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A human heart posted:Gibson is an awful writer my man ok
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Jan 25, 2017 02:22
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Gibson's prose can be amazing.
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Jan 25, 2017 07:34
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I really liked Spook Country and I keep meaning to get around to Zero History and The Peripheral. I like his more recent stuff generally, but the early books like Neuromancer really do not hold up well as anything but artefacts of a particular period of SF.
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Jan 25, 2017 07:35
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"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” - good prose, lol
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Jan 25, 2017 07:40
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That would be blue these days.
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Jan 25, 2017 07:42
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Notahippie posted:Alastair Reynolds has some of the scope and epic-ness and the analysis/deconstruction of social systems of Banks, but completely lacks the playfulness that Banks has. Behold.. the wedding gun!
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Jan 25, 2017 08:08
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A human heart posted:Compared to whom? He's got a knack for stripping language down to a core. I don't have any of my books on hand so can't quote, sorry.
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Jan 25, 2017 09:08
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A human heart posted:"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” - good prose, lol Ah, yeah. One line that is used to set tone and evoke references to noir fiction is totally useful as evidence that no other line in any book that Gibson wrote is worth a drat. Well done.
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Jan 25, 2017 14:03
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Murgos posted:Ah, yeah. One line that is used to set tone and evoke references to noir fiction is totally useful as evidence that no other line in any book that Gibson wrote is worth a drat. please do not feed the chronic threadshitter
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Jan 25, 2017 17:04
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I just realized, the game of Azad is basically a more elaborate form of Sid Meier's Civilization series, isn't it? When I read the book (which was a couple of years ago) I had never played the games, but now that I have and I'm reading up on Banks it just clicked.
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Jan 25, 2017 17:38
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Dude, have you read Complicity yet? Go read Complicity. Right now.
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Jan 25, 2017 18:01
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Gibson owns because everything he wrote came true (in the abstract if not the specifics) and because he has good prose which can stand up with ~real~ writers. Like Banks he ended up writing books which weren't science fiction, but while Banks did it because he could Gibson did it because then world caught up to him.
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Jan 25, 2017 18:17
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General Battuta posted:Gibson owns because everything he wrote came true (in the abstract if not the specifics) and because he has good prose which can stand up with ~real~ writers. Like Banks he ended up writing books which weren't science fiction, but while Banks did it because he could Gibson did it because then world caught up to him. We can only hope this comes true for Banks some time in the future too.
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Jan 25, 2017 19:05
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:We can only hope this comes true for Banks some time in the future too. It's 2017, welcome to the Affront!
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Jan 25, 2017 21:06
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divabot posted:It's 2017, welcome to the Affront! We're already the Affront, just without the cheerfulness. 
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Jan 25, 2017 21:10
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Well, Contact has us in its control group, so that's a non-starter. Maybe the Morthanveld will swing by. They seem pretty chill overall.
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Jan 25, 2017 21:27
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The best we can hope for is to be destroyed by a hegemonizing swarm event, it's pretty much what we deserve.
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Jan 25, 2017 21:33
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I would be totally down with assimilating into a culture-equiv society of galactic fish people
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Jan 25, 2017 23:49
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Taeke posted:I just realized, the game of Azad is basically a more elaborate form of Sid Meier's Civilization series, isn't it? When I read the book (which was a couple of years ago) I had never played the games, but now that I have and I'm reading up on Banks it just clicked. Banks played and was inspired by Civilization (see Excession), but Player of Games (1988) came out three years before Civilization (1991) and seven years before Catan (1995) kicked off the modern board game movement. If I had to guess, I'd suspect he started with 20th century chess culture and extrapolated from there.
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Jan 26, 2017 03:17
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The culture and structure around Azad always reminded me of The Glass Bead Game
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Jan 26, 2017 03:28
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Microcline posted:If I had to guess, I'd suspect he started with 20th century chess culture and extrapolated from there. With some Star Trek three-dimensional chess thrown in and taken to a crazy extreme, probably. I mean, it's space chess.
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Jan 26, 2017 09:39
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Wargames and wargaming culture has been around forever as well.
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Jan 26, 2017 09:46
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Microcline posted:Banks played and was inspired by Civilization (see Excession), but Player of Games (1988) came out three years before Civilization (1991) and seven years before Catan (1995) kicked off the modern board game movement. Yeah, I know it wasn't a direct inspiration, but I just noted how strikingly similar Civ and Azad are, especially now that in Civ 6 you've got the policy card system. I know Banks loved to come up with overly complicated games that were completely unmarketable at the time.
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Jan 26, 2017 12:37
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Wargames and wargaming culture has been around forever as well.  
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Jan 26, 2017 13:25
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:He's got a knack for stripping language down to a core. I don't have any of my books on hand so can't quote, sorry. "They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in new Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandi Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT." and ""You make me think about horses," he said finally. "Well," she said, as though she spoke from the depths of exhaustion, "they've only been extinct for thirty years." "No," he said, "their hair. The hair on their necks, when they ran." "Manes," she said, and there were tears in her eyes. "gently caress it." Her shoulders began to heave. She took a deep breath She tossed her empty Carta Blanca can down the beach. "It, me, what's it matter?" Her arms around him again. "Oh, come on, Turner Come on" And as she lay back, pulling him with her, he noticed something, a boat, reduced by distance to a white hyphen, where the water met the sky. That poo poo is perfect. A Human Heart is a useless fuckstain threadshitter.
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Jan 26, 2017 17:26
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Eh, that's from 1986, his newer stuff is better imo
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Jan 27, 2017 07:25
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Espedair Street as presented by the BCC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp6nf2Rkj5w
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Jan 27, 2017 16:51
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Uh yeah, Gibson is loving awesome. He once described a character's hair as a "black lacquer masterpiece." That has always stuck with me for some reason.
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Jan 27, 2017 19:51
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though i agree a lot of genre fiction has poor prose (i think grrm writes like poo poo and never goes anywhere so i could never get into his book) it's just funny when people poo poo on it because so does a lot of what it is considered literary writing.
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Jan 29, 2017 16:05
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Groovelord Neato posted:though i agree a lot of genre fiction has poor prose (i think grrm writes like poo poo and never goes anywhere so i could never get into his book) it's just funny when people poo poo on it because so does a lot of what it is considered literary writing. There are alot well written fiction titles, see the name of the wind and mistborn that come to my mind, yet all you hear about is the latest YA novel or over hyped thing to be produced into a series or movie.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:15
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Zaebo posted:There are alot well written fiction titles, see the name of the wind Do the opposite of what this guy says, Name of the Wind is complete tripe.
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Jan 30, 2017 09:34
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remigious posted:Uh yeah, Gibson is loving awesome. He once described a character's hair as a "black lacquer masterpiece." That has always stuck with me for some reason. he described hot women as 'gods own hood ornaments' not once but twice in his sprawl trilogy and really that's all the evidence you need that you should not kill your babies but should rather toss them gaily into an industrial shredder
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Jan 30, 2017 10:59
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Zaebo posted:There are alot well written fiction titles, see the name of the wind and mistborn that come to my mind, yet all you hear about is the latest YA novel or over hyped thing to be produced into a series or movie.
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Jan 31, 2017 06:02
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Zaebo posted:There are alot well written fiction titles, see the name of the wind and mistborn that come to my mind, yet all you hear about is the latest YA novel or over hyped thing to be produced into a series or movie. name of the wind is so bad someone in the book barn did a critical reading of it in its own thread.
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Jan 31, 2017 17:47
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Groovelord Neato posted:name of the wind is so bad someone in the book barn did a critical reading of it in its own thread. Would you mind linking to the posts? I made it 30 pages into The Name Of The Wind before I had to give up because the bad prose made me want to scream
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Jan 31, 2017 21:35
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The Name of the Wind thing (and it's been done to death both on SA and elsewhere) always boggles me, because despite it, loads, LOADS of people love the drat book, and I can't figure out why.
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Jan 31, 2017 21:43
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CARL MARK FORCE IV posted:Would you mind linking to the posts? I made it 30 pages into The Name Of The Wind before I had to give up because the bad prose made me want to scream https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3365216&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=122#post458895404
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Feb 1, 2017 17:08
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I'm hoping you all can help me for a bit. I'm finishing up my thesis on Banks (The Player of Games and Use of Weapons in particular) and I've got a question regarding UoW. I'll put everything in spoilers because... yeah, it's all about what makes UoW such a clever book so reading the following pretty much spoils it all. So a large part of my thesis is how play and games are featured in his works. The Player of Games is an obvious choice for foregrounded synecdochical games, but of course the way he plays with the reader is much more subtle in UoW. I'm looking for specific examples of textual ambiguity and other tricks which hint at the protagonist actually being Elethiomel (and not Zakalwe, as he is presented throughout). There's the many references to chairs and ships and stuff that indicate his trauma and fractured identity, but I'm really looking at those elements that really only come to light on a second reading. So far I've got the following, but I'm worried I'm missing some obvious ones. After a couple of rereads, and now reading specific sections over and over again, I'm in need of fresh eyes, so to say. The first and more obvious one is the prologue. Banks never directly references the protagonist as Zakalwe. Only ever is he 'he', 'the young man', etc. The only time he comes close is when he writes "The young man Cullis had called Zakalwe walked ...". This can be read as an implicit admission right from the start that Zakalwe is not actually Zakalwe, only called as such, but even if noticed is easily dismissed by the reader as a stylistic choice (it only being the prologue, after all, which authors often use to write differently). Then there's the first of the reverse chronological chapters, where we find the protagonist telling a story to his victim. He structures the story in more or less the same way Banks structures UoW, interweaving two narratives where nothing is as it seems. Just as Zakalwe is actually Elethiomel, he presents himself to the Ethnarc as someone from the Culture sent to relocate him, revealing only at the end he's there to kill him for his own reasons. Another instance that's fairly subtle is when Zakalwe/Elethiomel reflects on his youth with his adopted brother and sister. They hide away a gun out of boredom and when they want to play with it see infiltrators attacking the house. Elethiomel starts shooting to warn the house, a firefight breaks out and Darckense is hit. Then there's a paragraph break, and from (who we think is) Zakalwe continues "He was hit too, although he didn't know by what at the time." The paragraph break hides the fact that it was Elethiomel getting hit, and not Zakalwe, who was the focus of the preceding flashback. The last one I found to be useful is at the end of the penultimate chapter, last of the reverse chronological ones, when Zakalwe received the 'chair' and shoots himself in the head: His mouth was very dry. He pressed the gun hard against his temple and pulled the trigger. The besieged forces round the Staberinde broke out within the hour, while the surgeons were still fighting for his life. It was a good battle, and they nearly won. Here the implication, suggested by the author, is that the battle lost was the battle of the besieged forces when it is in fact the battle of the surgeons. It's clever, and obvious in hindsight, but Zakalwe died in that moment allowing Elethiomel to take on his identity. So anyway, those are the examples I found that seemed most useful for my argument that Banks plays with the reader in subtle, clever ways. Are there any other obvious moments I've missed?
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Feb 7, 2017 14:21
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I don't have my copy to hand, but aren't there some shenanigans aboard the cryo-ship where the ship hands explicitly tell you Zak is travelling under an assumed name?
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Feb 7, 2017 14:33
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Taeke posted:I'm hoping you all can help me for a bit. I'm finishing up my thesis on Banks (The Player of Games and Use of Weapons in particular) and I've got a question regarding UoW. I'll put everything in spoilers because... yeah, it's all about what makes UoW such a clever book so reading the following pretty much spoils it all. Use of Weapons spoilers: One of the childhood scenes describes Elethiomel as the better marksman, Zakalwe being more proficient with blades. I don't think we ever see the protagonist use a blade, and he loves his rifle. I'm fuzzier on the specifics, but I seem to recall that in moments of extremity (The "Light. Some light" passage prior to his beheading, his time in the caldera, his dream-leaf experience), there are points where he kind of probes at the edges of questioning his identity, each time recoiling from it as too painful or too dangerous Edit: those might not be what you're going for. They're not really tricks of prose in the same way that your examples are. Edit again: in case it is something you can work with, there's this from the pre-beheading deliruim scene (chapter X): quote:Where am I again? Crash. Funeral. Fohls. Toast Museum fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 14:37
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