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If you buy the excellent novel The sheep look up, I strongly recommend you get The Muppet Movie cued up for immediately after.
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Jan 14, 2024 05:31
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navyjack posted:I have had a setting kicking around in my brain for YEARS where magic 100% exists but it kills 90% of would-be sorcerers because routing enough energy through your brain meat without frying it is tricksy. There are all kinds of work-arounds but they tend to be gross and/or evil
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Jan 14, 2024 06:06
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fischtick posted:Read GRRM's Tuf Voyaging, which was a $2 deal posted by pradmer a couple weeks back. It was great! It's a collection of short stories about Haviland Tuf and his ecological engineering adventures... with cats! Imagine Doctor Who, but replace the Doctor with Varys from GoT and the TARDIS with a centuries-abandoned supership. I mean, maybe just imagine a short season of Doctor Who, in book form; each chapter is like a 90-minute read. Doesn't that book keep going "THESE PLANETS FULL OF BROWN PEOPLE ARE hosed UP BECAUSE THEY BREED TOO MUCH!", or am I thinking about another sci-fi novel? Which, Okay, I get it, Its Malthusianism, Its 2024 and Malthusianism is still popular with writers. Its probably not an aspect that's as suspicious to someone who loves the series as compared to someone who hasn't. Edit: Just checked, and yeah, three of the stories are about the planet which is Malthus spelled backwards, and how because of their "stupid religion" and cultural values, they breed way too much and have constant food crises, which ends in the final story with... Tuf forcibly sterilizing the planet's population without their knowledge. Which is , to me, hosed up. Fivemarks fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 08:52
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HopperUK posted:The Vorrh gave me that '???' feeling though I didn't read very much of it, got distracted. I should go back. I really liked what I read. The Vorrh is fantastic and the second book was excellent too. I really need to read the third. For a very well written book that has sci fi, fantasy, and magical realism elements, I highly recommend The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell.
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Jan 14, 2024 09:50
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navyjack posted:I have had a setting kicking around in my brain for YEARS where magic 100% exists but it kills 90% of would-be sorcerers because routing enough energy through your brain meat without frying it is tricksy. There are all kinds of work-arounds but they tend to be gross and/or evil Yep Graydon Saunders beat you to this one (although in some ways it's pretty obvious as an idea). It's also basically the major plot device in about half the books.
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Jan 14, 2024 10:18
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Mustang posted:Are there authors out there that are similar to Gene Wolfe? Book of the New Sun kind of makes me think of Dark Souls, where you can't expect to have a 100% concrete understanding of everything going on in the book and the best you can do is to to piece all the parts of the puzzle together as best you can. Lots of good recs already and I will add Michael Swanwick, specifically Stations of the Tide which is fully a love letter to Fifth Head of Cerberus. John Crowley also gives Wolfe vibes sometimes, Engine Summer most of all. Incredible book. Oh and Mask of the Sorcerer by Darrell Schweitzer is very New Sun influenced and fun.
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Jan 14, 2024 12:01
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Mustang posted:Are there authors out there that are similar to Gene Wolfe? Book of the New Sun kind of makes me think of Dark Souls, where you can't expect to have a 100% concrete understanding of everything going on in the book and the best you can do is to to piece all the parts of the puzzle together as best you can. M. John Harrison's Viriconium books come up often enough when talking about BotNS and its place in the Dying Earth subgenre.
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Jan 14, 2024 12:21
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my bony fealty posted:Lots of good recs already and I will add Michael Swanwick, specifically Stations of the Tide which is fully a love letter to Fifth Head of Cerberus. Vance too.
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Jan 14, 2024 12:24
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FPyat posted:M. John Harrison's Viriconium books come up often enough when talking about BotNS and its place in the Dying Earth subgenre. Yeah these are great ones, The Pastel City is more a straightforward play on S&S while A Storm of Wings gets dense and wild very quickly and has a bugfuck awesome ending. Need to reread that one. Vance should always be read, absolutely.
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Jan 14, 2024 12:29
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Learning that this de Chirico piece is called The Nostalgia of the Infinite has changed somewhat how I imagine Revelation Space’s lighthuggers.
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Jan 14, 2024 15:20
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D-Pad posted:You already got good Fehervari suggestions but if you like the weirder stuff I would highly recommend The Lords of Silence. It's a Death Guard novel (but not bolter porn) and really leans into the weirdness of being a worshipper of Nurgle. It's one of my favorite books period not just 40k. The magnum opus of Chaos novels is the Night Lords trilogy which is just excellent. Never has a book made me root so hard for characters that are so unapologetically evil. Yeah I've read the Night Lords series and really enjoyed it. I'll check out the Lords of Silence.
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Jan 14, 2024 16:58
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HopperUK posted:The Vorrh gave me that '???' feeling though I didn't read very much of it, got distracted. I should go back. I really liked what I read. e: So is Viriconium. e: Just so I can add something: the Well-built City trilogy by Jeffrey Ford hits the Wolfean notes and atmosphere, especially in the final volume. Criminally underrated. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 17:59
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Translation State by Ann Leckie - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BH4JGLMC/
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Jan 14, 2024 18:50
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Fivemarks posted:Doesn't that book keep going "THESE PLANETS FULL OF BROWN PEOPLE ARE hosed UP BECAUSE THEY BREED TOO MUCH!", or am I thinking about another sci-fi novel? This is all accurate but a dreadfully ungenerous reading of the book IMO Like, yeah, it's obviously hosed up, that's part of the story, and I sincerely doubt antiquated race theory had anything to do with the construction of the plot
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Jan 14, 2024 20:28
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MOTE IN GOD'S EYE has kind of the same problem but it's soooort of excused (for me) by the aliens being Actually Aliens, not any kind of human population or allegorical standin thereof...although I suspect if you cornered Jerry Pournelle about his views on population growth in the 20th and 21st century he'd have said some prize racist poo poo. You still meet a lot of people in SFF circles who sort of take it as unquestioned that explosive population growth is the great obstacle to all human progress and Something Must Be Done. There are probably more Great Replacement racists now, maybe they could be sort of mutually annihilated into pure photons and racist neutrinos
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Jan 14, 2024 20:35
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I think irony is already the racist neutrino. It penetrates everything 
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Jan 14, 2024 20:54
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As the Tuf series is fundamentally about humanity's relationship with its environment, of course it would touch upon Science Fiction's general assumption of infinite growth in a finite universe. However, I don't believe if it were written today, with declining birth numbers in most/all developed countries, that point would be as emphasised.
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Jan 14, 2024 21:45
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Charles Stross' Accelerando always sticks in my mind as a good example of humanity reaching its limits in this solar system.
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Jan 15, 2024 00:44
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Aware posted:Charles Stross' Accelerando always sticks in my mind as a good example of humanity reaching its limits in this solar system. This book was such a surprise after only reading his Laundry books
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Jan 15, 2024 04:01
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I remember liking Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise but remember basically nothing of them now since it's been so long. Could never get into his main series at all sadly.
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Jan 15, 2024 05:10
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pradmer posted:Translation State by Ann Leckie - $2.99 Best in a good series.
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Jan 15, 2024 06:27
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I may be rationalizing here, but that comparison only seems to work in the broadest sense of "the Moties are an outside threat which reproduces quickly." The Moties are treated quite empathetically, they're super intelligent and great with technology, they're funny, they can be incredibly charming and empathetic when they want to be, they have an interesting if briefly sketched culture and history. The book seems to take their side, in a way—the human heroes are those who want to find a way for the species to coexist. They don't seem like a racist's immigration nightmare about Are Traditional Values being eroded from within by our own foolish tolerance. They're just...better than us, smarter than us, clearly going to outcompete us because they are tremendously older and far more ferociously adaptable. Maybe I am dead wrong though.
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Jan 15, 2024 06:28
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That's always been my take on it as well. Like, even the Moties acknowledge that their biology is A Problem for them, this one quirk of genetics that is holding back a species which would otherwise be in glorious ascendance, and doing so in a pretty horrifying way. But given the combination of their reproductive rate and an acquisitive feudal culture backed by a literal warrior sub-species, it's kind of hard to imagine any way for mutual cooperation to be possible without fixing their genome so that you don't get, 1) A civilization that implodes into near-extinction-level genocide periodically, or, 2) A civilization that is going to devour every star they can get their hands on, because they have absolutely no incentive to do otherwise, and the most powerful possible incentive to do exactly that. You can do a racist interpretation of this, but hell, you can do a racist interpretation of most things. Just let it be an interesting puzzle to noodle over.
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Jan 15, 2024 07:01
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Yeah, i got the sense the narrative felt bad for the Moties. I need to reread it though.
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Jan 15, 2024 07:06
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Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine. it's for... research purposes!
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Jan 15, 2024 10:29
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The narrative does feel bad for the Moties. Their plight is portrayed fairly sympathetically, and individuals among them are presented as both likeable and worthy of respect. This does not erase the fact that as a species, their role in the events of the story, and their position in-universe, both dovetails almost perfectly with the role assigned to the Insidious Foreign Immigrant in a certain racist worldview. So, I don't want to delve too deeply into the internal "logic" of racism here, but, the basic pitch goes: "there's a race of people who don't look like you, and they want to move into your neighbourhood, and if we let them, they're going to take it over, ruin it, and then eventually replace us, so we need to keep them out by any means necessary". For this pitch to make "sense" (well, it doesn't. but, for it to stand up to at least basic scrutiny...), the despised race is assigned some set of negative attributes: they're unhygenic, they're prone to violence, they're criminals, they're uneducated, they're devious, they're stupid - and, critically, they are prone to rapid breeding. This last quality comes up, without exception, even as the other terms change, because it suggests a sort of inherent, immutable dirtiness that means the 'problem' posed by the despised race cannot be dealt with in any other method than exclusion (or extermination). To be a bit more visceral: if the reason, in the mind of a racist of this particular type, that a bunch of Mexicans immigrating to the US is an impending disaster for white civilisation, is not just that these Mexicans are criminals or drug addicts - if that were the case, then immigration would be fine provided it was also paired with like, drug treatment programs or a crackdown on crime or whatever. The disaster is that even if the community can protect itself from these ones, even if the community can actually civilise these ones, they will still just make more of themselves, faster and faster, until they are the community. This concept - that the danger posed by the other grows directly out of their fecundity - is a pretty resilient one, as racist ideas go. It is capable of surviving many of the typical challenges to the racist worldview. A less virulent strain of racism might at least be challenged by the idea of [members of] the despised race being well-educated, law-abiding, respectable, personally likable, or so on - forced to find rationalisations or ways to dismiss the evidence. But this form of racism is *strengthened* by the idea of a personally likable, sympathetic member of the despised race, without any of the negative qualities ascribed to them - because they are, in the racist's worldview, inherently threatening, and the nicer they appear the more dangerous they are, because they'll be more readily accepted into the community and begin the "outbreeding". It's not that the foreign family who moved in next door are bad people; this particular racist is not being disingenous when he states this. He honestly likes and respects the foreign family who moved in next door. He just thinks that they're genetically dangerous; they're like asymptomatic carriers of a plague who need to be locked away or killed as a necessary evil to protect the greater good. I'm barely paraphrasing here! I've seen racist trash that explicitly invokes, in almost the same words, pretty much everything objectionable in the previous two paragraphs. ... so let's look at the Moties. They are individually likeable and trustworthy. They are more and less advanced than humans, wickedly intelligent and capable of some truly astonishing advancements, yet simultaneously primitive, with their greatest technological advance over humanity (their mastery of genetics and their seperate species) being one that can't be easily seperated from their biological essence and that feels more animalistic than it does rational - to my eye, it sits at least adjacent to the sort of 'black men have a raw, animalistic strength' racism. They have a submerged violent nature that, when it reveals itself, results in some truly savage and gruesome behaviour - there's cannibalism, infanticide, and nightmarish convolutions (seriously, the bits with the Watchmakers in A Mote in God's Eye are some of the most effective and visceral sci-fi horror I've ever read). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Umberto Eco's the enemy is both too weak and too strong statement about fascism is a pretty apt descriptor of the Moties's presentation. Then, consider that they are engaged in a species-wide conspiracy to deceive humanity as to the depth and darkness of their history (to the point of hiding the fact that they even have a warrior caste), with the ultimate goal of escaping from their star system and immigrating into the human interstellar community - and if they're able to do so, they will inevitably proceed to outbreed humans, after which disaster will follow. Even if the individual moties involved are well-meaning and peaceful, their descendants will not be, and they can't control their biological urge, so no matter how well-meaning they are, they still spell doom for civilisation. And it's interesting to note that while the Motie reproductive urge is presented as if it's an inescapable imperative driving their civilisation into endless cycles of boom, overpopulation, and collapse... this completely breaks down when you apply the same logic to the humans in the same story. Like, okay, Bronze Age Moties either reproduce or die. But once they can build spaceships (and genetically engineer entire subspecies for specialised tasks), they clearly have the technology to find a form of birth control that doesn't kill them (doing this proves to be trivial for humans in the sequel). Now, the story suggests that of course, a group of Moties at a high enough tech level might choose to control their reproduction, but they'd be outpaced by their more populous rivals - Motie nations that control their population have less power, while Motie nations that reproduce endlessly have more, and so the population-limited ones are defeated, while the ever-reproducing ones thrive until food runs out and the whole thing collapses. It's a tragedy of the commons. Okay but, the exact same dynamic should hold for humans, yet their society is not an endless anarchy of population-based warfare and boom-bust cycles? Why not? Humans aren't compelled to reproduce on pain of death - but neither are Moties with advanced technology! So the thing, in-universe, that actually drives the cycle of Motie overpopulation and descent into barbarism is usually not their biology, it's competition between power groups. Humans have competition between power groups! Why don't humans do the same thing Moties do? Well, because humans are the stand-in for civilised white people, while the Moties are the stand-in for fecund, animalistic brown foreigners. the entire narrative arc of the book is a cautionary tale from the racist worldview I described above. it's "here's what could happen if you don't crack down on all those drat illegals, taking our jobs and eating up all the welfare!" in space. (then, as a bonus, consider the fact that in an intergalactic empire that appears to be a mixture of all sorts of human cultures that have gone to space, almost every single character just so happens to be a space white person, from a space white person culture. there's the space russians, the space irish, the space neo-romans... pretty much no space black people or space asians, etc. there's one guy who's a space arab - and he's the duplicitous, treacherous, cowardly merchant who uses his money to incite rebellion against the government) e: also the moties are almost all brown, but they have a genetically distinct secret ruling class of white-furred ones who use the more primitive brown ones as pawns in their schemes against the civilised humans. does this not also remind one of anything? a computing pun fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 11:41
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I mean, it's not like the title is overly subtle. It's a riff on the Biblical verse "Before attending to the mote in thy neighbour's eye, attend to the beam in thine own" - in other words, fix your own big problems before you start caring about other people's little ones. The Moties are thus named from the very start as a tiny problem on a universal scale but an absolutely massive problem for humanity. The problem is not that they exist, it's that they're here.
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Jan 15, 2024 12:03
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Lily Catts posted:Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine. Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood series is the first one that comes to mind. If you want a film rec too I saw Ben Wheatley's In the Earth night before last and whoo can recommend.
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Jan 15, 2024 12:11
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Lily Catts posted:Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine. Holdstocks’s Mythago Wood was also my first though, Naomi Novik’s Uprooted might be a good one too.
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Jan 15, 2024 13:08
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Lily Catts posted:Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine. Going to bring back Brian Catling’s The Vorrh and sequels here. A creepy forest is core to the plot thought tbh in the first book at least you only spend a chunk of time actually in said forest. For short fiction, try Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ for a dose of the deep creepiness on offer but even a seemingly mundane forest.
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Jan 15, 2024 13:40
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Lily Catts posted:Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine. depending how wide your net is, check out the videogame Against the Storm. some of the lore snippets might be useful!
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Jan 15, 2024 14:18
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Lily Catts posted:Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine.
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Jan 15, 2024 14:59
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Thirding Mythago Wood. And for my money the most explicit statement of Pournelle's racism is Oath of Fealty, where good, upper-class, white Angelenos living in an arcology are menaced by an army of lower-class, darker-skinned gangs (and nutty environmentalists, another one of Pournelle's favorite hobbyhorses).
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Jan 15, 2024 15:50
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Lily Catts posted:Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine. fuckin Hexwood, read Hexwood It's Diana Wynne Jones, one of my favorites of hers, so it's about the length of her other stuff, not short story but not big novel either.
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Jan 15, 2024 15:51
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So I was in the mood for some trash D&D novels and found this one and its sequels - This book is so D&D, I've been trying to figure out what edition it's using (seems to be 3.5, for the record). It's so D&D, magic items have X/day uses - and their owners know it. It's so D&D, I know what level a spellcaster is when they rattle off their spells. It's so D&D that they are right now going through the titular dungeon, and you can follow along on the dungeon map and key. It's so D&D, they have iron rations, a bullseye lantern, iron spikes, and a ten foot loving pole. Frankly? It's exactly what I was looking for, lol
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Jan 15, 2024 15:53
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dwarf74 posted:This book is so D&D, I've been trying to figure out what edition it's using (seems to be 3.5, for the record). Looks like it came out right at the end of 2E, so it's likely that edition.
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Jan 15, 2024 16:12
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Lily Catts posted:Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine. If you have any interest in tabletop RPGs, maybe take a look at Symbaroum, Summerland, Don't Walk in Winter Wood, Into the Wyrd and Wild and/or Trophy Dark.
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Jan 15, 2024 16:15
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Ravenfood posted:Ursula Vernon's Hollow Places might fit the bill. Also, The Twisted Ones by the same author.
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Jan 15, 2024 16:39
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Lily Catts posted:Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine. Brandon Sanderson's Shadows for Silence in the Forest of Hell is a short story about a creepy forest. It doesn't require knowledge of his other works to understand.
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Jan 15, 2024 17:12
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