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Evil Fluffy posted:The only useful posts I can remember BotL making were the overly detailed chapter-by-chapter takedowns of Name of the Wind and Patrick Rothfuss's terrible writing in general. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3833655&pagenumber=1
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Mar 17, 2019 22:31
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:As quoted by BoTL: So, basically a Tom Clancy novel.
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Mar 17, 2019 23:01
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There's been enough ban drama in TBB already lately, and I don't want to exacerbate it unless it's absolutely necessary. Fair enough. Not everyone uses patreon(?, did I spell that right) though. Finally gave up on a David Brin book. Earth @1990 with a premise "Earth : 50+ yrs in the future", it aged badly in the 29 years since it was published. Even attempting to view it as parody (which has saved multiple books + authors for me) failed. The space shuttle program that was 400% more efficient than in real life(because PR + middle management didn't take up 30%/40% of the NASA budget in-book i guess versus real life), the poo poo-talking gives no fucks nobel award winning scientist whom is ALWAYS RIGHT, massive govt funded bio-arks across the world yet kyoto accords were too expensive to implement/never took place, and finally the internet (think prodigy online circa 1989 with better bandwidth). quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 03:03
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Existence is 80% a rewrite of Earth updating to fix the obsolete predictions.
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Mar 18, 2019 03:12
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I finished the raven tower - expected to dislike it more based on the drama in here and while I found the concept a little grating I was more upset by the very thin story. Still I did enjoy it enough and I find Anne Leckie's approach to sex and gender refreshing.
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Mar 18, 2019 07:06
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For those that don't prefer Patreon (like me) https://secure.somethingawful.com/products/donate.php is also available and non-recurring. Thread content: Recently finished Sundiver and that was an interesting little piece that holds up fairly well. I'm not going to fault Brin for failing to be a prophet but one scene made me giggle a bit when a major plot point hinged on the protagonist not having access to a phone or a camera, which are of course separate, bulky objects. A tiny bit of weirdness about women but compared to many of his contemporaries I can ignore that.
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Mar 18, 2019 10:32
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occamsnailfile posted:For those that don't prefer Patreon (like me) https://secure.somethingawful.com/products/donate.php is also available and non-recurring. Alternatively, you could buy me a new avatar  (I know I know I just need to get to a point where I'm not broke so I can fix it. I need to spend less money on books and more on spine money) Regarding Sundiver, I've tried it twice and never gotten into it - but I want to keep trying because the rest of the series sounds amazing. I've been told that it's actually a murder mystery. Is it?
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Mar 18, 2019 12:25
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StrixNebulosa posted:Alternatively, you could buy me a new avatar Just skip past the dolphin stuff in Sundiver, and if that fails to work, just read a in-depth summary from wikipedia. Reading sundiver is not required to get into the rest of his Uplift Universe series....sundiver covers early dolphin uplift, the main character in it is mentioned a grand total one or six times in the other books, but the refrigeration laser in it does reappear in the final book if you're a completion-ist Brin is interesting because he has a low boredom threshold so characters rarely appear for more than two books, settings usually change from book to book, and finally he doesn't write awkward blow-by-blow(lick-by-lick) sex scenes like Richard K. Morgan/Peter Hamilton.
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Mar 18, 2019 13:32
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Finally gave up on a David Brin book. Earth @1990 with a premise "Earth : 50+ yrs in the future", it aged badly in the 29 years since it was published. I remember really enjoying that when I read it back then but haven't revisited it since and yeah, I can see how it would be very much a product of its time.
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Mar 18, 2019 14:10
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I liked the dolphin stuff in Sundiver well enough, but I guess I was thinking of the then-existant stereotypes of dolphins as these friendly sea-buddies who help swimmers in distress or are Flipper or whatever and Brin had them as foul-mouthed whale cultists. Either way though I totally read it out of completionism, I wanted to read the other Uplift books.
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Mar 18, 2019 15:49
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It wasn't the dolphins that stopped me, it was the bizarre Mexican border stuff that stopped me.
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Mar 18, 2019 15:51
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StrixNebulosa posted:It wasn't the dolphins that stopped me, it was the bizarre Mexican border stuff that stopped me. Don't even remember the mexican border stuff in Sundiver honestly. Did you ever finish book 3 of Corporation War? MacLeod's first book, the Star Fraction, is so much better and despite being 24 yrs old, is hella-relevant given whats been going on in 2019.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:09
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General Battuta posted:Another good one is David Weber orders a pizza i remember optimistically thinking that timothy zahn's breezy pulp stylings would...even out weber's idiosyncrasies, on their collab alas this did not transpire as such!
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Mar 18, 2019 18:02
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Evil Fluffy posted:The only useful posts I can remember BotL making were the overly detailed chapter-by-chapter takedowns of Name of the Wind and Patrick Rothfuss's terrible writing in general. Useful as in who the hell cares about a bad book series enough to do a chapter take down. Or a good ones for that matter. BotL never grasped the fact that the time he spent on dissecting bad books could have been better spent on reading more and better books. On a more relevant thing, I started The Goblin Emperor and is kinda enjoying it. Is it court intrigue the whole way through? Cause while the writing and plot is decent, court intrigue bores the hell out of me.
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Mar 18, 2019 18:52
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There are lengthy digressions into the power of friendship, but there's a whole lot of court intrigue.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:02
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Don't even remember the mexican border stuff in Sundiver honestly. I'm not interested in being told that Ken Macleod's work sucks again today. I enjoyed the Corp Wars trilogy and would be up for rereading it in the future.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:08
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Cardiac posted:Useful as in who the hell cares about a bad book series enough to do a chapter take down. I found it extremely helpful to learn about why exactly a book fails. If you're at all interested in the mechanics of writing, either due to an abstract interest or from being a writer yourself, that sort of knowledge is great to have, and hard to come by. Genre criticism is often as thin as genre writing itself, just plot summations followed by an almost-arbitrary end statement of "I didn't find it believable", "I didn't like the characters", etc. Algis Budrys used to do some excellent work for Galaxy and then F&SF back in the 60s-80s (I'd strongly recommend getting his collected criticism). We haven't had a solid voice like that since, with review work of the sort found on (say) Tor.com being quite shallow. BotL in that light was really refreshing, foibles aside.
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Mar 18, 2019 19:48
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StrixNebulosa posted:I'm not interested in being told that Ken Macleod's work sucks again today. I enjoyed the Corp Wars trilogy and would be up for rereading it in the future. Uh what? Wanted to know if you had finished corp war 3, and your take on the series as a whole...sorry if you took my question that way. MacLeod's first book, Star Fraction, covers lots of the same themes as Corp Wars while having a very raw/angry tone to the writing that MacLeod never quite reclaimed. Star Fraction the book takes place in a balkanized/fragmented to extreme yet kinda plausible in 2019 measures UK, with lots of "oh thats very 2019", yet it was written in 1995. Xotl posted:We haven't had a solid voice like that since, with review work of the sort found on (say) Tor.com being quite shallow. Always thought that Tor.com exists to sell books. Shallow review work at tor.com keeps 99% of everyone who visits there happy, anything other than that is bad for business?Deep reviews would be nice, but take time + potentially drive away offended authors/fans from tor.com quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 20:01
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yea i feel like you shouldn't be looking to a publisher's website for criticism to begin with as it is I think you've got to cobble your genre criticism together from some combination of blogs and academia, there's not really a broadsheet or anything that does it well I wish benjanun sriduangkaew's blog was still running although i understand why she felt it was best to shut it down!
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Mar 18, 2019 22:04
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PupsOfWar posted:yea i feel like you shouldn't be looking to a publisher's website for criticism to begin with She's the one who posted death and rape threats repeatedly against POC and women writers. I can see why you'd miss her.
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Mar 18, 2019 22:08
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Uh what? It feels like every time I mentioned Corp Wars, you had to tell me again how his earlier work is better and I'm a little tired of it. I mean you just did it again in this post! I like tor.com for occasionally having cool articles about random subjects - like this 5 books about communicating with alien species - there are surprisingly good recs in here, especially of older genre works written by women. On the other hand I hate that tor.com doubles as a Marvel movie/tv show advertising feed, because damnit, I come to tor for books, not movies.
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Mar 18, 2019 22:08
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pseudanonymous posted:She's the one who posted death and rape threats repeatedly against POC and women writers. I can see why you'd miss her. Didn't the truth turn out to be quite a lot more complex and messy than that? Basically, she adopted a severely abrasive persona and ran into a largely white group of writers who proceeded to try and run her off the Internet, and it was genuinely unclear what she'd actually done and what was racist, cliquey assholes making poo poo up (especially the infamous 'raped by dogs' thing).
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Mar 18, 2019 22:19
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Mar 18, 2019 22:42
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Darth Walrus posted:Didn't the truth turn out to be quite a lot more complex and messy than that? Basically, she adopted a severely abrasive persona and ran into a largely white group of writers who proceeded to try and run her off the Internet, and it was genuinely unclear what she'd actually done and what was racist, cliquey assholes making poo poo up (especially the infamous 'raped by dogs' thing). Honestly, I don't think we'll ever know what really happened, the only one who does is Sriduangkaew, who used multiple screen names and appears to have played a shell game. Oh right someone impersonated her. “you illiterate gently caress!” yes, “eat poo poo and die because your taste is poo poo! Are things she admits to saying in her apology. I’d like to negotiate the world through a language other than rage and hate and force. I’d like to become someone who deserves even a tenth of the compassion that’s been shown to me Again from yet another apology. This is what she had to say to Peter Watts: Me, on February 17th, 2012 at 11:07 am Said: You are a pathetic loving turd nobody reads. Maybe the ROH owner and her friends (about 30 other bloggers or so) will start eviscerating your verbal dysentery instead? I hope so. I would do it myself, but life is too short to waste it wading through horribly written crap, you know? Stop screeching about freedom of speech and be thankful that we can’t rip off your scrotum with a rusty meat hook via the Web (yet). Maybe you should eat Bakker’s feces and then give him a blowjob (complete with swallowing) if you love him so much? Bitch slaps and kicks with a spike-toed boot, -Me She doesn't in any way seem to be worth anyone's time to me. I'm not gonna spend hours trying to sort through the SFF equivalent of gamergate.
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Mar 18, 2019 22:44
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PupsOfWar posted:yea i feel like you shouldn't be looking to a publisher's website for criticism to begin with Regardless of whether we should or not, that's where some of it is coming from these days (though it's not all tied to books they're publishing: they try to be a fantasy/SF hub on top of their natural self-promotion). Jo Walton's articles and various genre classic readthroughs come to mind.
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Mar 18, 2019 22:57
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StrixNebulosa posted:It feels like every time I mentioned Corp Wars, you had to tell me again how his earlier work is better and I'm a little tired of it. I mean you just did it again in this post! Ok fair enough...stop giving StrixNebulosa book recs, will do. Always have to be reminded that tor.com exists along with other book publisher sites, same goes for book review sites. Most of the stuff I've read recently has come from randomly browsing the stacks at libraries or bookstores/used bookstores. Came across a cool non-fiction book which discusses hidden messages/invisible ink/steganography from prehistory t0 modern day and have been enjoying it so far.
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Mar 18, 2019 23:20
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Ok fair enough...stop giving StrixNebulosa book recs, will do. .... Now you're taking my protest out of context and being rude in the process.
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Mar 18, 2019 23:21
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Evil Fluffy posted:The only useful posts I can remember BotL making were the overly detailed chapter-by-chapter takedowns of Name of the Wind and Patrick Rothfuss's terrible writing in general. Cardiac posted:BotL never grasped the fact that the time he spent on dissecting bad books could have been better spent on reading more and better books. Let's not have any more botlchat for a while, thanks. Now is time for books. pseudanonymous posted:I can see why you'd miss her. drat dude. Let's not make it personal ok? pseudanonymous posted:Honestly, I don't think we'll ever know what really happened, the only one who does is Sriduangkaew, who used multiple screen names and appears to have played a shell game. Yeah, let's not go there either unless it somehow relates directly to discussion of an actual book. We don't need to import drama from elsewhere, we've been perfectly capable of manufacturing our own lately. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 23:42
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StrixNebulosa posted:.... Now you're taking my protest out of context and being rude in the process. Rudeness was not intended. Anytime I mention Ken MacLeod, I usually mention his earlier work. That seems to annoy/trigger you. So I'll just stop recommending books directly at you, and everything can go back to normal in this thread. Ironically, I do want to recommend that non-fiction book I just mentioned to other people in this thread, but.. I guess send me a PM if you want the name of that book/author. It's pretty good so far, and goes into detail what David Kahns Codebreakers covered briefly. Otherwise I'll remention the book tomorrow when I get deeper into it. CryptoLog #1 was pretty good, despite the redacting and aged content of the articles in it. Even the pencil art cover sketch was fun scifi-ish in the "Asimov meets NASA" sense.
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Mar 18, 2019 23:42
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StrixNebulosa posted:there are surprisingly good recs in here, especially of older genre works written by women. Thanks in large part due to the efforts of James Nicoll, whom I'm glad to see is getting work.
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Mar 18, 2019 23:58
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whenever older women-written genre fiction comes up, I think about the large volume of it (primarily golden age and a bit later) that's sorta hidden because of authors' use of pseudonyms, gender-neutral initials, etc. Or incidents where credit was stolen from them. I think it would be useful to have a blog or website dedicated to essentially "SFF by women that you didn't know was by women", but I have never found one. beyond printed works, there's a worthwhile conversation to be had about, say, marcia lucas' heavy editorial work on Star Wars, margaret sixel's editorial work on Fury Road, etc, which I think people generally ~know about but which don't have a real permanent place in the discourse. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 00:38
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On the topic of SFF criticism, Strange Horizons posts regular long-form critical essays, but it's on whatever Strange Horizons contributors find interesting which does not always match up with 'wider audiences' I guess. They are one of the few outlets that will do criticism on short story collections and even individual short stories. Ruthanna Emry's Lovecraft rereads and Jo Walton's Hugo columns were both good content on tor.com but that kind of thing seems to be in the minority, and I get it, it's a house-organ feed.
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Mar 19, 2019 02:53
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fritz posted:Thanks in large part due to the efforts of James Nicoll, whom I'm glad to see is getting work. I agree -- Nicoll's blog is a great source of reviews and he makes a point of promoting non-white/non-male authors.
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Mar 19, 2019 04:24
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pseudanonymous posted:She doesn't in any way seem to be worth anyone's time to me. I'm not gonna spend hours trying to sort through the SFF equivalent of gamergate. Also the SFF equivalent of gamergate was the sad puppies/rabid puppies kerfuffle. But we just call them all the alt-right or neo-nazis now.
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Mar 19, 2019 04:29
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pseudorandom name posted:Also the SFF equivalent of gamergate was the sad puppies/rabid puppies kerfuffle. Not merely they equivalent, GamerGate and the Rabid Puppies were in many cases the same people.
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Mar 19, 2019 07:30
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Speaking of the Sad Puppies, I'm at the point in John C. Wright's Eschaton series where in the author's personal life he was transitioning from being an rear end in a top hat atheist to being an rear end in a top hat christian and it's pretty funny watching his mental gymnastics as he clumsily retcons away all the anti-religious themes of the earlier books.
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Mar 19, 2019 11:10
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Speaking of ladies who write scifi/fantasy stuff, Dianna Wynne Jones is cool and people should read her books.
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Mar 19, 2019 11:35
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Chairchucker posted:Speaking of ladies who write scifi/fantasy stuff, Dianna Wynne Jones is cool and people should read her books.
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Mar 19, 2019 12:01
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CryptoLog #2 (September 1974) wasn't bad, actually pretty interesting. The cover-art was the same from issue #1, however redaction was mostly full pages, not lots of piecemeal redactions so the readibility/flow of CryptoLog #2 was much better. Articles covered the gamut from an awkward "intern at the NSA" promo to dead language puzzles found on tombstones/etc to a 2.5 page I'mNotMad rant about Lexicography to a guide for better classification via colored pencil colors to systems to a fairytale parable about sorting through your garbage to a topical Language news section that had a book review/recommendation for a extremely hosed up afrikaan language book called KENNIS VAN DIE AAND. In case people think I'm making all this stuff up, I'm not. Check the pic links below. CryptoLogs are/were declassified https://i.imgur.com/oEinNBR.jpg https://i.imgur.com/sdh50Cp.jpg
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Mar 19, 2019 13:43
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An Officer's Duty by Jean Johnson: apparently Einstein or the people that followed him made a mistake, and FTL travel is possible. Is the author going to explain this? hahahaha no I know I know 98% of all sci-fi books go "FTL is possible" but this is the most brazen "yeah screw science let's go" moment I've ever read.
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Mar 19, 2019 15:40
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