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skasion posted:Anyone have any recommendations for stuff with a really out-there prose style? I’m thinking something like Riddley Walker where it’s basically written in its own cracked-out original dialect, or else like entirely in a super elevated diction like Eddison or something. I guess it doesn’t have to be genre book but the only example I can think of that isn’t is The Wake by Kingsnorth. Most of the books I can think of that might fall under this aren't genre fiction at all.
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Jan 26, 2018 05:29
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Feersum Endjinn is what you want.
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Jan 26, 2018 05:44
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The funny thing about Pullman's novels is that they get progressively worse in the same ways and for the same reasons that Lewis' Narnia books get bad: they start out with a good story but then get progressively preachier and dumb. He set out to write Narnia for Atheists and by god he achieved it.
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Jan 26, 2018 06:28
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skasion posted:Anyone have any recommendations for stuff with a really out-there prose style? I’m thinking something like Riddley Walker where it’s basically written in its own cracked-out original dialect, or else like entirely in a super elevated diction like Eddison or something. I guess it doesn’t have to be genre book but the only example I can think of that isn’t is The Wake by Kingsnorth. If you like Eddison, you might also enjoy Dunsany -- check out "Idle Days on the Yann," for instance.
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Jan 26, 2018 06:47
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skasion posted:Anyone have any recommendations for stuff with a really out-there prose style? I’m thinking something like Riddley Walker where it’s basically written in its own cracked-out original dialect, or else like entirely in a super elevated diction like Eddison or something. I guess it doesn’t have to be genre book but the only example I can think of that isn’t is The Wake by Kingsnorth. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, maybe? Not really sure what you mean (not familiar with Kingsnorth) but definitely has its own original dialect. And thanks everyone for the info on Morgan's other books. I'll check them out before too long.
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Jan 26, 2018 13:41
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this is a steal https://twitter.com/catvalente/status/956922233028595712
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Jan 26, 2018 23:40
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ToxicFrog posted:
Hey, a bit late, but do you recall the title of that book? It sounds suspiciously like one I’ve been looking for/trying to remember for a bit. I skimmed Cherryh’s bibliography but couldn’t pick it out. Does it end with the aliens reviving a cache of frozen humans stored in a vault on the moon?
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Jan 27, 2018 09:07
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:
read everything but market forces unless you like corporate distopia worlds where executives fight for dominance in saabs with missiles
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Jan 27, 2018 11:43
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Altered Carbon is his best book. The other two Kovacs books are okay, but in retrospect I think I'd be okay if I never'd read them. I've grown somewhat 'meh' on the rest of his output.
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Jan 27, 2018 12:47
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branedotorg posted:read everything but market forces
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Jan 27, 2018 13:53
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Megazver posted:Altered Carbon is his best book. The other two Kovacs books are okay, but in retrospect I think I'd be okay if I never'd read them. I've grown somewhat 'meh' on the rest of his output. The one about  car-duelling for corporate promotions on the M25 started out as an entertaining loopy proposition, then got tedious, particularly when his libertarian streak started to show.
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Jan 28, 2018 01:07
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Solitair posted:I jumped the gun with my embarrassing post. What I didn't mention earlier is that Too Like the Lightning only starts with a novel, optimistic view of the future. You'll see the downsides to it in due time, and I'll see if the plot decides whether the tradeoffs are worth it. i got 60% through the first book before getting distracted (and kinda bored), but even before you see the other stuff what they showed of the setting made me think 'there's no way for this society to function like this without some bad poo poo going on or the author writing in pure fantasy-land'. i could never see governments dissolving their power like that... and having totally chaotic movement and migration would terrify people. having migration as it is now, which is nowhere near as open (but still far greater than other times in modern history) already scares people, being faced by the sudden possibility of whatever the 23rd century's equivalent of Congolese rape gangs coming to your neighbourhood would cause pandemonium.
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Jan 28, 2018 03:03
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Does anyone know any fantasy series or books akin to the Earthsea series. Aka shorter, not epic or dark even though Earthsea is epic and dark in some ways but not like modern fantasy.
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Jan 28, 2018 03:59
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CaptainCrunch posted:Hey, a bit late, but do you recall the title of that book? It sounds suspiciously like one I’ve been looking for/trying to remember for a bit. I skimmed Cherryh’s bibliography but couldn’t pick it out. quote:Does it end with the aliens reviving a cache of frozen humans stored in a vault on the moon? It's the novella "Pots", available in the short story collection The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh. And no, it doesn't -- the humans are all dead, and it ends with a brief but vicious sectarian conflict between a faction who want to accept that and return home, and a faction who insist that such an ancient and powerful race couldn't have died out and want to keep searching for the real homeworld.
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Jan 28, 2018 04:16
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Ulio posted:Does anyone know any fantasy series or books akin to the Earthsea series. Aka shorter, not epic or dark even though Earthsea is epic and dark in some ways but not like modern fantasy. Nothing else is quite like Le Guin, that's why she was Le Guin. Lord Dunsany was a really strong influence on Le Guin so that might be a place to look. http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/swld/swld09.htm http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL-Review-Joshi-LordDunsany.html quote:When people ask me about “a book that changed my life,” one of the several hundred honest answers I can give them is A Dreamer’s Tales. (Then they look blank, which is too bad.) I was about twelve when I picked it up, one of those nice little leather-bound books the Modern Library used to do, and from the first sentence I was a goner. Maybe Dianna Wynne Jones -- ever read Howl's Moving Castle? The Prydain Chronicles seem like a really strong suggestion for your request also. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jan 28, 2018 |
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Jan 28, 2018 04:24
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I was thinking about this request a bit and was also gonna say "Some older YA fantasy, pre-HP specifically." Not that HP is bad, but it had a lighter tone, and a lot of the YA boom that came after it either matched that tone or was first-person narrative, which changes the feel of a lot of things. Basically seconding Jones and Prydain, and maybe some Jane Yolen and some others I'm not remembering clearly. Maybe Tamora Pierce. I said maybe! They just remind me of Earthsea more than they remind me of Kirsten Cashore or something, and Kirsten Cashore doesn't remind me of Tamora Pierce even though they're sort of links in a chain. Also, weirdly, The Night Circus as I think about it.
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Jan 28, 2018 04:51
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branedotorg posted:read everything but market forces I think that's the only Richard Morgan book I've read, actually.
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Jan 28, 2018 05:32
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branedotorg posted:read everything but market forces Market forces is pretty nice, except for the loving SAAB. Driving that dead brand of car is just a sign of being pretentious. Besides the car dueling, it is a rather depressing dystopian not so far future that doesn’t seem that unlikely. Btw I have never seen Morgan as libertarian, too much of his books are themed on the injustices of capitalism and evilness of rich people. If anything he is some form of anarchist that just wants to burn everything down.
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Jan 28, 2018 07:51
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Cardiac posted:Market forces is pretty nice, except for the loving SAAB. Driving that dead brand of car is just a sign of being pretentious. Yeah, I've always gotten a vibe of "poo poo needs to change, don't know what to replace it with. You figure it out and I'll be over here tearing the current poo poo down and salting the earth"
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Jan 28, 2018 08:28
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Cardiac posted:Market forces is pretty nice, except for the loving SAAB. Driving that dead brand of car is just a sign of being pretentious.  .
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Jan 28, 2018 09:38
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Ulio posted:Does anyone know any fantasy series or books akin to the Earthsea series. Aka shorter, not epic or dark even though Earthsea is epic and dark in some ways but not like modern fantasy. I'll throw in a vote for Patricia McKillip as well. Try The Forgotten Beasts of Eld or the Riddle-Master trilogy.
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Jan 28, 2018 15:30
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Nothing else is quite like Le Guin, that's why she was Le Guin. I haven't read anything by Dunsany but aren't his stories more folktales/myth based? I haven't read Howl's Moving Castle but have watched the movie which was great, not sure how similar they are. Speaking of anime movie adaptation did anyone watch the Ghibli Earthsea movie? I heard it isn't that good which is surprising since everything Ghibli is normally considered great.. Prydain I have heard about it but looking at wiki it says it is a children's book?
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Jan 28, 2018 19:23
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Ulio posted:I haven't read Howl's Moving Castle but have watched the movie which was great, not sure how similar they are. Speaking of anime movie adaptation did anyone watch the Ghibli Earthsea movie? I heard it isn't that good which is surprising since everything Ghibli is normally considered great.. The Earthsea movie was handed off to Miyazaki's son, who turned out to not have even a modicum of his father's talent, and was such a disappointment he quit the job altogether. So that's why, despite being a Ghibli movie, it sucks raw donkey balls. It's less an Eathsea movie than a bunch of anime cliches uncannily wearing the names of Leguin's characters.
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Jan 28, 2018 19:38
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heffray posted:Saab died 7 years after it was published What, SAAB is alive and kicking and making fighter jets. The car company SAAB was a pretentious brand before that and the last few years of its life it was just generic brand of GM.
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Jan 28, 2018 20:14
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Ulio posted:I haven't read anything by Dunsany but aren't his stories more folktales/myth based? Read the short story I linked for an idea. Dunsany is his own thing. Ulio posted:
It's YA, same as Earthsea books are technically.
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Jan 28, 2018 20:22
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Proteus Jones posted:Yeah, I've always gotten a vibe of "poo poo needs to change, don't know what to replace it with. You figure it out and I'll be over here tearing the current poo poo down and salting the earth" He's a pessimistic materialist. He believes everything Marx says about capital, but that there's not really much to be done about the accumulation of capital in the hands of the powerful. He's written about it on his blog before.
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Jan 28, 2018 20:37
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As someone who only encountered them for the first time only a couple months ago, I can confirm that Diana Wynne-Jones' children's books are perfectly enjoyable even if you happen to be a jaded adult. Howl's Moving Castle is a lot of fun.
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Jan 28, 2018 21:46
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Grimson posted:He's a pessimistic materialist. He believes everything Marx says about capital, but that there's not really much to be done about the accumulation of capital in the hands of the powerful. He's written about it on his blog before. This but for all systems ranging from ecologies to posthuman intelligences is the ideology I staggered into while super depressed. Got some extremely  fiction out of it so I guess I recommendI know this URL will be an instant no-go zone for many but I like this essay about the possibly super depressing implications of game theory in the distribution and capture of resources. I'd love to read criticism or pushback. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jan 28, 2018 |
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Jan 28, 2018 22:22
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navyjack posted:So, if the first book is Tak as Sam Spade, the second is Tak as Indiana Jones and the third is Tak as Danny Ocean. It’s more complicated than that, but they definitely swap genres as easily as they swap bodies. Megazver posted:Altered Carbon is his best book. The other two Kovacs books are okay, but in retrospect I think I'd be okay if I never'd read them. I've grown somewhat 'meh' on the rest of his output. There seems to be a recurring pattern where fantasy & SF authors make it big writing "Noir + [genre]" and then they gently caress with the formula and start writing "NOT(Noir) + [genre]" and there's a resultant drop in quality. Happened to Butcher with the Dresden Files (started as noir, became Dresden's RPG campaign), happened to Morgan with the Altered Carbon series, etc. One reason I really like Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series is that he doesn't gently caress with the formula: almost every novel is ringing the changes on the same basic structure. Some of the books he's a detective, some of the books it's the other side of the coin and a caper/heist, but with a few limited & purposeful exceptions the series stays grounded in the genre it started in. The result is that each book has a stronger narrative, because the genre imposes certain kinds of limitations and the author has to be more inventive within those limitations instead of just cribbing from a different set of notes. It might just be a pet peeve of mine when authors shift genres over the course of a series. The Temeraire books could have been so good if they'd stayed historical fiction instead of turning into fanfic of themselves >_<
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Jan 28, 2018 22:36
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General Battuta posted:This but for all systems ranging from ecologies to posthuman intelligences is the ideology I staggered into while super depressed. Got some extremely Reading along through it and I got to this section: quote:
As so often happens in discussions of libertarianism, I found myself thinking of the Icelandic Republic -- which tried out a functionally an-cap system with privatized courts etc. and after a few hundred years got so sick of it they all gave up and swore fealty to the King of Norway. I think the article fails in its conclusions because it does not sufficiently address the possibility that the leap of faith, the cooperative leap, can happen; sometimes the prisoners communicate and the dilemma is resolved. Sometimes the libertarians get sick of dueling each other for land rights and decide to all join Norway instead. There's a way out, and it can happen, and historically has happened. As to most likely end state -- realistically I expect we'll probably end up, eventually, at something like the far future society in Dan Simmon's Illium -- a small population of humans, perhaps a few hundred thousands or a million or two, scattered across the whole globe and possibly the solar system, with massive amounts of automation supporting them. Basically, at some point, everyone who isn't the 1% is going to drop away, whether due to disaster or famine or simple redundancy or because they all spend all their time playing World of Warcraft and using contraceptives and the population just declines. Life might be pretty good for the remainder though. Human populations don't inevitably grow; Malthus was wrong; human populations in most of the developed world are declining because if you don't need kids to work the farm there's not much reason to have them apart from sentiment. Another error I'd point to the author making is the focus on "efficiency." There's no need, except in a hypercompetitive state, for efficiency to matter that much; get nuclear and solar power fully optimized and energy isn't a limiting factor on human endeavor any more, and get automated space mining optimized and resources aren't a limiting factor on human endeavor any more. A Federation-style post-scarcity society is not a complete impossibility (especially if we hit a major population drop first). Said another way, efficiency only matters if you're competing: if we can or could shift to a society that was solving the prisoner's dilemma instead of one that was caught in it, we wouldn't be locked in competition with each other, and efficiency would matter a lot less than it does. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Jan 28, 2018 |
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Jan 28, 2018 22:54
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Solitair posted:I jumped the gun with my embarrassing post. What I didn't mention earlier is that Too Like the Lightning only starts with a novel, optimistic view of the future. You'll see the downsides to it in due time, and I'll see if the plot decides whether the tradeoffs are worth it. I haven't read the books but there is a lot of really awful stuff that people shrug off as a necessary cost to the system now, in the real world. People overlook it because they normalise their current circumstances. I am sure the same would happen if we lived in a society with a very different framework (heck, people do if you look at different societies and a=economic circumstances around the world). The tradeoffs are different but the acceptance is the same.
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Jan 28, 2018 22:55
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Neurosis posted:i got 60% through the first book before getting distracted (and kinda bored), but even before you see the other stuff what they showed of the setting made me think 'there's no way for this society to function like this without some bad poo poo going on or the author writing in pure fantasy-land'. i could never see governments dissolving their power like that... In a setting influenced by the French Enlightenment, what makes you think governments gave up power willingly? 
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Jan 29, 2018 01:08
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Read the short story I linked for an idea. Dunsany is his own thing. Ya I will read it when I get time thanks. Earthsea is definitely YA but it is not like modern YA. I will give Prydain a shot.
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Jan 29, 2018 01:31
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Ulio posted:Does anyone know any fantasy series or books akin to the Earthsea series. Aka shorter, not epic or dark even though Earthsea is epic and dark in some ways but not like modern fantasy. Some of Sherwood Smith's Sartorias-Deles books maybe? They're fairly dry and mythic in tone, and also deal with a lot of the same themes of what makes a good society that Le Guin wrote about. There's also Le Guins later YA series that I mentioned before, Annals of a Western Shore.
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Jan 29, 2018 03:06
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General Battuta posted:This but for all systems ranging from ecologies to posthuman intelligences is the ideology I staggered into while super depressed. Got some extremely The problem is that it takes a simple model (natural selection/economic competition), plugs in insane parameters (infinite competitors over an infinite period of time), and doesn't check it's results against history. It's impossible for a corporation to make a profit in an optimized free market because infinite competitors undercutting each other over an infinite period of time eliminates it, but corporations historically and currently return a profit. Time isn't infinite, 7 billion humans is a lot less than infinite competitors, 100 million corporations (made up number) is a lot less than that, the 1000 corporations that matter is even less, 200 nations is still less, and there is to our knowledge only one spacefaring intelligent species. It's important that pessimistic materialists like Morgan and Watts exist because while right accelerationism isn't inevitable it is a possible future and does represent the low-energy state that becomes inevitable with political apathy. Like with global warming, the death cultists are now shifting from "right accelerationism is a myth" to "right accelerationism is inevitable". Climate change is already happening so you should keep burning coal. The government will always be corrupt so you shouldn't run or vote. The universe will end in a quintillion years so you should stop eating.
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Jan 29, 2018 03:43
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ToxicFrog posted:It's the novella "Pots", available in the short story collection The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh. Ah thank you. Guess it’s not the book I was looking for. I suppose the search continues.
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Jan 29, 2018 05:08
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Microcline posted:The problem is that it takes a simple model (natural selection/economic competition), plugs in insane parameters (infinite competitors over an infinite period of time), and doesn't check it's results against history. It's impossible for a corporation to make a profit in an optimized free market because infinite competitors undercutting each other over an infinite period of time eliminates it, but corporations historically and currently return a profit. Those in perfect competition earn accounting profits, but not economic profits. Those in imperfect competition earn economic profits. History checks out.
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Jan 29, 2018 05:55
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Syzygy Stardust posted:Those in perfect competition earn accounting profits, but not economic profits. Those in imperfect competition earn economic profits. History checks out. Economic profit is what people care about, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I wouldn't expect it to either given that the conditions for perfect competition are a mix of the physically impossible (e.g. infinite buyers/sellers), the nonexistent (e.g. zero entry barriers), and the deliberately denied (e.g. symmetry of information).
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Jan 29, 2018 07:14
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Safety Biscuits posted:In a setting influenced by the French Enlightenment, what makes you think governments gave up power willingly? well, that was the story they told in the first half of Too Like the Lightning. It sounded extremely improbable from a top-down and bottom-up perspective, regardless
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Jan 29, 2018 08:17
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It should.
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Jan 29, 2018 12:09
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