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Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C Clarke A family friendly wholesome story. A bit too Disney for me. Early on the book pretty much establishes everyone as having 20 inches of plot armour and after that all the adventure goes out the window as the characters spend the whole book "ohh-ahh-ing over mainly inert alien machinery. Like you're not going to have me at the edge of my seat when the books equivalent of Wesley Crusher is plummeting towards his death on a hover bike. I already know he's going to be fine because that's the kind of book this is.
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Sep 1, 2018 10:55
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Now read the sequels  never read the sequels
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Sep 1, 2018 16:01
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Pyromaniac Ida posted:Starship Troopers - Robert A Heinlein On the upside: knowing how hosed up the book is makes one appreciate the movie's tone even more.
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Sep 1, 2018 16:25
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Evil Fluffy posted:On the upside: knowing how hosed up the book is makes one appreciate the movie's tone even more. I like how they put all the officers in nazi uniforms as a big gently caress you to ol Heinlein. 
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Sep 1, 2018 18:52
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The film was panned by critics as fascist propaganda when it came out. Verhoeven is a loving genius.
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Sep 1, 2018 19:13
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Pyromaniac Ida posted:I just went on a sci-fi binge over the last 2 months and had some very mixed results. I should apologize in advance for the brevity but I want to finish up my backlog. There's a newer translation that cleans up a lot of the mistakes of the first one--the first translator not only left out a bunch of stuff but also inserted anti-semitism in places, like referring to a character as "the cackling old Jew." Nemo was meant to be an Indian prince who lost everything after the Indian Mutiny but the translation ignored a lot of his important backstory and later adaptations often made him European, sometimes Polish nobility whose family were tortured by Russians, motivating him to leave the surface world.
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Sep 1, 2018 19:33
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General Battuta posted:Now read the sequels I remember Rama II being alright if you pretend the book ends at about the time the drive activates, stranding Nicole et al on board, but in that case you might as well play the 1996 video game based on it, which has most of the good parts from the book and none of the bad parts.
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Sep 1, 2018 22:58
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tooterfish posted:The film was panned by critics as fascist propaganda when it came out.
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Sep 1, 2018 23:22
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tooterfish posted:The film was panned by critics as fascist propaganda when it came out. I just realised the same guy who made Starship Troopers also made Black Book I loved that movie.
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Sep 2, 2018 06:37
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General Battuta posted:Now read the sequels If there's another name with Clarke on the jacket, it's just part of a big racket If Gentry Lee's the other name, destroy it with a cleansing flame
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Sep 2, 2018 08:30
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Pretty sure the book Starship Troopers is also satire, just a bit more subtle than the movie's Baby's First Satire feel. Also Forever War is an extremely good book about the alienation felt by servicemembers both between them and their command and the command's vague goals, and between them and the people at home they return to but can't always reconnect with. You gave up on it just as most of the actual commentary began. It even gets really progressive about gender/sexuality towards the end, especially for its time.
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Sep 2, 2018 14:00
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Internet Wizard posted:Pretty sure the book Starship Troopers is also satire, just a bit more subtle than the movie's Baby's First Satire feel. It's not, Heinlein was always very earnest about whatever his ideal future civilization was at the moment. What that ideal was changed over time, and Starship Troopers is honestly one of the least  books Heinlein produced. Even as a kid, I realized The Door Into Summer was hosed up.Heinlein was in many respects a brilliant sci-fi author, but his ideas about society were... special.
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Sep 2, 2018 14:38
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DACK FAYDEN posted:This thread is someplace that would probably know, what's the rights/other issue that results in Lord of Light not being available for Kindle? Is this book hard to find? I was about to donate a pb copy to charity, but if a goon wants it they can have it for postage (from the UK).
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Sep 2, 2018 14:44
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Internet Wizard posted:Also Forever War is an extremely good book about the alienation felt by servicemembers both between them and their command and the command's vague goals, and between them and the people at home they return to but can't always reconnect with. And then Haldeman rewrote the premise about half a dozen times. I actually rather like Forever Peace even if it is a bit like Haldeman crashed a Dan Brown plot into it.
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Sep 2, 2018 15:29
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Internet Wizard posted:Pretty sure the book Starship Troopers is also satire, just a bit more subtle than the movie's Baby's First Satire feel. Heinlein was (at the time) very open about his ideas of a proper society. Extra credits did 2 episodes on him that offer a lot of insight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaWMe5nC9SA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8AyxQ-J1no
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Sep 2, 2018 17:27
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Jedit posted:Is this book hard to find? I was about to donate a pb copy to charity, but if a goon wants it they can have it for postage (from the UK).
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Sep 2, 2018 18:13
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General Battuta posted:Now read the sequels I actually read both sequels as they came out, and I could not tell you a single thing that happened in either of them. I'm wondering now what combination of badness and/or boring they must be, because they apparently made zero impression on me and I could tell you the plot of (to pick the first thing that comes to mind) shlock D&D novel Azure Bonds off the top of my head in considerable detail. And I haven't read that for 30 years.
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Sep 2, 2018 18:35
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Deptfordx posted:I actually read both sequels as they came out, and I could not tell you a single thing that happened in either of them. Hey now, Azure Bonds was decent enough to get a Gold Box game made based on it. One of the better ones, as far as I can remember.
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Sep 2, 2018 19:12
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Deptfordx posted:I actually read both sequels as they came out, and I could not tell you a single thing that happened in either of them. There are three Rama sequels  .
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Sep 2, 2018 19:17
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General Battuta posted:Now read the sequels Rama 4 spoilers for the curious: god did it
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Sep 2, 2018 19:26
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It might have been 3  , like I said zero recollection.
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Sep 2, 2018 19:26
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Rendezvous with Rama was the fourth Rama book I read, as a child.
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Sep 2, 2018 19:27
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In the Rama sequels the protagonist has to convince her elderly catholic priest buddy to have a child with her to improve the genetic diversity of their tiny rear end human colony, and her husband is so mad he runs away. The child is born with cognitive deficits and eventually the aliens take him away because he’s not smart enough to meet God.
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Sep 2, 2018 21:38
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In less "what the poo poo?" book developments, I finished up the new Nicholas Eames and it's a hell of a sequel to Kings Of The Wyld but at the same time god drat does he yank the heart strings. Dude has talent. Loved the "dire chicken" in the beginning though. Slight spoiler, yes there is another meme line in the book and yes it makes no god damned sense like the last one. Still I can forgive him one line out of an entire book.
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Sep 2, 2018 21:52
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Jedit posted:It may interest anyone who follows the Hugos to know that Kickstarted In The Butt: A Chuck Tingle Digital Adventure is funding right now. They've already been funded to the tune of $85,000 and have nothing to show for it. It is either a scam or the people behind it are terminally incompetent.
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Sep 3, 2018 01:51
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:In less "what the poo poo?" book developments, I finished up the new Nicholas Eames and it's a hell of a sequel to Kings Of The Wyld but at the same time god drat does he yank the heart strings. Dude has talent. Bloody Rose is next on my list after I finish Gone Girl, pretty excited, I pre-ordered it immediately after finishing Kings of the Wyld.
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Sep 3, 2018 03:21
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It's pretty great. The only weird thing for me was him switching the protag from a guy to a girl (the original sample has Tom, but the book is about Tam.) but after I realized why it felt off, it was good. I was just like "Wait, this doesn't seem much like the sample I read... What the gently caress.... OH. poo poo. OK."
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Sep 3, 2018 04:15
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fritz posted:I thought it was 'fine' if you could get past the 'character is extremely super into an art form from ye olde earth' thing, but that kind of wrecked the whole thing for me. I assume you mean the classical music thing? I'm about 40% of the way through right now and I'm still liking it so far, it seems to be ramping up
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Sep 3, 2018 05:12
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Still can't believe that movie came out pre-9/11. Like, obviously much of the symbolism is relatively timeless (and one scene is shot-for-shot from Triumph of the Will) but it's so loving spot-on and it came out in 1997. I couldn't imagine that movie coming out right now (or any time after 9/11 and the US collectively losing its mind). It'd be too hard for people to not see it as making light of the hellish path the GOP is taking us down at a breakneck pace. Internet Wizard posted:Pretty sure the book Starship Troopers is also satire, just a bit more subtle than the movie's Baby's First Satire feel. He had bad views. Kinda like how Robert E. Howard was pretty racist even by the standards of his time and reading through Conan stories it isn't exactly subtle at times.
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Sep 3, 2018 05:21
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Evil Fluffy posted:
This isn’t really true. Yes, Howard was racist—dude was raised around a bunch of Odessa oilmen in the early 20th. He was most racist towards Mexicans which is no surprise for the area and his beliefs about civilization and its corrosive influence were directly linked to American frontier mythology. However, there are signs that his beliefs were changing as he grew up, and I use that phrasing deliberately, since he killed himself at age 30. He was racist from his background but I don’t think fear of the other was intrinsic to his character the way it was for Lovecraft. Conan has a sort of exasperated contempt for the weaklings of civilization but he still came down from the mountains to live among them. The depiction of the “savage” races (as opposed to the barbarians) is the most problematic part though he doesn’t ultimately state that their nature is fixed. It’s an assumption in the world that nations rise, decay and fall.
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Sep 3, 2018 05:55
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occamsnailfile posted:This isn’t really true. Yes, Howard was racist—dude was raised around a bunch of Odessa oilmen in the early 20th. He was most racist towards Mexicans which is no surprise for the area and his beliefs about civilization and its corrosive influence were directly linked to American frontier mythology. I feel like I’ve talked about this a half-dozen times before in this thread, but that didn’t make Howard less racist. It just meant that he had different views on what race was and which races were superior to, say, Lovecraft. Howard thought both civilisation and savagery were corruptive forces, and that ‘barbarians’, strong, vital frontiersmen, were the pinnacle of humanity. He also thought that evolution happened much faster than it actually did, so it was possible for certain races to gain and lose their humanity within mere centuries. So yeah, he was open to the idea that African ‘savages’ might have the spark of noble barbarism somewhere within them, but he didn’t see that as a reason not to hunt them like the animals they were until natural selection brought out their inner humanity. Howard was absolutely a racist, and a pretty extreme racist even by the standards of the time. It’s just that his ideas on race were loving weird.
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Sep 3, 2018 17:03
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Robert E Howard was a american pulp fiction writer who grew up during World War 1, and lived most of his life in Texas. Texas in the early twentieth century was super-duper racist. Howard channeled most of his energy into writing for any genre magazine that bought stories: mens adventure, horror stories, fantasy, cowboy/mountain man stories, pugilism, etc. The Conan stories were popular, but so were his pugilism and mountain man/cowboy stories, and above all Howard made good money from all the different stories he was able to sell. At his peak, Robert Howard was a popular author making $200k per year in 2018 money-terms, while his contempary HP Lovecraft was usually hovering just above the poverty line.
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Sep 4, 2018 14:01
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"nations rise, decay, and fall" sounds perfectly fine in the abstract, but feels a bit dodgy if you're gonna try and make some actual comparisons. if someone suddenly brings it up in conversation I'm gonna suspect that they have some dubious motivations. And by dubious, I mean fascist.
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Sep 4, 2018 15:07
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navyjack posted:I just finished Foundryside by (former goon) Robert Jackson Bennett and it’s pretty good, actually. Magic system as computer operating system and the MC is a bit of a hacker. It’s a trilogy, but RJB did a good job of sticking the ending of his last trilogy so I’m in. Finished this over the weekend as well. I enjoyed it. I wished it was more standalone-ish, but Jackson's last trilogy was actually a trilogy and it worked out well, so I guess I'm along for the ride here.
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Sep 4, 2018 15:17
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I had no idea Howard offed himself at 30, that's crazy for someone whose characters went on to be so influential. Wish he could have been around to see the Kull the Conquerer movie with Kevin Sorbo.
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Sep 4, 2018 15:19
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howard's last years were such a mess that it's pretty sad even though he was a gigantic piece of poo poo what a lonely person
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Sep 4, 2018 16:08
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Texas in the early twentieth century was super-duper racist. Unlike the enlightened Texas of today?
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Sep 4, 2018 16:13
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Are there any discussions from Howard and Lovecraft's contemporaries on their racial views? I know some of Lovecraft's friends took issue with his racism, and obviously modern critics are highly aware of it, but I've never seen anything from other writers at the time.
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Sep 4, 2018 16:17
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Strom Cuzewon posted:"nations rise, decay, and fall" sounds perfectly fine in the abstract, but feels a bit dodgy if you're gonna try and make some actual comparisons. if someone suddenly brings it up in conversation I'm gonna suspect that they have some dubious motivations. Fascists would never admit that their nation will fall, though.
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Sep 4, 2018 16:17
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Nazi architecture was literally designed to look super cool as ruins.
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Sep 4, 2018 16:22
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