SF & F Mega-thread: I had to google 'spock pirate depilatory'

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cptn_dr: Sep 7, 2011; Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies

FPyat posted:

https://bsky.app/profile/aptshadow.bsky.social/post/3kbmjtvczk527

I trust his kid and will check out the two authors I'm not familiar with.

Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines Quartet is my absolute favourite Young Person' Fiction series. It kind of predated the YA boom, but did everything that all the Hunger Games knockoffs wish they could have done while being intense, thoughtful, funny, and heartbreaking in equal amounts.

# ? Oct 13, 2023 12:51

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# ? May 20, 2024 12:59

Strategic Tea: Sep 1, 2012

I absolutely love Mortal Engines!

Top economists say municipal darwinism is the only stable model for a society and who am I to argue?

# ? Oct 13, 2023 13:03

Ccs: Feb 25, 2011

General Battuta posted:

HILD is great and if you like it you should read THE WINTER KING (not by her but sort of slightly adjacent)

I wonder if Cornwell named his warrior nun in The Last Kingom/Saxon Stories series Hild is a tribute to that historical figure (different centuries though).

# ? Oct 13, 2023 15:22

Crashbee: May 15, 2007; Stupid people are great at winning arguments, because they're too stupid to realize they've lost.

FPyat posted:

https://bsky.app/profile/aptshadow.bsky.social/post/3kbmjtvczk527

I trust his kid and will check out the two authors I'm not familiar with.

Homeward Bounders was one of my favourite books as a kid. I still remember the cover:

# ? Oct 13, 2023 17:43

silvergoose: Mar 18, 2006; IT IS SAID THE TEARS OF THE BWEENIX CAN HEAL ALL WOUNDS

I had a different cover, but yeah it's a good one. So much of DWJ is good.

# ? Oct 13, 2023 18:40

DACK FAYDEN: Feb 25, 2013; Bear Witness

Crashbee posted:

Homeward Bounders was one of my favourite books as a kid. I still remember the cover:

this cover would absolutely have gotten me to check this book out of the library or perhaps purchase it from a bookstore occupying the type of location Spirit Halloween uses these days

those were the days. nostalgia for youth is rare for me but hell, this hit it. thank you.

# ? Oct 13, 2023 22:15

mllaneza: Apr 28, 2007; Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952

General Battuta posted:

Sounds like the Bill Watterson Soulsborne is out!?

The Mysteries ? Yep, got mine Wednesday. It's good!

# ? Oct 13, 2023 23:32

NoNotTheMindProbe: Aug 9, 2010; pony porn was here

Janny Wurts wrote up some brutal breakdowns of how the publishing industry memory holes female SFF authors over on r/fantasy

Janny Wurts posted:

That is an appallingly uninformed opinion. No slight to you - but probably caused by an endemic belief overlaid from today.

Women authors were writing adult fantasy and were in fact far less discriminated than they are today. Even from the pulp era, they have virtually been erased.

I was there; I read heavily in that time period, and published my debut in 1981. McCaffrey was in fact the first ever to make the times best seller list with Moreta. Tanith Lee and Ursula LeGun were everywhere. Julian May, Ellen Kushner, R. A. MacAvoy, Sheri Tepper, C J Cherryh, CL Moore, Jane Gaskell's Atlan, Janet Morris, likely Judith Tarr, Tanya Huff at the borderline, late 80s/1990, Andre Norton, whose name was as prevalent as Asimov or Heinlein ever were, virtually erased from history. Jennifer Roberson's entire Cheysuli series, Megan Lindholm (aka Robin Hobb! for gosh sake) did Limbreth Gate trilogy then, Diane Duane's Door into Fire, some of the earlier LGBQT fiction in fantasy, R. M. Meluch's remarkable Jerusalem Fire, Ru Emerson, Emma Bull, Elizabeth Moon, Kate Elliott (and I've edited to add, her original byline for Curse of Sagamore was Alis Rassmussen), though she wrote under a different byline then, Vonda MacIntyre, Diana Paxon, Elizabeth Lynn - many of them award winners, top of their field.

And this is a list I compiled without EVEN TRYING!

The saddest part of this story: Most of these authors are still alive, and still writing - many - far too many - were forced to change their bylines to something else due to emerging prejudice and algorithm suppression creating the bookstore death spiral....Edgerton, Hobb, Tarr, Eliott are likely the most notable forced to switch byline and this is still happening (Carol Berg/Cate Glass). So even loyal readers lost track of them. Worst, some died in utter obscurity, within the past few years.

Notable for younger readers then were Nancy Springer (of today's Enola Holmes fame, still writing), Joy Chant/Red Moon, Black Mountain, very Narnia inspired) Jane Yolen.

Yes, some women wrote SF - CJ Cherryh being the best known of these - but she also wrote phenominal fantasy - brilliant stuff - now suppressed for gosh knows why.

WOMEN DO NOT ALWAYS WRITE FOR CHILDREN! Nor do they fare any better writing SF, in the past few decades. Check out Sarah Zettel's brilliance as a SF writer, you will be astonished at the quality of her work - try Quiet Invasion, a stunning standalone, and yes, she also writes fantasy, but her fantasy came later then a string of strong SF titles.

Many of these women were published as original paperbacks; it was rare to get a start in hardbound, one had to work up to that.

Janny Wurts posted:

This is a long topic and not simple, so cutting to basics:

Once upon a time, there was no electronic tracking of sales. Publishers put a book out, and waited. Months. Even years. To know if a book sold through (was not stripped for cash credit) or got 'returned'...so there was a long lag time before they could recognize a growing success, and more time for word of mouth/browsers to find the title before it was recalled or replaced by something new. Careers gave you four books or so to 'make your mark' before publishers pulled support. There was no internet. People chose books by looking at the physical book in hand, and communication was slow to travel...so books had TIME to find their niche.

Bring in electronic tracking - publishers and chain stores suddenly knew to the moment what had sold and what had not; this sharply curtailed the time a title had to find its proper audience. A book that was original or cut new ground or had less up front support (midlist title) had TIME to find readers...the insta best seller was not a thing.

Bookstores, naturally, with such info at hand, started pulling books quicker and quicker and replacing them with titles with higher traffic....and the 'auto reorder' cycle began, whereby, if a book sold, another copy was automatically reordered by mechanical default. No person involved.

The auto re-order cycle could disrupt Really Easily....if a title arrived damaged and never got shelved, it never sold, one count less. If a title was super quick to move: it could run out of PRINT, and in those days (No POD printing) it could take four to six MONTHS to get press time reserved (from new titles coming off each month) to reprint, ship, restock - all those months, the chains would register NO SALES to that title - and wham, that title fell off the auto reorder list, that fast....to get it back ON again - incredibly HARD - readers would have to have been demanding ORDERS from multiple stores in multiple locations across the country - in the days of NO INTERNET, how could anybody know, browsing a shelf without that title, that the book Even Existed?? Unless someone MANUALLY switched that bit back ON (nobody bothered but Stephe Pagel when he was national buyer, because it took HOURS of his weekend)...that book disappeared.

So what you get: a new book selling too fast, or one not STOCKED heavily enough to sell immediate numbers - lost sales against other titles printed in HUGE quantities and pushed hard by what was then, co-pay (gone now, but heavy in Martin and Jordan's time) - copay was kickback to the CHAINS to keep a title on the shelf....for example: chains got tens of THOUSANDS of dollars to show a title face out, or even, shelve a book title at all in Christmas season.

Bookstore death spiral happened because: something tripped auto re-order, someting interrupted visibility, sales fell off, and the author's NEXT title, brand new - would be cut back or cut off by the chains for No reason except electronic counting said so many titles sold - with nothing else taken into consideration. This tended to 'clip' stocking off, shorter and shorter (self fulfilling cycle) until: chains would not shelve a title by said author, no matter how well they wrote. Since chain stores often stocked ONE book of a new title (many by women) and bookstore STAFF bought that title at cost - some titles never ever reached the shelf for a browser to find.a

Bookstore death spiral still happens. The author, if they have an editor firmly in their court - is forced to change byline to go it again.

I know firsthand how this happens: it's killed my numbers three times and beyond going. The first: Stormwarden was released as first in a trilogy pre-Christmas and SOLD OUT within four weeks. Nobody noticed until well afterwards, into the new year, when inventory turned it up...and by then, the momentum was GONE GONE GONE. Publisher decided: not to reprint until volume II came out/and that was years later due to: I wrote it as a two book series, publisher wanted a 'trilogy' of it after finishing it to the end/I had to re-negotiate for a third volume (MONTHS on), I was writing another book AND Empire, so had to fit the rewrite in (more time lost) and reworking it took another year to make it a proper three book series. Publisher printed vol II HUGE - tens of thousands - but only reprinted a fraction of vol I...Vol II was stocked Every which way, with NO VOLUME ONE in sight....instant death on a new title, which backsplashed and sank the entire project.

That affected all other books going forward.

Second time this hit was when I SOLD OUT a ten thousand printing hardback of a short story collection. This was a runaway success for short fiction!! But delays and backchannel stuff with the publisher splitting one volume of my epic fantasy into two (for, they said, length, but men's epic fantasy was allowed to be long as it liked)...that delayed me, because I had to do NEW COVERS for the split version AND new artwork for a re-issue of Cycle of Fire - months of work -causing my next book to take another year to release. Bookstores only recalled the short story sales....hardback numbers that were LESS than HALF of what my hardback epic fantasy sales were, for the prior Light and Shadows volume. INSTANT cutback: Chains reduced what they would shelve to the same number the short fiction title sold - no regard for the epic selling over twice that volume (into the twenty thousands for hardback, with reprints)....the series, in short, never ever recovered its hardbound press run, and more messes hit as mergers between publishing houses cut editors, shifted personel, and removed all support.

I state my own experiences because they are mine, and I am at liberty to make them public, and I prefer ethically not to expose details of my peers' careers without permission.

If you search book store death spiral, I am sure you will encounter instances and details you probably wished you'd never known, but it is a way that authors of all kinds get buried...most lately POC writing YA.

...

I forgot also: another hit to bookstore cutback of stocking: there was a paper shortage, industry wide, in the nineties at the time that Fugitive Prince was going to press. The publisher was SHORTED on the press run they ordered...they got several thousand LESS copies delivered than they'd wanted....which, cut back sales of said hardback, and so, cut back what bookshops would stock next time...so many factors cause stocking issues...with fewer personnel and electornic spreadsheets, nobody looks closely at WHY...books with smaller press runs then even mine could vanish entirely from one glitch in the system.

Janny Wurts posted:

Following bookstore death spiral, in my other post, Algorithm suppression is a whole other deal.

Amazon runs on algorithm. Books that do not accrue a fixed number of reviews on release (number I knew was 50, but I am not up to date on this) failed to cross the algorithmic threshold: they don't get recommended as 'also buys' and they dont' show as 'you may also like'...books that make algorithm appear on the page when you buy other books Amazon thinks you'd order....and those that don't show fall fast/don't make Amazon driven sales, don't get shown and slide into invisibilty.

Algorithm runs GoodReads...if a pre-internet book was written by a woman and NOBODY registered or reviewed that title, or, they did in small numbers - same deal...that book got heaped with other books of low algorithm, often NOTHING LIKE the other books in that heap...pre internet books are listed and reviewed less all around, and pre 2000 titles fall into this catagory enmasse.

Audio titles, if anything worse: algorithm buries them entirely. If they were released by Audible without substantial backing and promo (typical would be '5 promotional codes' for reviewers, no more than that) - they are INVISIBLE, they never get featured on Audible sales, and in short, nobody knows they exist.

This repression of awareness carries into everything across the internet. Nobody mentions, reads, or talks about what they have never heard of.

So recency bias, popularity building the algorithm, continues to cascade, and work that is offbeat, experimental, or written by minorities gets crushed pretty regularly.

And a ton of really worthy works get buried. Hobbs is NOT the only female epic fantasy writer, and LeGuin is NOT the only woman who ever wrote a worthy classic in Adult fantasy.

Janny Wurts posted:

That this trend towards omitting female bylines gained force starting in 2000 - that is accurate.

Huge changes swept through publishing, starting with the collapse of the Independent Distributors in the 90s/online tracking of sales and immediate numbers instigated by the chains, combined with the sharp emergence of Anne Rice and Paranormal romance (NOTHING wrong with reading those, each preference to their individual taste) and a sweeping shift with the rise of YA. Then the internet, the rise of the algorithm, online sales and forums, women who had been doing code side by side with men - ousted as those jobs moved overseas; the influx of mainstream popularity in the genre, and hence, mainstream prejudice creeping in...a perfect storm of misogyny online and the glutting of shelves with massive sales going to womens' market and YA - many women wrote to survive; others shifted byline, sometimes more than once, the disparity in advances - always true - shifted sharply for the worse. The warehousing shift where distrubuters shoved it back on publishers - it is a long, long list of trainwrecks, now fed and redoubled in force by the algorithm that shoves certain (mainly male written) adult fantasy to the fore. What is not seen cannot be talked about; what is not talked about is not pre-ordered; press runs are tailored to preorders now (remember, preorders don't need warehousing) -- and what we get it the Fixed Belief that women.......-------------....fill in the blank.

It is a tragedy of major proportions and half our going reservoir of living talent, WASTED.

I have seen peers literally die of despair. I see them, daily, fighting to stay on the page, creating. I see them vanish, even the famous ones. And I see ignorance adding to the equation.

The ones who have survived have nerves of steel and determination that would wreck most obstacles, but even that has a cost.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 02:17

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

God. Am I the only one in this thread who remembers reading Red Moon, Black Mountain?

# ? Oct 14, 2023 03:46

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Arsenic Lupin posted:

God. Am I the only one in this thread who remembers reading Red Moon, Black Mountain?

You certainly aren't. I've recommended another of Chant's Vandarei books, The Grey Mane of Morning, a few times in this forum.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 04:54

mllaneza: Apr 28, 2007; Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952

NoNotTheMindProbe posted:

Janny Wurts wrote up some brutal breakdowns of how the publishing industry memory holes female SFF authors over on r/fantasy

Jesus Christ. I knew it was bad, but not that bad.

I'll just throw out Sarah Zettel's Fool's War as a very clever, character driven, almost cozy, science fiction tale about what it's like to be an Ai "born" into chaos as you come to self-awareness in a network of systems while being violently attacked because you don't understand that the systems you're taking over to run your consciousness on are also needed for life support for the squishy humans you don't know exist. Zettel does a great storytelling job bringing the opposite sides into alignment despite both sides suffering from very different traumas from the same event.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 05:41

Rand Brittain: Mar 25, 2013; "Go on until you're stopped."

I put a lot of effort into trying to get enough people to write reviews for Jenna Moran's books to get the algorithm to pick up on them, but even for dedicated fans getting reviews about people is like pulling teeth.

Seriously, though; read The Night-Bird's Feather.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 05:53

fez_machine: Nov 27, 2004

I think the memory holing occurs in fan communities as well which over emphasise recency over quality. How many requests here for recommendations are modified by new, recent, or latest? And this is in a community that values the past/quality more than somewhere like reddit.

Feeling vindicated about getting extremely aggressive about people ignoring Patricia A. McKillp's death. She's not even mentioned on that list.

fez_machine fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Oct 14, 2023

# ? Oct 14, 2023 06:26

NoNotTheMindProbe: Aug 9, 2010; pony porn was here

Janny Wurts and Critical Dragon do a reading from The Bell at Sealy Head in a recent vidoe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyvHafT1KaA

# ? Oct 14, 2023 08:21

Jedit: Dec 10, 2011; Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

fez_machine posted:

I think the memory holing occurs in fan communities as well which over emphasise recency over quality. How many requests here for recommendations are modified by new, recent, or latest? And this is in a community that values the past/quality more than somewhere like reddit.

Is that correlation or causation, though? When someone is asking for a reading recommendation, suggesting a book that has been out of print since 1987 isn't particularly helpful. So we don't mention these books, even though we know of them, because they have been memory holed.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 09:40

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

"Memory holing" happens to almost all art, it's unavoidable. Unless we all stop reading any new books, we're going to collectively forget about the older ones as time goes on. It's probably worse in science fiction in particular since SF often doesn't age as well as other genres, but it happens with everything.

I'm kind of a near-term AI skeptic and tired of the current hype cycle around it but I do have a small hope that large language models can somehow help with the recommendation problem. It's been 25 years and they know all of my book purchases and yet Amazon still cannot recommend me books I want to read. This seems like a much easier problem to me than having an AI actually write a good book from scratch. And there's clearly a lot of money to be made solving this problem. If we have to suffer the indignities of capitalism we should at least reap the benefits and have someone get richer than God by solving this problem.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 16:13

Rand Brittain: Mar 25, 2013; "Go on until you're stopped."

I mean, being better at giving recommendations would be easy; the problem is that Amazon doesn't actually want to recommend only things that are good.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:03

Megazver: Jan 13, 2006

A lot of male fantasy authors from the 1980s are slipping away into the hole as well, even though some are still writing:

Joel Rosenberg, Alan Dean Foster, Michael Shea, Robert Asprin, John M. Ford, David Gemmell, Charles de Lint, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Jack Chalker, Craig Shaw Gardner, etc.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:07

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

fez_machine posted:

I think the memory holing occurs in fan communities as well which over emphasise recency over quality. How many requests here for recommendations are modified by new, recent, or latest? And this is in a community that values the past/quality more than somewhere like reddit.

Feeling vindicated about getting extremely aggressive about people ignoring Patricia A. McKillp's death. She's not even mentioned on that list.

She died? drat. And yeah, I didn't see it mentioned in my usual haunts.

The thing is, people are still recommending and endorsing Heinlein but not Tanith Lee. There's a set of classics that calcified in, at latest, the 1960s, and surprisingly few since. When John Brunner died, none of his books were in print. And so on.

e: Genuine question. Did Alan Dean Foster write anything besides tie-ins?

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:12

NinjaDebugger: Apr 22, 2008

Arsenic Lupin posted:

e: Genuine question. Did Alan Dean Foster write anything besides tie-ins?

Pip & Flinx, the expanded commonwealth books around those, the Spellsinger series, which was one of the big 80s isekais, a truckload of standalone novels. Dude had more original stuff than tie-ins, but that's what people remember because they paid the bills.

edit: Pip is actually the inspiration of D&D's Faerie Dragons, as it happens.

NinjaDebugger fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Oct 14, 2023

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:22

Ror: Oct 21, 2010; 😸Everything's 🗞️ purrfect!💯🤟

I didn't realize it was part of the bigger Commonwealth thing but I read Nor Crystal Tears last year and liked it a lot. Just like BDOs I'm a sucker for first contact stories and that one is solid.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:26

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Honestly what I do about female authors being memory-holed is rec them a bunch, and specifically seek them out.

This tag on Tor has been super helpful: https://www.tor.com/tag/women-writers/

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:27

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

NinjaDebugger posted:

Pip & Flinx, the expanded commonwealth books around those, the Spellsinger series, which was one of the big 80s isekais, a truckload of standalone novels. Dude had more original stuff than tie-ins, but that's what people remember because they paid the bills.

edit: Pip is actually the inspiration of D&D's Faerie Dragons, as it happens.

Aha! I think I may have read a Spellsinger book.

e: Strix, I still smile whenever I see your avatar.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:30

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Arsenic Lupin posted:

e: Strix, I still smile whenever I see your avatar.

Learn from me: do not admit to looking up the solution to a puzzle in a puzzle game when the gamedev is in the thread you're posting in.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:35

mystes: May 31, 2006

lol so that's how you ended up with that avatar? It's a funny avatar though

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:38

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

mystes posted:

lol is that how you ended up with that avatar?

I have yet, to this day, to actually 100% Baba Is You because I'm too stupid for it. :negative:

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:40

mystes: May 31, 2006

a lot of puzzle games are too hard

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:42

Patrick Spens: Jul 21, 2006; "Every quarterback says they've got guts, But how many have actually seen 'em?"; Pillbug

Arsenic Lupin posted:

She died? drat. And yeah, I didn't see it mentioned in my usual haunts.

The thing is, people are still recommending and endorsing Heinlein but not Tanith Lee. There's a set of classics that calcified in, at latest, the 1960s, and surprisingly few since. When John Brunner died, none of his books were in print. And so on.

e: Genuine question. Did Alan Dean Foster write anything besides tie-ins?

A bunch. I really like his The Damned trilogy which is one of the earliest, "Humans as Space Orcs" stories I know of.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 17:57

Cardiac: Aug 28, 2012

Lex Talionis posted:

I'm kind of a near-term AI skeptic and tired of the current hype cycle around it but I do have a small hope that large language models can somehow help with the recommendation problem. It's been 25 years and they know all of my book purchases and yet Amazon still cannot recommend me books I want to read. This seems like a much easier problem to me than having an AI actually write a good book from scratch. And there's clearly a lot of money to be made solving this problem. If we have to suffer the indignities of capitalism we should at least reap the benefits and have someone get richer than God by solving this problem.

LLMs just going to increase the amount of noise and add non existing books as recommendations.

This thread is good for recommendations with a 50% hit rate for me, which is good enough. Learning to predict what is a good bandwagon have helped as well.

I miss classic book stores, but hopefully I�ll get around to that next time in London. Unless all the shops around Tottenham Court Road died during the pandemic.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 18:13

dervival: Apr 23, 2014

Arsenic Lupin posted:

e: Genuine question. Did Alan Dean Foster write anything besides tie-ins?

He wrote a weird one-off novel about a guy that gets superpowers from toxic waste that I don't think was a tie-in, does that count?

and if it was a tie-in, what the heck did it tie into? :confused:

# ? Oct 14, 2023 22:54

TOOT BOOT: May 25, 2010

dervival posted:

He wrote a weird one-off novel about a guy that gets superpowers from toxic waste that I don't think was a tie-in, does that count?

and if it was a tie-in, what the heck did it tie into?

The Toxic Avenger!

# ? Oct 14, 2023 23:34

Hobnob: Feb 23, 2006; Ursa Adorandum

Arsenic Lupin posted:

e: Genuine question. Did Alan Dean Foster write anything besides tie-ins?

Quite a lot, actually, though I've only read Nor Crystal Tears, which I remember as being middling-good.

I thought he did the (surprisingly rather decent) novelization of Total Recall, but that turns out to have been, jesus, Piers Anthony.

# ? Oct 14, 2023 23:43

Beachcomber: May 21, 2007; Another day in paradise.; Slippery Tilde

Hobnob posted:

Quite a lot, actually, though I've only read Nor Crystal Tears, which I remember as being middling-good.

I thought he did the (surprisingly rather decent) novelization of Total Recall, but that turns out to have been, jesus, Piers Anthony.

Wake up! In real life Piers Anthony is in prison for just being generally creepy. You're stuck in the simulation! This could be your last chance!

# ? Oct 15, 2023 00:09

Selachian: Oct 9, 2012

Megazver posted:

A lot of male fantasy authors from the 1980s are slipping away into the hole as well, even though some are still writing:

Joel Rosenberg, Alan Dean Foster, Michael Shea, Robert Asprin, John M. Ford, David Gemmell, Charles de Lint, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Jack Chalker, Craig Shaw Gardner, etc.

I just finished reading Ford's Aspects, which was left unfinished by his death and was clearly intended to be the jumping-off point for a series. Good enough that I'm sorry we'll never get to see the rest.

But let's be honest, the reason some of these people are falling into the memory hole is that they're not actually that great. I mean, I loved Robert Asprin, Joel Rosenberg, and Alan Dean Foster when I was a teenager, and I still have some of their books on my shelves, but there are so many newer and better writers out there. I picked up one of Foster's newer Flinx and Pip books (Reunion) earlier this year and found it forgettable, which is a bit sad because I've read the early Flinx and Pip books at least a dozen times.

# ? Oct 15, 2023 00:31

branedotorg: Jun 19, 2009

I don't think it's unfair to ask for recommendations that bias towards 'recent' or 'new', there's a lot of great quality older genre books but there's also a heap that haven't come along with social mores 30, 40, 50 years later; or simply haven't aged well stylistically.

# ? Oct 15, 2023 00:41

Kalman: Jan 17, 2010

branedotorg posted:

I don't think it's unfair to ask for recommendations that bias towards 'recent' or 'new', there's a lot of great quality older genre books but there's also a heap that haven't come along with social mores 30, 40, 50 years later; or simply haven't aged well stylistically.

Or just are things you�ve read already - people may simply feel they�ve read most of the stuff from further back that�s worth reading and want something they might not have heard of.

# ? Oct 15, 2023 00:51

Kesper North: Nov 3, 2011; EMERGENCY POWER TO PARTY

Arsenic Lupin posted:

e: Genuine question. Did Alan Dean Foster write anything besides tie-ins?

He's actually incredibly prolific. His character writing is so-so but he comes up with really cool worlds.

For example, he was given an undisclosed sum by James Cameron because "Avatar" and the ecology of Pandora is just a somewhat loose adaptation of Foster's 1975 novel Midworld.

# ? Oct 15, 2023 02:07

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Lex Talionis posted:

"Memory holing" happens to almost all art, it's unavoidable. Unless we all stop reading any new books, we're going to collectively forget about the older ones as time goes on. It's probably worse in science fiction in particular since SF often doesn't age as well as other genres, but it happens with everything.

I'm kind of a near-term AI skeptic and tired of the current hype cycle around it but I do have a small hope that large language models can somehow help with the recommendation problem. It's been 25 years and they know all of my book purchases and yet Amazon still cannot recommend me books I want to read. This seems like a much easier problem to me than having an AI actually write a good book from scratch. And there's clearly a lot of money to be made solving this problem. If we have to suffer the indignities of capitalism we should at least reap the benefits and have someone get richer than God by solving this problem.

Try LibraryThing. It has a recommendation algorithm that isn�t as uselessly warped as Amazon�s.

# ? Oct 15, 2023 02:16

TOOT BOOT: May 25, 2010

Hobnob posted:

I thought he did the (surprisingly rather decent) novelization of Total Recall, but that turns out to have been, jesus, Piers Anthony.

The concept of novelizing a movie based on a written story is weird.

# ? Oct 15, 2023 02:18

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# ? May 20, 2024 12:59

Kesper North: Nov 3, 2011; EMERGENCY POWER TO PARTY

TOOT BOOT posted:

The concept of novelizing a movie based on a written story is weird.

It is! But the narratives of Blade Runner and Total Rekall are so different from those of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and We'll Remember It For You Wholesale that it also kinda makes sense.

# ? Oct 15, 2023 02:21

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > SF & F Mega-thread: I had to google 'spock pirate depilatory'

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