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The Black Company series by Glen Cook As a regular in the TG forum, so many things get compared to them, especially when anything dark fantasy gets brought up, sometimes connected to videogames, too, like Myth. But you know what no one ever really mentions? How much loving sexual violence and creepery is in these books. How one of them stars a character who's introduced while having a threesome with underage girls. There is absolutely some interesting stuff in it, and the way it's written and presented is notably different from most other books I've read, enough to make it slightly novel, and one of them really has an eerie, dream-like quality to it that I appreciate even if it made sticking with it a challenge. But if I had known what I was in for in terms of the author being kind of a horny creeper, I probably wouldn't have even started on the series. Everything people say reminds them of the Black Company books reminds them, thankfully, of the good parts, so those remain relatively unimpeachable, but the actual books could get tossed in a landfill and little would be lost.
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Mar 10, 2023 23:24
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I just finished reading Starfish by Peter Watts and it was like someone put a bunch of sci-fi authors I knew into a blender, then strained out all the good parts. I should not have listened to whoever told me that this was the good Peter Watts book. Also rarely have I read a book which gave me such a strong feeling that the author lived to murder sealife. So much gratuitous animal killing.
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Nov 7, 2023 00:06
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I read Old Nathan by David Drake, sent to me as a gift for Christmas. It's a short collection of five stories about Nathan Ridgeway: Old West Wizard, and I have established that there's a special hell reserved for authors who write out accents phonetically, by the fifth one there were some bits of dialogue I genuinely could not make out what the gently caress people were saying, as an ESL reader it was vile. But the four first stories were solid enough, though when I was later told that Drake was friends with Le Guin, I was not surprised. There's some degree of disdain for normal story structures: stories have beginnings and things happen, but there aren't clearly capped ends, sometimes Nathan just decides he doesn't give a poo poo and walks away from what's happening, and Nathan himself doesn't really have anything resembling a character arc in any sense. The fifth one felt out of place, sadly, which felt like a bit of an unfortunate way to end things. While the first four had a kind of fun vibe of "trickster wizard local legend," the last one felt like where Nathan somehow slipped up and became a protagonist who had a story of his own rather than being in other people's stories, which killed a bit of the, hah, magic.
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Jan 8, 2024 09:47
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Having just finished Empire of the Ants by Bernard Weber I feel like I'm going to return to never reading any French book more recent than the Count of Monte Cristo. It's meandering, weird, seems to have no point, has nothing approaching a traditional story structure, the ants are written more like real people than the humans are and the author is some sort of hardcore racist who considers understanding foreigners like Tibetans, Hindus or the Japanese to be as complex and impossible as understanding ants.
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Apr 16, 2024 15:45
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Recently finished Cycle of the Werewolf and The Institute by Stephen King. Cycle of the Werewolf is probably one of his better books because it keeps itself relatively short and self-contained while implying a lot of things and letting the reader's mind do some work. I like some of King's longer books, but he has a tendency to sometimes get distracted when he writes them and bungle the endings. Not enough time for it here, pretty solid. The Institute feels like Dean Koontz' spirit possessed King for a while, which I don't mean as a good thing. I mean that it feels like one of Koontz's modern stories about STRONG MILITARY MANS SAVING THE WORLD ARGH but coming from the other side of the political spectrum instead with STRONG MILITARY MANS RUINING THE WORLD ARGH but the same amount of pointless focus on military gear and details of weapons, combined with some, dare I say it, cringeworthy self-dating in constantly referencing specific modern-day media that just... I don't know, it just feels weird and not like it belongs there. Anyway, the basic story outline is fine, but the cracks start showing once you fill in the gaps since it requires a kid of such titanic intellect that even multi-billion-dollar global conspiracies cannot out-think or out-plan him, which is largely accomplished not by actually making him super smart but by making everyone around him super stupid and sloppy. Apparently no one else ever thought to, say, crawl under a fence. Most of the characters also feel very... superficial? Few of them ever reveal anything interesting under pressure, draw back from their original convictions or otherwise have any of that depth of character/character development which I feel is usually one of King's stronger suits. Ultimately it was good enough to keep me reading to the end to see what was going to happen, but not good enough that I think I'll ever go back to read it a second time, which most other King books(Dark Tower excepted) have managed. Lex Talionis posted:Minor correction: Carmack left Facebook a few years ago to found an AI startup. Essentially the AI equivalent of Armadillo Aerospace, I guess. He is under the impression he can create AGI with millions of dollars of VC (as opposed to the billions of dollars big companies are spending training LLMs). Don't forget he also supported some alt-right dorks associated with something called "BasedCon" a few years back. The man is an rear end in a top hat.
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Apr 29, 2024 10:26
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