosed up sex stuff, Richard Calder's Dead Girls trilogy, where a virus turns girls into immortal robot lolitas.

He wrote a lot of books involving highly-sexed underage-looking girls. For some no doubt entirely innocuous reason.

# ? Jul 13, 2023 14:40

mycatscrimes: Jan 2, 2020

OwlFancier posted:

I assume there is something in the brain of SF authors that just make them start writing hosed up sex stuff after a while.

In his case the thing in his brain was virulent homophobia.

# ? Jul 13, 2023 15:00

nonathlon: Jul 9, 2004; And yet, somehow, now it's my fault ...

quantumfoam posted:

Did nobody mentioned Rudy Rucker and his WARE series yet?

Reading the WARE books made want to cleanse myself with kerosene.

I can't get upset at Rucker because he writes and acts like the aging Californian hippy he is. Didn't mean his books are good, but he's not smuggling messages into his writing.

The OSC one that I found the weirdest was Timewatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus. Summarized briefly as: we got a time machine. Let's go back and carefully explain to Columbus that what he did was bad, mkay? Cool, he agrees, history is fixed, everything is hunky dory.

# ? Jul 13, 2023 18:36

Fifty Farts: Dec 23, 2013; - Meticulously Researched
- Peer-reviewed

I work at a thrift store taking in donations, so I see a lot of bad books. The usual suspects: Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, Dean Koontz, you know. I haven't seen any copies of the infamous Wild Animus yet, but I'm sure it'll show up one day. There are also some good things - I got a book of zombie short stories published in the 80s, I think. It's sitting in my little desk drawer waiting for a rainy day when I don't want to fill up adult coloring books (I have a pile of like 15 of them because my manager keeps bringing them down for me when she sees one). I also have The Roswell Report: Case Closed, by Headquarters of the United States Air Force, but I don't know if that belongs here either.

Anyway, this isn't really an awful book. It's more of a "dumb joke that I still find funny" book, but I don't know where else to put it. I saved something from being thrown away by the little old ladies who sort through our books before they go into the store. I give you Farts: A Spotter's Guide:

It's very tongue-in-cheek ( :haw:

), and the "still a 12-year-old" part of me loves it, but it's also the dumbest thing ever. I'm happy for the guy whose pitch ws "it's a book about farts, and we'll have buttons to play different fart sounds," and the answer was "Yes!" I had to buy new batteries for the sound board, but it was worth it. The introductory first page is a long-winded ( :haw:

) joke about how the author's cataloguing of flatulence is just as valid as anything else, by making references involving famous naturalists (and farts). It's only about 10 or 11 cardboard pages, each full-page illustration is dedicated to one of the 10 types of farts on the sound board, with little factoids along the sides. This is the first paragraph:

Farts posted:

Aristotle, the world's first naturalist, passed gas. And Linnaeus must have eaten too much Solanum melongena (a.k.a. eggplant) while working through some late night taxonomical riddle, only to spend the following morning tooting in Latin. And, of course, with Captain FitzRoy's cooking on the HMS Beagle, Darwin surely broke wind like a maritime gale while chasing his finches around the Galapagos. And yet there is no evidence that these scions of natural history ever considered researching a dichotomous key separating the Flight of the Buttock Bees from the Sleeping Dog.

The last sentence is talking about different types of farts he's named in the book. I can take more pictures if people are interested. I've never typed the word "fart" this much in my life.

# ? Jul 14, 2023 02:28

Captain Hygiene: Sep 17, 2007; You mess with the crabbo...

My kid nephew's visiting this weekend, I need to find a way to get that on very short notice and send it home for him and his similarly-aged brothers to go nuts over (mom can't do a thing since I'm a thousand miles away :smugdog:

)

# ? Jul 14, 2023 02:39

IshmaelZarkov: Jun 20, 2013

beats for junkies posted:

I work at a thrift store taking in donations, so I see a lot of bad books. The usual suspects: Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, Dean Koontz, you know. I haven't seen any copies of the infamous Wild Animus yet, but I'm sure it'll show up one day. There are also some good things - I got a book of zombie short stories published in the 80s, I think. It's sitting in my little desk drawer waiting for a rainy day when I don't want to fill up adult coloring books (I have a pile of like 15 of them because my manager keeps bringing them down for me when she sees one). I also have The Roswell Report: Case Closed, by Headquarters of the United States Air Force, but I don't know if that belongs here either.

Anyway, this isn't really an awful book. It's more of a "dumb joke that I still find funny" book, but I don't know where else to put it. I saved something from being thrown away by the little old ladies who sort through our books before they go into the store. I give you Farts: A Spotter's Guide:

It's very tongue-in-cheek (), and the "still a 12-year-old" part of me loves it, but it's also the dumbest thing ever. I'm happy for the guy whose pitch ws "it's a book about farts, and we'll have buttons to play different fart sounds," and the answer was "Yes!" I had to buy new batteries for the sound board, but it was worth it. The introductory first page is a long-winded () joke about how the author's cataloguing of flatulence is just as valid as anything else, by making references involving famous naturalists (and farts). It's only about 10 or 11 cardboard pages, each full-page illustration is dedicated to one of the 10 types of farts on the sound board, with little factoids along the sides. This is the first paragraph:

The last sentence is talking about different types of farts he's named in the book. I can take more pictures if people are interested. I've never typed the word "fart" this much in my life.

I can honestly say I would very much like that, and - if you have it in your heart to do so, kind goon - I would love a video of a dramatic reading.

# ? Jul 14, 2023 03:26

Fifty Farts: Dec 23, 2013; - Meticulously Researched
- Peer-reviewed

IshmaelZarkov posted:

I can honestly say I would very much like that, and - if you have it in your heart to do so, kind goon - I would love a video of a dramatic reading.

There's absolutely no chance of a dramatic reading, but I'll take some pictures.

Sorry about the glare on some of them.

Introduction:

4, 5, 8, 10

I don't want to post the whole book, but maybe I'll try to record some of the fart sounds at some point. However, I'm easily distracted and Jagged Alliance 3 comes out tomorrow, so it probably won't be soon, if ever.

Fifty Farts has a new favorite as of 04:33 on Jul 14, 2023

# ? Jul 14, 2023 04:06

Cornwind Evil: Dec 14, 2004; The undisputed world champion of wrestling effortposting

mycatscrimes posted:

In his case the thing in his brain was virulent homophobia.

And likely being so deep in the closet he's found Narnia.

# ? Jul 15, 2023 17:20

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

There's also Hart's Hope which is a fantasy story of multiple gods, except one is Judeo-Christian God and his chosen champion murders the local bad king (good), and rapes the 12 year old princess and enslaves her as his wife (you'd think this would be bad) and most of the plot is the result of it turning out that the 12 year old princess is the evil bad guy of the story.

# ? Jul 15, 2023 19:35

Terrible Opinions: Oct 18, 2013

Runcible Cat posted:

Oh, and in hosed up sex stuff, Richard Calder's Dead Girls trilogy, where a virus turns girls into immortal robot lolitas.

He wrote a lot of books involving highly-sexed underage-looking girls. For some no doubt entirely innocuous reason.

Wikipedia posted:

Richard Calder (born 1956) is a British science fiction writer who lives and works in the East End of London. He previously spent over a decade in Thailand (1990�1997) and the Philippines (1999�2002).

# ? Jul 15, 2023 19:41

Brawnfire: Jul 13, 2004; 🎧Listen to Cylindricule!🎵
https://linktr.ee/Cylindricule

Isn't there a whole neighborhood in Thailand just full of sci-fi and fantasy authors? A cul-de-sac of creeps?

# ? Jul 15, 2023 19:57

The Lone Badger: Sep 24, 2007

Kchama posted:

God and his chosen champion murders the local bad king (good), and rapes the 12 year old princess and enslaves her as his wife

That does sound pretty biblical.

# ? Jul 15, 2023 22:44

Byzantine: Sep 1, 2007

OwlFancier posted:

I assume there is something in the brain of SF authors that just make them start writing hosed up sex stuff after a while.

My theory is that it's because scifi is The Boundary-Breaking Genre, that's its 'job', if you can say a genre has a job. It's for exploring the far reaches of what societies and technology could become. But by now, the boundaries that needed to be broken largely are, or are in the process of. Original Star Trek was blazing a trail just by having a black woman as part of the bridge crew, to the point that MLK himself advised Nichols to keep playing the role when she considered leaving the show.

Can't get those kind of kudos for just being a decent person nowadays, gotta go wild, gotta shock the audience, also in this scenario you're a horrible pervert with a very poor concept of what boundaries should stay up.

# ? Jul 16, 2023 10:11

Solumin: Jan 11, 2013

Heinlein was writing weird incest stories in the 70s, and Asimov was an infamous sex pest. This isn't a new phenomenon.

# ? Jul 16, 2023 13:38

Cornwind Evil: Dec 14, 2004; The undisputed world champion of wrestling effortposting

I remember reading somewhere that a constant mental fallacy of nerds/geeks/those types was thinking that the more 'exotic' your sexual tastes, the more 'enlightened' you were. Between that and the issues that seem to plague that ilk with socializing, understanding cues, and understanding the world outside their own heads, and what should just be stuff like 'Mildly suggest something unusual and move on' rapidly decays into 'incredible detail over the incest/pedophilia which my power balance craving brain deeply desires and has mistaken for 'okay, just unusual', except I subconsciously recognize it as not okay because of all the extra effort I go to to justify it.'

# ? Jul 17, 2023 05:12

A Worrying Warlock: Sep 21, 2009

Cornwind Evil posted:

I remember reading somewhere that a constant mental fallacy of nerds/geeks/those types was thinking that the more 'exotic' your sexual tastes, the more 'enlightened' you were.

The famous Five Geek Social Fallacies, which are applicable to way more social groups than the author realized. Like, it fits certain parts of 50s and 60s counterculture just as much as it does a local D&D group.

Only I would argue that amidst the social circle of scifi authors like Heinlein and Asimov, the real weirdo was Hubbard. But that's a whole other story...

# ? Jul 17, 2023 11:30

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

It's not even particularly new or localized to scifi or other 'genre' fiction. 'Literature' is full of the literally the same stuff, complete with sex predator authors.

# ? Jul 17, 2023 18:46

Dalris Othaine: Oct 14, 2013; I think, therefore I am inevitable.

nonathlon posted:

The OSC one that I found the weirdest was Timewatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus. Summarized briefly as: we got a time machine. Let's go back and carefully explain to Columbus that what he did was bad, mkay? Cool, he agrees, history is fixed, everything is hunky dory.

Don't forget how they stopped his expedition by having their one Muslim guy suicide-bomb the Nina, Pinta, and Santa-Maria.

# ? Jul 17, 2023 20:06

nonathlon: Jul 9, 2004; And yet, somehow, now it's my fault ...

Dalris Othaine posted:

Don't forget how they stopped his expedition by having their one Muslim guy suicide-bomb the Nina, Pinta, and Santa-Maria.

😦

I had completely forgotten that

# ? Jul 17, 2023 20:36

nonathlon: Jul 9, 2004; And yet, somehow, now it's my fault ...

Runcible Cat posted:

Oh, and in hosed up sex stuff, Richard Calder's Dead Girls trilogy, where a virus turns girls into immortal robot lolitas.

He wrote a lot of books involving highly-sexed underage-looking girls. For some no doubt entirely innocuous reason.

Yeah. Those books.

An argument could be made that the world in Dead Girls isnt that bad, because it's different, it takes in different cultures, it features sex workers as fully blown characters, it's placed in opposition to SF novels full of educated, middle-class technocrats.

But after a whole series of books like that? The author's motivations aren't that complicated.

# ? Jul 17, 2023 20:41

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Kchama posted:

It's not even particularly new or localized to scifi or other 'genre' fiction. 'Literature' is full of the literally the same stuff, complete with sex predator authors.

There is one major difference, I think, which is that "literary fiction" is confined to exploring sexual obsessions that are possible in the real world. If you want to write about your characters getting gangbanged by giant crickets with prehensile ovipositors or whatever that pretty much automatically banishes you to "genre fiction" unless you can find a way to work it in as a drug trip or something. So this means that SFF, in particular, has both the baseline rate of "authors who would be writing in the genre anyways, but are also writing as vehicle to explore their fetishes", and additionally "authors who would be writing in some other genre if they could figure out how to work three chapters of Giant Cricket Gangbang into it, but they can't, so they 'settle' for SFF". And this also results in a higher proportion of it being The Weird poo poo.

# ? Jul 18, 2023 02:41

Kchama: Jul 25, 2007

ToxicFrog posted:

There is one major difference, I think, which is that "literary fiction" is confined to exploring sexual obsessions that are possible in the real world. If you want to write about your characters getting gangbanged by giant crickets with prehensile ovipositors or whatever that pretty much automatically banishes you to "genre fiction" unless you can find a way to work it in as a drug trip or something. So this means that SFF, in particular, has both the baseline rate of "authors who would be writing in the genre anyways, but are also writing as vehicle to explore their fetishes", and additionally "authors who would be writing in some other genre if they could figure out how to work three chapters of Giant Cricket Gangbang into it, but they can't, so they 'settle' for SFF". And this also results in a higher proportion of it being The Weird poo poo.

That's true but generally the worst genre stuff isn't cricket gangbangs or whatever, but typically incest/pedo stuff, which 'literary fiction' has in spades. Or just being insanely disgusting, like Sean Penn's stuff.

# ? Jul 18, 2023 05:07

LITERALLY A BIRD: Sep 27, 2008; I knew you were trouble
when you flew in

Samovar posted:

Oh poo poo, LaB! I thought you had left the forums! Nice to see you again!

Belated hi back, Sam! I did leave for a while; life got a little busy and between that and that one unpleasant ex-goon that started harassing me in 2020 I took a forums break. Life has gotten less busy, and I missed my community, and that person remains fixated on me regardless of whether I have an online presence or not, so I have been venturing back in a bit recently

It's nice to see you too, how are you?

beats for junkies posted:

There's absolutely no chance of a dramatic reading, but I'll take some pictures.

Sorry about the glare on some of them.

Introduction:

1:

4, 5, 8, 10

I don't want to post the whole book, but maybe I'll try to record some of the fart sounds at some point. However, I'm easily distracted and Jagged Alliance 3 comes out tomorrow, so it probably won't be soon, if ever.

Pardon me beats, but you seem to have accidentally posted this in the thread for terrible books??? :raise:

# ? Jul 24, 2023 18:42

Fifty Farts: Dec 23, 2013; - Meticulously Researched
- Peer-reviewed

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Belated hi back, Sam! I did leave for a while; life got a little busy and between that and that one unpleasant ex-goon that started harassing me in 2020 I took a forums break. Life has gotten less busy, and I missed my community, and that person remains fixated on me regardless of whether I have an online presence or not, so I have been venturing back in a bit recently It's nice to see you too, how are you?

Pardon me beats, but you seem to have accidentally posted this in the thread for terrible books???

I did say that it was more of a dumb and funny book than a bad one and i didn't see a thread for books that 13-year-old me would think are hilarious and awesome. Fart book is good, not terrible.

Also wb, bird.

# ? Jul 24, 2023 19:32

LITERALLY A BIRD: Sep 27, 2008; I knew you were trouble
when you flew in

Hahaha, true, you did say that, touche. I am glad there was no mistaking where the fart book lands :lol:

Thank you, friend

# ? Jul 24, 2023 20:05

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# ? May 21, 2024 07:47

NoiseAnnoys: May 17, 2010

OwlFancier posted:

I assume there is something in the brain of SF authors that just make them start writing hosed up sex stuff after a while.

don�t forget the fact that there was a very sizable market for the hosed up sex stuff! thank god that market now goes elsewhere.

# ? Jul 24, 2023 20:50

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF terrible book: Freud molesting a thesaurus.

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