|
reynolds used the phrase 'of course' about 150 times in redemption ark. in magician's land the word 'scooch' appeared faaar more than was warranted. 'copacetic' appears in worm, similarly, too much. that poo poo takes you out of the book and is really obnoxious.
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 15:19
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 06:40 |
|
|
blue squares posted:Read the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy. It works as a standalone, though leaves many unanswered questions. I haven't read the sequels yet so I can't speak to their quality. It's all three of those genres, a short quick read, and very engrossing. I enjoyed Annihilation, the ending was weird but it was a good first book. I'm having a tougher time with Authority. The authors overuse of descriptive detail is almost masturbatory and the pace of the narrative feels absolutely glacial as a result. I feel like I've learned more about the swamp just outside of the building than I have most of the characters. Control is a strange character and the jarring shifts in his perspective are beginning to wear on me. I really hope this is going somewhere because my Kindle says I'm 80% of the way through and it feels like its going to be another non-ending.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 15:20
|
|
|
The Gunslinger posted:I enjoyed Annihilation, the ending was weird but it was a good first book. I'm having a tougher time with Authority. The authors overuse of descriptive detail is almost masturbatory and the pace of the narrative feels absolutely glacial as a result. I feel like I've learned more about the swamp just outside of the building than I have most of the characters. Control is a strange character and the jarring shifts in his perspective are beginning to wear on me. I really hope this is going somewhere because my Kindle says I'm 80% of the way through and it feels like its going to be another non-ending. Stick with it. Authority is about a fan of Annihilation trying to understand Annihilation and getting lost and confused. It has really good payoff in the next book. I'm fascinated by the structure of the Area X books. Authority is a chronological sequel to Annihilation, sure, but it's not really a trilogy. More like two rivers that run into a common lake (being Acceptance). Acceptance is the book I loved the most. I think it has the most emotional range and all the best scenes. The first eruption of Area X and the fate of the biologist really stuck with me.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 15:28
|
|
|
Oh, another good one is China Mieville's obsession with "cacophony" Authority was my favorite of the three Area X books...I don't know why but it creeped me out and stuck with me the most. Maybe because my full-time job is being a bureaucrat
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 15:37
|
|
|
The worst for me was Redshirts, endless lines of "he said" "she said". The first and last Scalzi fiction I've read.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 15:42
|
|
|
taser rates posted:The worst for me was Redshirts, endless lines of "he said" "she said". The first and last Scalzi fiction I've read. Really? I find the exact opposite pisses me off when reading. Especially when they use -ly words, I said furiously.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 15:50
|
|
|
flosofl posted:Really? I find the exact opposite pisses me off when reading. Especially when they use -ly words, I said furiously. The problem wasn't the lack of adverbs, it was that, at least as far as I recall, literally every line of dialogue was followed by a "X said".
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 15:58
|
|
|
"said" is usually invisible in writing. With that said (lol), if you have two people with distinct voices talking to each other, it's good to drop it whenever possible. As a ~writer~ I err on the side of adding "said" if there is any possible ambiguity at all. Chances are no one will notice it in most cases. If you try to get too excited about cutting out all the dialogue tags, you risk that thing happening where you are reading a conversation between two newly introduced characters who you don't have a strong mental image of (and whose names you barely remember anyway) and they are going back and forth rapid fire, and you can't even remember which is which anymore. Obviously you can do poo poo like. John put down his glass. "Why's that?" Or break up the monotonous tone with "No," John said, "but..."
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 16:06
|
|
|
The overuse of 'because' in the later Bernard Cornwell novels really grinds my gears for some reason. Makes his writing feel faintly like one of those Learn to Read books.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 16:08
|
|
|
angel opportunity posted:Oh, another good one is China Mieville's obsession with "cacophony" If you really want to be irritated by use of a word, read Thomas Covenant and count how many times Donaldson uses "roynish".
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 16:14
|
|
|
taser rates posted:The worst for me was Redshirts, endless lines of "he said" "she said". The first and last Scalzi fiction I've read. Scalzi has zero talent for writing distinct characters, they all feel exactly the same and inter-character dialogue reads like a bad Joss Whedon screenplay. I thought Old Man's War was interesting for the concept more than anything else but I've never finished anything else I've attempted from him. Also Steven Erikson is the king of thesaurus overuse, multiple instances of "gelid" in the same book. quote:Stick with it. Authority is about a fan of Annihilation trying to understand Annihilation and getting lost and confused. It has really good payoff in the next book. Ok I'll stick it out, cheers.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 16:55
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Stick with it. Authority is about a fan of Annihilation trying to understand Annihilation and getting lost and confused. It has really good payoff in the next book. So can I just read a plot summary of Authority and then read Acceptance?
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:07
|
|
|
So I just finished my first Kim Stanley Robinson book, Aurora. Did anyone else find it extremely anti-climactic and kind of boring after the midpoint of the book? I was really really disappointed.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:14
|
|
|
I'm not giving KSR another shot. I kind of liked Red Mars as I was reading it, but after I finished it was just like...nothing. I don't really have a good memory of it, and I just do not like how he handles characters.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:17
|
|
|
blue squares posted:So can I just read a plot summary of Authority and then read Acceptance? Not really, though I can see how you get that from what I said. If you could get a book's effect just by reading the plot summary - if the prose style, the formal structure, the tensions and arrangements of information, if none of that mattered - it'd be terrible! Acceptance is like a person, it needs two legs to stand on.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:23
|
|
|
dy. posted:So I just finished my first Kim Stanley Robinson book, Aurora. I absolutely loved that book. I thought it only got better and better.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:30
|
|
|
dy. posted:So I just finished my first Kim Stanley Robinson book, Aurora. I love KSR, but what you pointed out is definitely a problem with Aurora. It feels like he knew exactly what he wanted to do as far as arriving at Aurora, and all the drama that ensues, and then having built up to the return to Earth as the only logical option he didn't give it anywhere near enough time, and in particular the part that would actually have been interesting (how humans who've never experienced Earth before come to terms with it) gets compressed to like 60 pages. Even more than most of his work, it was clearly a book with a Big Idea which climaxes about halfway through and then past that point he ran out of steam.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:31
|
|
|
I'm about halfway done with Robinson's book 2312 and I gotta say it hasn't been a great read so far. There's been two times when I thought the book was about to grab me and start going places, but it pulled back on both counts. It's feeling like a slog at the moment.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:34
|
|
|
Jedit posted:If you really want to be irritated by use of a word, read Thomas Covenant and count how many times Donaldson uses "roynish". God those are awful books. blue squares posted:So can I just read a plot summary of Authority and then read Acceptance? Definitely wouldn't skip it even if only because of the insight you'll get into the "normal, working world" outside of Area X's borders. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jan 8, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:40
|
|
|
To me KSR novels have stopped being about the plot or the story as such, and more about the characters and the world he builds for the story and the ideas. It's fine and okay not to like this kind of book or author, and it's kind of weird that even in my case Robinson is the only author I let get away with it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:45
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Not really, though I can see how you get that from what I said. If you could get a book's effect just by reading the plot summary - if the prose style, the formal structure, the tensions and arrangements of information, if none of that mattered - it'd be terrible! Some books are bad and not worth reading. There's no need to get all philosophical about books on me
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:46
|
|
|
Finished Declare by Tim Powers, what a cool book. I usually just reserve a ton of books from the library and then forget about them until they arrive, and this was one of them. I never read the back cover because it often has stupid spoilers, so I went in blind. Oh, this is a 40s-60s spy thriller, cool. Then you start seeing hints dropped about some weird poo poo and it just keeps on getting weirder until it's full bore djinns and angels and stuff. It also ties in with real history and real life people, very cool. Started China Miévilles Three moments of an explosion last night because I love short stories for some quality bedtime reading.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:46
|
|
|
HUMAN FISH posted:Finished Declare by Tim Powers, what a cool book. I am jealous that you got to go into Declare blind. That must have been wild. Three Moments was surprisingly meh for a Miéville, I'll just temper your expectations a little. A few of the stories are duds.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:49
|
|
|
blue squares posted:So can I just read a plot summary of Authority and then read Acceptance? I didn't enjoy Authority that much, but I was glad I read it by the time I got to Acceptance. The way it brings everything together kinda made Authority retroactively better.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:51
|
|
|
On wordchat, lemme dig up my old post from 2011 about the Malazan books and words/phrases people thought were overused:code:
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:52
|
|
|
Drawled: 25. I guess Coll doesn't get over his drinking problem (I just finished the first book, starting #2 today)
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:53
|
|
|
Detritus? What a weird crossover! Discworld is the only reason I know what that word is.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:55
|
|
|
It was kinda interesting to look them up because a lot of people (including me) were pretty sure some words were incredibly overused. Then the reality ended up being ~10 instances in a 1000 page book.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 17:59
|
|
|
To be fair, a weird word that you normally never hear in an entire year, if you see it ten times in one story, it's actually a lot
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 18:00
|
|
|
HUMAN FISH posted:On wordchat, lemme dig up my old post from 2011 about the Malazan books and words/phrases people thought were overused:
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 18:00
|
|
taser rates posted:The worst for me was Redshirts, endless lines of "he said" "she said". The first and last Scalzi fiction I've read. Yeah, that was really, really bad. I've ready other Scalzi, he's a reliable B on prose, but Redshirts was awful for a lot of reasons, and this ranked high.
|
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 18:00
|
|
|
Antti posted:To me KSR novels have stopped being about the plot or the story as such, and more about the characters and the world he builds for the story and the ideas. It's fine and okay not to like this kind of book or author, and it's kind of weird that even in my case Robinson is the only author I let get away with it. I think it may just be a conflict of what I like about scifi vs. where KSR wanted to go. Ultimately I read scifi for new and interesting ideas, or different perspectives for looking at the world, and I never got any of that from KSR, except maybe the point that interplanetary travel could be much more difficult than we expect, which is a neat idea but could have been tackled in a much more interesting way. I really liked the book to the point of getting to Aurora. There were a number of interesting things going on: the ecosystem of the ship was steadily breaking down, the society was growing increasingly polarized, the ship's AI was developing into a really interesting character, Freya was coming into her own (but still kind of ends up being almost a background character), and finally the hostile environment of Aurora. I thought it was the setup to some really interesting possibilities. Then when confronted with Aurora's environment, they were just like "welp this won't work better go home," which I get is maybe realistic, but I thought made for a pretty loving boring story with the only payoff being "well we got home" instead of anything new or interesting. I only got about 90% through the book before I put it down, but I also would have liked to hear about what happened to the other generation ships that were sent out. I think the book mentioned a few.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 18:24
|
|
|
Lunchmeat Larry posted:"potsherds" is a good one because literally nobody apart from archaeologists/anthropologists know what that means and he uses it a lot huh, i decided to google this thinking "there's no way that means pot shards" and that's exactly what it is, pieces of broken ceramic pottery.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 18:40
|
|
|
Antti posted:I am jealous that you got to go into Declare blind. That must have been wild. My only real complaint about Declare is that it was my second Tim Powers book (after The Anubis Gates), and nothing else of his I've read since has been anywhere close. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 19:09
|
|
|
HUMAN FISH posted:On wordchat, lemme dig up my old post from 2011 about the Malazan books and words/phrases people thought were overused: Wasn't tawny used a decent bit too?
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 19:18
|
|
|
andrew smash posted:huh, i decided to google this thinking "there's no way that means pot shards" and that's exactly what it is, pieces of broken ceramic pottery.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 20:18
|
|
|
angel opportunity posted:To be fair, a weird word that you normally never hear in an entire year, if you see it ten times in one story, it's actually a lot That's sort of the deal with 'companionable.' I literally went years without hearing/reading it, so now it sticks out like crazy. As far as 'said', I agree about it being 'invisible' for the most part--HOWEVER, if the author doesn't occasionally change-up the sentence structure, that's when I start to notice. Tried reading the first 'Jack Reacher' book (terrible--it was a recommendation from a relative), and Lee Child basically wrote the same sentence over and over and over... tonytheshoes fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Jan 8, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 20:21
|
|
|
I absolutely loved the climax of Aurora. The bit where the ship drops them off at Earth and then tries to make a final gravity slowdown past the sun, and is musing about how much it's learnt and how proud it is that it got its humans home safe, about how protecting and nourishing them was its purpose in life, but is then destroyed - that's one of the most affecting passages I've read in sci-fi in a long time. Maybe I'm just a big softie but at that point I completely loved the ship as a character and a narrator. Having said that I can also entirely see where other people are coming from when they say KSR is boring. I agree with Antti, he does a lot of stuff which is objectively not good but for some reason I'm okay with it when it's coming from him.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 22:05
|
|
|
Yea, I was completely taken with Aurora. It's very much how you approach what KSR does in terms of plotting or concluding storylines. Regarding the crew who make one last go at colonizing a planet, I've read where people wanted to to hear more about what happened with them. For me, I always felt that no matter what the outcome for that group was that they earned their ending. All they wanted was the chance to go off and try. It didn't matter if they succeeded, they just wanted the opportunity. Ultimately, their fate was inconclusive, but for the story KSR was telling, that group of characters had an earned conclusion. Aurora struck a chord in me the same way that Interstellar does. Both are about the big ideas with a bit of slop on the margins. You're on board and don't mind the roughness, or it is a problem. I can see the criticism either way.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 22:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 06:40 |
|
|
freebooter posted:I absolutely loved the climax of Aurora. The bit where the ship drops them off at Earth and then tries to make a final gravity slowdown past the sun, and is musing about how much it's learnt and how proud it is that it got its humans home safe, about how protecting and nourishing them was its purpose in life, but is then destroyed - that's one of the most affecting passages I've read in sci-fi in a long time. Maybe I'm just a big softie but at that point I completely loved the ship as a character and a narrator. The ship's character development is probably the best part of the whole thing. I think in the fact that the ship isn't present for chapter 7 is some of what makes it jarring, because you switch voice to Freya who's been there, sure, and is the focal point of the ship's attention in the preceding narrative, but you have a slight perspective shift and then it just sort of ends. I liked the idea that the ending was building towards, I just felt like it could have been executed better than it was if given a little more time.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2016 22:56
|
|