|
So question for Tolkien fans... My general experience with people online who don't "get" Lord of the Rings is that someone says "just read The HObbit." And if you really liked LOTR, read The Silmarillion. I guess I'm weird because I absolutely struggled to get through Fellowship. All the crap in the Shire and the stuff on the way to the Prancing Pony (excluding Bombadil, who was great) bored the ever loving gently caress out of me. Things took a definite turn for the better with the Council of Elrond but the book still defeated me about four or five times before I could complete it. But The Silmarillion? It kept me captivated from start to finish. The genesis of Ea, the massive events that took place before and during the First Age, the Fall of Numenor in the Second, all of it kept me wanting for more. I finished it one read through and thoroughly enjoyed myself. As it so happens I thought Turin was the best character, namely because he got the most legitimate focus and character development of anyone else in the book. Everyone else received sort of broad strokes characterization while the part with Turin was very focused on him. So my question - should I go for The Hobbit or the Children of Hurin?
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2013 22:45
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 00:35 |
|
|
I have a technical question about science fiction. I've heard of "hard" and "soft" science fiction and I was just wondering what MichaeL Crichton's Jurassic Park constitutes as? As was typical of Crichton he went into extensive detail about the science behind everything and the technology available to be used for the process. It's one reason I genuinely enjoy his novels - I never knew we had all this cool stuff in the 80s like we see in Sphere and JP. Also I don't care what anyone else, I like Jurassic Park the book more than the movie. Fact is, it simply explains things better. And even if the long-winded technical stuff bores you, the book still has better action scenes than the movie because Spielberg, unlike Crichton, didn't realize that these are not animals, they are horrific abominations of science. Hence why dinos get shot and blown to bits in the books while God forbid a human ever hurt a dino in the movie. I think I'm due for my yearly re-read of JP actually... NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Jun 30, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2014 18:39
|
|
|
See this is what I was kinda confused about. Science fiction doesn't have to all be laser beams and robots and spaceships. I thought it just had to involve using science in, uh, a fictional way. I mean, I'm a fan of 50s movies. Them! is a personal favorite, a classic of sci-fi cinema as far as I know, and that takes place in the modern world only with the threat of Atomic radiation mutating ants. I don't see how that's any more science-y than Jurassic Park.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2014 20:08
|
|
|
I have a simple question. Jurassic Park is a sci-fi novel, right? I just feel like last time I looked in here and asked about Crichton someone said to post about it in a Thrillers thread and I don't get it. The book is pretty much all about science used in a fictional manner.... The movie cut most of the harder stuff so it was all Newman's fault but the novel has a lot of detail.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2016 21:20
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Yes, it is an SF novel. Crichton played very fast and loose with scientific concepts, but I think he's great at coming up with a killer premise and writing a thriller about it. He sucks at endings, but that's natural, because he's all about the questions. I feel the same way. I truly enjoyed him as a writer. Well, most of his books. Sphere was my personal favorite. Actually, since I'm here, can anyone recommend a similar novel? One thing I really liked about Sphere was the idea of a "first contact team" made up of various specialists and focusing on that team. I think that was really neat and made a lot of sense and I haven't seen or read much else with that. Well, I don't think I've rad anything else like that, actually. Ornamented Death posted:I guess it would depend on how you phrased the question? Jurassic Park is unabashedly science fiction, but something like State of Fear is a thriller and the John Lange books are crime novels. Well I've mainly read his sci-fi stuff. And Congo. I don't know what the gently caress Congo is. Fighting off gorilla-men with lasers is what Congo was.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2016 21:53
|
|
|
Classic sci-fi goons, I need your help. Was Robert Heinlein a fascist or at least was Starship Troopers a pro-fascist novel? My friends elsewhere can't agree and I haven't read the book. All I know is the film which Verhoeven supposedly made to satire the book.
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2016 04:22
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:The answer is basically "yes and no." No, this post is just the right size. I wanted a detailed explanation, thank you.
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2016 04:56
|
|
|
So I was reading Brave New World and decided I'd like more of that but maybe a different style of writer. I liked the whole engineered a new breed of human and human culture stuff. Could anyone recommend any other books like that? It would appear to be only a sci-fi thing but maybe it can also be done in fantasy, I wouldn't know.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2017 11:50
|
|
|
90s Cringe Rock posted:Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive? Hm, that sounds promising, thank you. I suppose I might also just want to read Herbert's Dune series in general given it's a classic and all and does at least have some of this "engineered human" stuff I think.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2017 14:07
|
|
|
I just want to thank everyone for all the book suggestions. I'm gonna be preoccupied for a while. However, I wanted to get the insight of more knowledgeable people than myself on something. i was recently reading the t Libertarianism thread and they were discussing its uncomfortable popularity in sci-fi. Now any time uncomfortable political themes is brought up with regards to science fiction literature, Robert Heinlein is invoked. Starship Troopers was fascist and then he wrote some later book that is apparently a Libertarian utopia. Well I went and did some Googling to get other hot takes on this. There is apparently a whole award for Libertarian Science Fiction. Has anyone read this Niven guy because one of his books - going just by the basic description I read - was like WTF. Apparently LA descends into race riots (oh dear) and so they have to build a place for all the good people to live. (OH DEAR) There is some highly confusing overlap between "I want no government in my life" and "I want to fantasize about the days of yore when the government could stab me in the face with impunity." Anyway, in the course of my researches, I came upon an article on JSTOR titled "Fascism and Science Fiction." I had to buy a whole issue of Science Fiction Studies because apparently JSTOR doesn't actually let you read all the articles on the site, which defeats the whole goddam point of the site in my view but anyway.... Aaron Santesso posted:Fascism may be understood on one level as a narrative, one that fascist politicians and artists alike have used innumerable times over the past century. For decades, fascist literature—from the work of Gabriele D’Annunzio through the Nazi Schollen-roman [“novel of the soil”] to the journalism of Robert Brasillach—emphasized the “superior” class at the top of society, the importance of race, the nobility of sacrifice in defense of one’s people, and so on—these ideas were connected into a recognizable story about decline and rebirth. It is only natural that this story was told most clearly and forcefully in imaginative literature; by the 1930s, there was a certain mass-production feel to such works. “Blubo” (“blood and soil”) novels—the German fascist equivalent of pulp fiction—were churned out with regularity, always telling more or less the same story revolving around praise of traditional lifestyles and the perils of international urbanism and Jewish bankers. 19 The fascist author has his or her goals and a familiar strategy by which to pursue them: to outline the threat of the alien as opposed to the pure; to emphasize the necessity of unifying and fighting against the threat; to promote “action” as the most appropriate response to any crisis; to celebrate those who are willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the people; to describe the elite class and great leader who will emerge to lead the masses in their struggle. Indeed, we might reduce virtually all of these works to one relatively simple master-plot: a once-great society is now threatened and degraded by inhuman, impure, and hive-minded outsiders (who often blend into the society, corrupting it from the inside); a special, enormously gifted (to the point of being virtually superhuman) individual rises up and begins to fight back in order to restore the society’s original purity and greatness; this fight requires a steely society- wide resolve, a restriction if not outright rejection of democracy, and ideally militarization. The ideal society is imagined as recapturing earlier values and independence—but, ironically, that restoration will be pursued via the use of new, balance-altering technology Mr. Santesso makes it clear he is not attacking individual authors like Heinlein. Rather his point is to address whether or not a genre can have political inclinations written into its very tropes. He brings up epic poetry and states they naturally lend themselves to imperialism. He is contesting the (apparently very popular) idea that science fiction is inherently Progressive. quote:That conservative pulp sf is partly aligned with fascist thought is plain enough. More interesting and more subtle is the way this basic structure, and these familiar tropes, begin to infect other strains of writing influenced by pulp sf, so that even consciously progressive science fiction unintentionally offers up pseudo-fascist patterns and themes. A high-profile example is Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (1935). The title character is a superman of the highest order—as a small boy he reminds those who watch him “of a little old man with snowy hair condescending to play with young gorillas” (19). The young John Wainwright gradually becomes more insistent on his supremacy—beating and humiliating a friend, for example, and causing the friend to confess that he recognized John’s “right” to do so, given his own evident inferiority. While still young, John sniffs out other similarly superior individuals, forming a team of “supernormals” who offer each other “companionship of a calibre Apparently "Heinlein is a fascist" has just been an idea in everyone's head for decades. quote:This kind of labeling was at work at least since the 1940s (Under Cover, etc.), but it was logical that the seeking out and condemning of far-right overtones had its heyday during the counterculture era of the 1960s, when several authors spoofed the political overtones of earlier pulp sf—the most famous such parody being Norman Spinrad’s Iron Dream (1972). Spinrad imagined an alternate history in which Hitler failed to become a fascist dictator, and instead, naturally enough, became a science-fiction writer. Hitler’s sf “novel” (“Lord of the Swastika”) contains all the familiar tropes—familiar to both fascism and sf: an obsession with “freakish,” “monstrous,” and collectivized outsiders, with futuristic technology as a sign of enlightenment (or, alternatively, as proof of “alien” decadence and weakness), with the construction of a myth-system that places one chosen culture at its center, and so on. As in other such works, a utopian society is threatened with invasion and can only be saved by a superman figure (Spinrad’s hero “Trueman”)—indeed, the hero unites an entire race of “tall, blond, blue-eyed supermen” (220). Ursula Le Guin quickly identified it as a parody of “the kind of story best exemplified by Robert Heinlein, who believes in the Alpha Male, in the role of the innately (genetically) superior man, in the heroic virtues of militarism, in the desirability and necessity of authoritarian control, etc.” (“On Norman Spinrad” 41). Speaking of Le Guin.... quote:Le Guin is indeed an intriguing case: she has made her name by writing anti-fascist pieces, often parodying Gernsbackian hard sf—but she herself dwells, in more than one work, on the idea that a “special” individual might emerge, reconnect with the traditional ways, enlighten those oppressed by new, foreign ideology, and, emboldened by sacred authority and the power of the land, lead the people to rise up against the impure outsiders and their foreign concepts. In The Telling (2000), to take one example, we are presented with a planet corrupted by an alien ideology (collectivist and bureaucratic, and likened to the “communocapitalism” of twentieth-century Earth). The cities have been transformed into hives of conformity, with everyone wearing official uniforms and patronizing government shops—a dreary existence lightened only by official gymnastic displays (“hundreds of tiny children in red uniforms kicking and jumping in unison to shrill cheery music” [29]). Urban party “officials” and “bureaucrats” have set out to root out “reactionary ideology” (212) in the I find this absolutely fascinating. It's kind of that whole Horseshoe Theory thing. To be Leftist is, at least in my mind, to be anti-Imperialist. Consequently this leads to a sort of Nativism which is a concept usually associated with the Right. Native Americans and the like are the poor victims of evil foreigners and we should celebrate how great they were before they were brtually destroyed. Fighting off the evil hordes for the sake of a pure, unsullied people is a narrative that fits very snugly both the Left and the Right. To conclude: quote:Given his influence on progressive sf criticism, we may give the last word to Jameson, and in particular his celebration of the Brechtian notion of plumpes Denken (“crude thinking”), which he defines as the postulate that even the most subtle, academic, or experimental “neo-Marxist” works must contain a core element of “crude” or “vulgar” Marxism in order to qualify as “Marxist” at all. Jameson alludes to plumpes Denken in order to make a point about science fiction: “Something like this may have its equivalent in SF, and I would be tempted to suggest that even within the most devoted reader of ‘soft’ SF—of sociological SF, ‘new wave’ aestheticism, the ‘contemporaries’ from Dick to the present—there has to persist some ultimate ‘hard-core’ commitment to old-fashioned ‘scientific’ SF for the object to preserve its identity and not to dissolve back into Literature, Fantasy, or whatever” (Jameson 245). Might it also be the case that the fascist energies and ideas of pulp sf are precisely the kind of identity-confirming “core” or definitional element that makes it possible to speak of “science fiction,” even when discussing literary, progressive sf? It is understandable that progressive critics would wish to distance themselves from both the aesthetics and the politics that accrued to a generation of stories featuring scenarios of the Golden Races vs. the Scaly Ones variety. But to deny that politics altogether, to claim that it belongs only to the past, is to evade a serious investigation of what makes the genre work, what gives it its identity and indeed its appeal. It is, ultimately, a denial of “science fiction” itself as a genre worthy of discussion, for surely the point of genre criticism is to identify and trace the various constitutional energies, themes, and plots that animate a form and in doing so account for all its variant strains and trends, not just the ones that accord well with a narrow set of critical pieties. To speak of “science fiction” at all is to admit to certain links and ideological ties that go beyond subject and setting, leading readers and critics into unexpected places and opening up unexpected connections. One cannot simply disown unwanted relatives or pretend not to recognize their features when they pop up in later generations. It is, indeed, precisely those ancestral presences—sometimes odd, sometimes eccentric, sometimes distasteful—that give science fiction its remarkable diversity and continuing vitality. I found this a rather illuminating read. However I've read tragically little sci-fi. I wanted to see what more informed people think. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Apr 3, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2017 02:01
|
|
|
Safety Biscuits posted:Yo I enjoyed reading this post, still thinking about a reply though. Also can you get a myJSTOR account? I have one, I think they let any old riff raff in. I'm glad you enjoyed it and I look forward to your response. As for JSTOR, I have an account. It's a 10 day free trial thing so maybe that's why I can't read some of the articles or books listed.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2017 05:19
|
|
|
So I think this is a good place to ask about good steampunk books or fiction? I've played a few video games which maybe qualify as "steampunk" but they were things like Final Fantasy VI and IX which, if you have played them, don't really go into the details of it all very much. In fact, it's more like magic when you get right down to it. However I'm playing a visual novel right now that is very lore/worldbuilding heavy and talks a lot about its AU 19th Century UK where steampunk has started to reign supreme. It made me curious to find books that really explore the whole idea. I tried just googling Steampunk novels but, very weirdly to me, it looks like the steampunk stuff is usually almost a backdrop or afterthought and the core stories are things as simple as detective novels or whatever. I'm not interested in that. What I'd like is a steampunk story that goes over how the world is revolutionized and the implications of the technology. Big, kinda "epic" stuff I guess you might say? One book I found sounded kinda interesting - Perdido Street Station. What do you all think of it? Also other suggestions are very welcome.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2018 23:33
|
|
|
Just want to thank everyone for their suggestions. I got: The Difference Engine Burton & Swinburne series Alchemy Wars They all sound interesting and they are all on Audible which made me very happy because my eyesight is awful.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2018 13:07
|
|
|
So I know a lot of people hate his stuff but I like most of the Michael Crichton books I've read and I think Sphere is his best novel. But while the twist is all well and good, I really liked the premise. A team of experts just going to investigate and meet alien life. There's danger of course but the focus is more on figuring out just what the heck kind of lifeform they're dealing with, how to communicate with it, etc.. Most aliens I see in fiction are introduced as enemies or are basically humans so first contact is hardly anything special or difficult. Can aynbody recommend me any scifi books that have the same kind of premise as Sphere? More about the wonder and challenge of meeting aliens than fighting them?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2018 15:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 00:35 |
|
|
So thanks everyone for the earlier suggestions. I'm interested in the Foreigner Books and gotta check those out. Glad they are all on Audible but, well, it's Audible so it will be a while before I can afford to buy them all. But I have a new question. All the fantasy I know use stock medieval times or maybe bump it up to the Industrial Revolution or modern day. Are there any fantasy books set in like, the Stone Age or with hunter-gatherers or something more primitive like that? Somebody explained to me why there aren't more books like that since there's less people and civilization and political intrigue to deal with. Which makes sense but I'm sure somebody at some time must have written a fantasy series about cave people or something?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2018 05:16
|
|