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Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

I read it seriously until it quoted Warhammer 40k and I went "Christ". Now I can look back on the whole thing and say "Christ".

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the holy poopacy
May 16, 2009

hey! check this out
Fun Shoe
I went through an alt-hist phase at one point, which is basically one giant goldmine of terrible books. The standout for me was Conquistador, about a guy coming back from WWII (or maybe Korea?) who discovers a portal into an alternate Earth. In the alternate Earth continuity Alexander the Great didn't party himself to death, allowing him to conquer and consolidate vast swathes of central Asia into a stable empire that persisted after his death, creating a Eurasian fusion culture that subsumed nascent European civilization. This prevented the Industrial Revolution from happening because industrialization was such a freak accident of whiteness coincidence that it never would have happened without Europe's unique, one-in-a-million combination of pure white racial traits circumstances and Alexander had diluted Europe's creative potential by mingling with lesser peoples proud and noble cultures that nonetheless just don't have what it takes to industrialize, ever, so they just spend 2300 years drinking tea and bowing and doing all kinds of weird mysterious foreigner things instead of inventing guns or mechanized power or crossing the oceans like proper civilized people. Of course, the Western Hemisphere of the other Earth is entirely pristine and untouched because none of the native American populations had made any technological progress whatsoever in the 500 years since Colombus failed to show up, either.

So it's basically a world inhabited entirely by idiot savages, letting the retired GI bring in his war buddies and recruit/kidnap some colonists to set up a racially pure idyllic agrarian feudal society on the other side, selling exotic animals and resources on regular Earth in order to fund their ventures. Of course they can't sully their pure white hands by menial labor, but don't want to bring across any racial undesirables, so they solve the labor gap by hiring natives for menial labor--at the low, low cost of voluntary sterilization, since whiteness cultural harmony must be maintained. Unfortunately, meddling government agents stumble across the Earth side of the operation and wind up shanghaied on the other side, just in time to help foil a coup by the founder's "atsa spicy-a meatball-a" mafioso accomplice. As a result of their service several minority characters are rewarded with civil rights, and everybody lives happily ever after!!

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

Gabriel Pope posted:

I went through an alt-hist phase at one point, which is basically one giant goldmine of terrible books.

This can't really be said enough. Alt history is almost entirely "here is one minor change somewhere that led to my favorite side taking over the world!!!!" It's generally poorly researched, based on flimsy premises, and is really just awful historical fan fiction.

divabot
Jun 17, 2015

A polite little mouse!

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

I read it seriously until it quoted Warhammer 40k and I went "Christ". Now I can look back on the whole thing and say "Christ".

They have in fact made and distributed bound copies and the author is seriously recruiting his minions to spam the 2016 Hugo for Best Novel with it (because spamming the Hugos, particularly after this year, is an excellent way to get people to love you and think you're anything other than a stupendous cockhead), so it'd probably actually be on-topic for this thread. Though the linked thread is the place to go.

I did read the thing to the end. Because I have no taste and most of the fiction I read is actually trashy fanfic and my inbox is filled with Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity alerts. (Mostly of Worm, which will be good once a proper editor gets to it. And I'll even confess it was HPMOR that tipped me off to Worm.) As a fanfic, HPMOR is a bloated didactic Mary-Sue that should be a third of the length, but it's pretty good for the category (because most fanfic is actually worse) and he did in fact finish it, which is rare for the category.

But I am not, as it happens, under the delusion that glitzy-surfaced nerdsniping trash, much as I enjoy the genre, is the same thing as work of literary value. HPMOR fans seriously consider it what proper literature actually is and should be. Holy crap.

divabot has a new favorite as of 18:11 on Jul 8, 2015

divabot
Jun 17, 2015

A polite little mouse!

ToxicSlurpee posted:

This can't really be said enough. Alt history is almost entirely "here is one minor change somewhere that led to my favorite side taking over the world!!!!" It's generally poorly researched, based on flimsy premises, and is really just awful historical fan fiction.

Yeah. Someone like Turtledove is a middling writer, but he's about the best the genre has to offer. Everyone else is worse.

the holy poopacy
May 16, 2009

hey! check this out
Fun Shoe

divabot posted:

Yeah. Someone like Turtledove is a middling writer, but he's about the best the genre has to offer. Everyone else is worse.

Middling is an overstatement. Guns of the South was a pretty decent novel for a journeyman writer, then being the only writer in the genre who isn't a literal fascist (Eric Flint's fanfiction doesn't qualify him as a writer) he got big enough through sheer inoffensiveness that he stopped having to edit his books and it's been downhill from there.

EDIT: Harry Turtledove presents "What if historical thing was actually just like other historical thing???"

yeah I eat ass
Mar 14, 2005

only people who enjoy my posting can replace this avatar

divabot posted:

They have in fact made and distributed bound copies and the author is seriously recruiting his minions to spam the 2016 Hugo for Best Novel with it (because spamming the Hugos, particularly after this year, is an excellent way to get people to love you and think you're anything other than a stupendous cockhead), so it'd probably actually be on-topic for this thread. Though the linked thread is the place to go.

I did read the thing to the end. Because I have no taste and most of the fiction I read is actually trashy fanfic and my inbox is filled with Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity alerts. (Mostly of Worm, which will be good once a proper editor gets to it. And I'll even confess it was HPMOR that tipped me off to Worm.) As a fanfic, HPMOR is a bloated didactic Mary-Sue that should be a third of the length, but it's pretty good for the category (because most fanfic is actually worse) and he did in fact finish it, which is rare for the category.

But I am not, as it happens, under the delusion that glitzy-surfaced nerdsniping trash, much as I enjoy the genre, is the same thing as work of literary value. HPMOR fans seriously consider it what proper literature actually is and should be. Holy crap.

It still is kind of bizarre to me that there are multiple goons that read that thing unironically, and in some cases actually enjoy reading it. I've been following the thread on it in the book barn and I don't understand how anyone can subject themselves to it unless they are actively making fun of it. I guess you're probably right that it's good for fanfiction, but that is just evidence of why nobody should be reading fanfiction.

DrBouvenstein
Feb 28, 2007

I think I'm a doctor, but that doesn't make me a doctor. This fancy avatar does.

SirPhoebos posted:

[*]The Jedi Academy series, in which the term "Mary Sue" accurately describes a spaceship.

Oh man, that's the Suncrusher one, right? Christ, that was absurd. It's the kind of spaceship a 10 year old would doodle in the margins of his math textbook and then try to describe to his friends.

"Oh man, this ship is, like, totally bad-rear end. But it doesn't look bad-rear end, which is why it's so cool! Everyone underestimates it! But it's armor is space-diamonds, so it can just fly through other ships to destroy them! And it has missiles that makes suns explode!"

Florida Betty
Sep 24, 2004

Gabriel Pope posted:

I went through an alt-hist phase at one point, which is basically one giant goldmine of terrible books. The standout for me was Conquistador, about a guy coming back from WWII (or maybe Korea?) who discovers a portal into an alternate Earth. In the alternate Earth continuity Alexander the Great didn't party himself to death, allowing him to conquer and consolidate vast swathes of central Asia into a stable empire that persisted after his death, creating a Eurasian fusion culture that subsumed nascent European civilization. This prevented the Industrial Revolution from happening because industrialization was such a freak accident of whiteness coincidence that it never would have happened without Europe's unique, one-in-a-million combination of pure white racial traits circumstances and Alexander had diluted Europe's creative potential by mingling with lesser peoples proud and noble cultures that nonetheless just don't have what it takes to industrialize, ever, so they just spend 2300 years drinking tea and bowing and doing all kinds of weird mysterious foreigner things instead of inventing guns or mechanized power or crossing the oceans like proper civilized people. Of course, the Western Hemisphere of the other Earth is entirely pristine and untouched because none of the native American populations had made any technological progress whatsoever in the 500 years since Colombus failed to show up, either.

So it's basically a world inhabited entirely by idiot savages, letting the retired GI bring in his war buddies and recruit/kidnap some colonists to set up a racially pure idyllic agrarian feudal society on the other side, selling exotic animals and resources on regular Earth in order to fund their ventures. Of course they can't sully their pure white hands by menial labor, but don't want to bring across any racial undesirables, so they solve the labor gap by hiring natives for menial labor--at the low, low cost of voluntary sterilization, since whiteness cultural harmony must be maintained. Unfortunately, meddling government agents stumble across the Earth side of the operation and wind up shanghaied on the other side, just in time to help foil a coup by the founder's "atsa spicy-a meatball-a" mafioso accomplice. As a result of their service several minority characters are rewarded with civil rights, and everybody lives happily ever after!!

Ah, an S.M. Stirling. Now there's an author whose every book belongs in this thread. I tried to read Dies the Fire once. That's the one where electricity and all modern technology magically stop working, so all the Ren Faire nerds who like playing with swords take over the world.

swamp waste
Nov 4, 2009

There is some very sensual touching going on in the cutscene there. i don't actually think it means anything sexual but it's cool how it contrasts with modern ideas of what bad ass stuff should be like. It even seems authentic to some kind of chivalric masculine touching from a tyme longe gone
Sometimes I wonder if the main reason to become a writer is because you're a bitter and powerless little turd and the idea of recreating the universe through the prism of your own dumb ego is too appealing to pass up. And the only way anything truly good ever gets written is when someone, almost by accident, captures something real in enough detail and beauty and ambiguity that it transcends its usefulness to their story and touches ur heart. It's hard to read Dante or like, The Bible, and not think this

Mulloy
Jan 3, 2005

I am your best friend's wife's sword student's current roommate.
I randomly ended up with a book in the Deathlands series from a bargain bin. It's all awful, but as a kid the whole setup was :krad: The US was nuked by russia and now there's nothing but mutants, outlaws, thieves, cancer, and random US military teleportation devices left. And about 20% of the word count is dedicated to describing guns, knives, explosives, etc.. I think the series is up to 150 books or something now.

Also as much as the Sword of Truth series is just Conan the Libertarian, I read the first couple as a teenager and I have far too much nostalgia to hate them though I fully recognize how awful they are. I tried to read the more recent few and... they've gone from bad atlas shrugged fanfiction to terrible atlas shrugged fan fiction with zombies.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

swamp waste posted:

Sometimes I wonder if the main reason to become a writer is because you're a bitter and powerless little turd and the idea of recreating the universe through the prism of your own dumb ego is too appealing to pass up. And the only way anything truly good ever gets written is when someone, almost by accident, captures something real in enough detail and beauty and ambiguity that it transcends its usefulness to their story and touches ur heart. It's hard to read Dante or like, The Bible, and not think this

That would explain the tendency for writers to have drinking problems, at least.

The Vosgian Beast
Aug 13, 2011

Business is slow

swamp waste posted:

Sometimes I wonder if the main reason to become a writer is because you're a bitter and powerless little turd and the idea of recreating the universe through the prism of your own dumb ego is too appealing to pass up. And the only way anything truly good ever gets written is when someone, almost by accident, captures something real in enough detail and beauty and ambiguity that it transcends its usefulness to their story and touches ur heart. It's hard to read Dante or like, The Bible, and not think this

What if we are all bitter and powerless little turds

Mycroft Holmes
Mar 26, 2010

by Azathoth

Mulloy posted:

I randomly ended up with a book in the Deathlands series from a bargain bin. It's all awful, but as a kid the whole setup was :krad: The US was nuked by russia and now there's nothing but mutants, outlaws, thieves, cancer, and random US military teleportation devices left. And about 20% of the word count is dedicated to describing guns, knives, explosives, etc.. I think the series is up to 150 books or something now.

Deathlands is great pulp fun and I will not hear it slandered.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



Nutsngum posted:

It hurts me as the series was a favourite as a kid but the entire Belgariad and its sequel are really pretty drat poorly written.

Pretty much consistent terrible view of women and how they should act (aka, completely irrationally at all times). Mary Sue characters that can defeat any obstacle. Cliched as hell "heroes journey" (to be fair, early 80's fantasy) and a completely blank and boring main hero (garion) with no personality traits whatsover.

I still have a great deal of nostalgic love for the series as I read it even before lord of the rings but it really does not hold up under critical scrutiny at all.

Funnily enough the Elenium was overall a MUCH tighter and better written book series that was completely undone by its awful sequel trilogy.

I haven't read any Eddings in a while, and his last series was pretty bad even for teenage me, but those books will always have a special place in my heart. It's not good, but at least it's charming.

I absolutely agree the Elenium is better, though.

Speaking of David Eddings,

pentyne posted:

Nah, Eragon the first book was actually fairly competant for a YA fantasy novel. The following ones with the perfect vegetarian elf race that were unquestionably superior to meat eating scum were poo poo.

Eragon straight up plagiarized the Belgariad. The scene where Eragon's mentor teaches him magic uses the same set-up and the same joke as when Belgarath is teaching Garion magic. Mentor guy even reacts with the same line, word for word.

I like how with all of the Star Wars talk, nobody has brought up the X-Wing series. They were my first Star Wars books, and the best ones I read. I never read the Thrawn ones. It's funny, they are both Star Wars and 100% military fiction, but are better than 98% of either.

The Vosgian Beast
Aug 13, 2011

Business is slow
Eragon is terrible. It's disgusting that you could rip off Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress so blatantly

divabot
Jun 17, 2015

A polite little mouse!

Murphy Brownback posted:

It still is kind of bizarre to me that there are multiple goons that read that thing unironically, and in some cases actually enjoy reading it. I've been following the thread on it in the book barn and I don't understand how anyone can subject themselves to it unless they are actively making fun of it. I guess you're probably right that it's good for fanfiction, but that is just evidence of why nobody should be reading fanfiction.

These are both true. I mean, I've read all the way to the end of multiple longform bloated fanfics of comparable size and quality (at least EY can write grammatical English with correct spelling), and enjoyed doing so. But the key point is they were just people having fun writing their favourite characters as an innocent enjoyable social activity, they weren't pompous didactic fools soliciting donations for their pseudoscience boondoggle think tank in the process.

Always keep in mind that I happily recommended the Worm x Deadpool fic to people with only the caveat "Has no literary quality, but I enjoyed it." I gleefully admit to jawdroppingly low taste. HPMOR is ridiculously crappy all the way through, but for the genre it's actually pretty good (though I never plan to read it myself again, I figure the SA readthrough will be quite sufficient for the rest of my life); the real suck factor is every other single aspect of it, all the stuff that can't be forgiven for it being fanfic.

divabot has a new favorite as of 00:20 on Jul 9, 2015

Ineffable
Jul 4, 2012
I haven't read much alt history, but I thought The Man in the High Castle was pretty good.

Starship Troopers, on the other hand, was awful. Fairly competently written, at least as science fiction goes, but even teenage me was put off by how unabashedly fascist the book is.

The Vosgian Beast
Aug 13, 2011

Business is slow
When I was a teenage nerd, I had people lecture me on how much worse the movie was, because it left out awesome power armor.

Then I went and read the book, and it was two chapters of power armor action, followed by five billion pages of lectures on Right Wing Conservatism

Gaunab
Feb 13, 2012
LUFTHANSA YOU FUCKING DICKWEASEL
A Song of Ice and Fire. :smug:

BravestOfTheLamps
Oct 12, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
Lipstick Apathy

Gaunab posted:

A Song of Ice and Fire. :smug:

That's a series of books. :smug:

Mulloy
Jan 3, 2005

I am your best friend's wife's sword student's current roommate.

Mycroft Holmes posted:

Deathlands is great pulp fun and I will not hear it slandered.

I agree and I also cannot believe I just now realized what pulp fiction is. :commissar:

RC and Moon Pie
May 5, 2011

The worst non-fiction I've ever read was The Devil's Rooming House: The True Story Of America's Deadliest Female Serial Killer, about Amy Archer-Gilligan, partial inspiration for Arsenic and Old Lace. This was an attempt to be a serious work, but it read like a middle school book review. A huge percentage of the text were quotes. The author talked a lot and spent a lot of pictures on a heat wave that had absolutely no bearing on the story, nor did he attempt to tie them together. He editorialized frequently, wrote about the 1910s in a modern colloquial manner, cited an online dictionary as a source, but the thing that stood out most, though, is that he used "lawyered up." Twice.

The Devil's Rooming House was one of the few books I've ever hate read, just to see how bad it got. Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible was another, but at least that was competently written and had a good first half.

InediblePenguin
Sep 27, 2004

I'm strong. And a giant penguin. Please don't eat me. No, really. Don't try.
About ten years ago I participated in a white elephant exchange and I received a complete paperback set of Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures series. This is an entire loving series of books based solely around puns. Egregiously lovely puns even as puns go. The main character is named Skeeve. There's a race of people who look like cartoon devils and they're called demons but it's short for "dimensional travellers." There's a planet of Mafia stereotypes headed by a stupidly camp-gay "fairy godfather" get it get it get it get it. There's a place called Perv. There's a stereotypical genie-land, where the males are called Djinn and the females are called Djeanies. There's a place called Scamaroni where the people are known for being suckers. There's a place called Ronko that's "full of televisions and advertising." There's a dimension where all the inhabitants are cowards, the place is called Wuh and the inhabitants are called Wuhses. There are trolls, and the female Trolls are called Trollops. There are nineteen of these motherfucking books. They have no redeeming features, except, I guess, that there aren't 20 of them.

I hid them in the back of the closet when I moved, which was really mean of me, because what if the people who moved in after me found those books and actually read them

Pocket Billiards
Aug 29, 2007
.
I've read some total shite.

Got through all 1000 odd pages of Atlas Shrugged. Just awful writing and dialogue, no nuance at all to the characters, they are all either evil simpletons or handsome supermen. I have no problem with fiction that the author uses to argue a certain philosophical point of view, even if I don't agree with it. But for fucks sake don't have characters just speaking entire essays and even a novella as monologues.

I read some Piers Anthony as a teenager. I think it was the Tarot series of books. I don't know if it was those books or others from Anthony or some other weird pervert sci-fi writer or even a fever dream, but I seem to remember a space-Catholic monk doing Judo throws on Bigfoot and Jesus being celibate because they botched his circumcision.

I know it's part of the canon of cool books as judged by the internet but World War Z was on the nose.

Marxism
Feb 14, 2012

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

It is great pulp fiction, with fascinating characters and a surprisingly strong moral centre. Abercrombie's later works have only confirmed this.

I felt like the ending just really hosed it all up. Also I felt like there was a lot of really unnecessary violence against women that was portrayed as "For the greater good"

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012

Pocket Billiards posted:

I know it's part of the canon of cool books as judged by the internet but World War Z was on the nose.

What? I can't tell if you're saying WWZ was awful or not. It was entertaining for its uniqueness at the time but has become pretty bland as vastly superior "realistic" zombie stories have come out since then.

Plus Max Brooks was a loving genius. Those "Survival Guides" were a minor, but fairly popular item for a few years and once he did one for zombies that made fucktons of money he made his mark as the "realistic" zombie expert and anything he wrote would almost certainly be a huge hit.

Evfedu
Feb 28, 2007
Almost nothing that happens in any of Abercrombie's books is portrayed as being "for the greater good". And certainly none of what is was violence against women.

CommissarMega
Nov 18, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER

InediblePenguin posted:

About ten years ago I participated in a white elephant exchange and I received a complete paperback set of Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures series. This is an entire loving series of books based solely around puns. Egregiously lovely puns even as puns go. The main character is named Skeeve. There's a race of people who look like cartoon devils and they're called demons but it's short for "dimensional travellers." There's a planet of Mafia stereotypes headed by a stupidly camp-gay "fairy godfather" get it get it get it get it. There's a place called Perv. There's a stereotypical genie-land, where the males are called Djinn and the females are called Djeanies. There's a place called Scamaroni where the people are known for being suckers. There's a place called Ronko that's "full of televisions and advertising." There's a dimension where all the inhabitants are cowards, the place is called Wuh and the inhabitants are called Wuhses. There are trolls, and the female Trolls are called Trollops.

I know you're trying to unsell the books here, but as a lover of lovely puns, I think I need these books now.

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012

Evfedu posted:

Almost nothing that happens in any of Abercrombie's books is portrayed as being "for the greater good". And certainly none of what is was violence against women.

I myself was guilty of not reading between the lines and thinking there was some moral high ground. What separates The First Law from other fantasy sagas is that there is no good versus evil, its warring mages using entire empires as their tools to prove who is right. The "good" mage even outright says that it doesn't matter and has his own 'law-breaking' magic servants he uses as a surprise tactic.

The most noble and heroic character in the series is the official Imperial torturer who does some absolutely repugnant poo poo but as his core only cares that what he does improves the world around him, and ends up lucking into possibly the happiest ending of anyone in the book.

The Saddest Rhino
Apr 29, 2009

Put it all together.
Solve the world.
One conversation at a time.



the audiobook for WWZ was pretty good with different voice actors for different stories. It was of course zombie apocalypse blah blah zombies are out of fashion blah blah but at the time it was actually fresh and not yet another zombie survival book. the movie was terrible though and had almost nothing to do with the book.

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012

The Saddest Rhino posted:

the audiobook for WWZ was pretty good with different voice actors for different stories. It was of course zombie apocalypse blah blah zombies are out of fashion blah blah but at the time it was actually fresh and not yet another zombie survival book. the movie was terrible though and had almost nothing to do with the book.

Max Brook's father is Mel Brooks. Let that sink in when you see the voices involved with the audiobook,



Max Brooks as The Interviewer
Steve Park as Kwang Jingshu
Frank Kamai as Nury Televadi
Nathan Fillion as Stanley MacDonald*
Paul Sorvino as Fernando Oliveira*
Ade M'Cormack as Jacob Nyathi*
Carl Reiner as Jurgen Warmbrunn
Waleed Zuaiter as Saladin Kader
Jay O. Sanders as Bob Archer
Dennis Boutsikaris as General Travis D'Ambrosia
Martin Scorsese as Breckinridge “Breck” Scott*
Simon Pegg as Grover Carlson*
Denise Crosby as Mary Jo Miller*
Bruce Boxleitner as Gavin Blaire*
Ajay Naidu as Ajay Shah
Nicki Clyne as Sharon*
Jeri Ryan as Maria Zhuganova*
Henry Rollins as T. Sean Collins
Maz Jobrani as Ahmed Farahnakian
Mark Hamill as Todd Wainio
Eamonn Walker as Xolelwa Azania / Paul Redeker / David Allen Forbes
Jürgen Prochnow as Philip Adler*
David Ogden Stiers as Bohdan Taras Kondratiuk*
Michelle Kholos as Jesika Hendricks
Kal Penn as Sardar Khan*
Alan Alda as Arthur Sinclair Junior
Rob Reiner as "The Whacko"

Dean Edwards as Joe Muhammad
Frank Darabont as Roy Elliot*
Becky Ann Baker as Christina Eliopolis
Parminder Nagra as Barati Palshigar*
Brian Tee as Hyungchol Choi / Michael Choi*
Masi Oka as Kondo Tatsumi*
Frank Kamai as Tomonaga Ijiro
John Turturro as Seryosha Garcia Alvarez
Ric Young as Admiral Xu Zhicai*
Alfred Molina as Terry Knox*
John McElroy as Ernesto Olguin
Common as Darnell Hackworth*
F. Murray Abraham as Father Sergei Ryzhkov*
Rene Auberjonois as Andre Renard*


Literally no other book on Earth could ever get even 1/4 of that talent for an audibook.

Carnival of Shrews
Mar 27, 2013

You're not David Attenborough

CommissarMega posted:

I know you're trying to unsell the books here, but as a lover of lovely puns, I think I need these books now.

I probably should not reveal that I know this, but the first book in the Myth Adventures series was long ago adapted as a graphic novel by the dreaded Team Foglio, and you can inspect the peculiar results here:

http://www.airshipentertainment.com/mythcomic.php?date=20100112

Carnival of Shrews
Mar 27, 2013

You're not David Attenborough
My bad book pick is Wraeththu: The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit by Storm Constantine, with the proviso that she wrote this book very young and has apparently since revised it.

Imagine a post-apocalyptic society of hermaphrodite pseudo-vampires physically based on David Bowie at the height of his long-haired glam-era magnificence (it won't startle anyone that I was in my teens when I decided to read this). Like vampires, the Wraeththu we meet at the start of the book have to reproduce parasitically, by 'turning' humans. Unlike vampires, only young men can be turned. Women and older men are killed by the attempt, as presumably are any young men who are plump or just plain ugly. Once transformed, a 'har' (that's a Wraeththu person) has a life expectancy of about 150 years, does not visibly age, is faster, stronger, and more emotionally stable than a human, and has a greater resistance to disease and poison. There is literally no known downside to joining the Wraeththu, apart from the shampoo bills.

Are they also magical? You bet.

Is their strongest magic powered by sex? What are the odds?

Is is oddly...um...botanical-sounding sex that would have got Charles Darwin's eccentric grandad Erasmus all hot and bothered, involving organs that are somewhere between a show orchid and a sea anemone, and like those things, come in a variety of unusual colours?

I had a pretty high tolerance for not-great books as a teenager, but that did it for me. I simply could not manage to get started on the next book (there are now two trilogies). There is still a smallish but keen fandom for the Wraeththu books online, and a GIS will reveal strange and mildly alarming things.

divabot
Jun 17, 2015

A polite little mouse!

Carnival of Shrews posted:

My bad book pick is Wraeththu: The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit by Storm Constantine, with the proviso that she wrote this book very young and has apparently since revised it.

Yeah, these are basically "sexy goth boys ahoy" porn from Constantine as early '80s goth girl. edit: apparently originating in a short story she wrote in 1973 at age 17, so Bowie porn too.

The climax (ahahaha) of the second trilogy is, no poo poo, a weapon of mass destruction made of collected crystal jizz.

She wrote better stuff later, but unfortunately none of it sold very well, so milking the Wraeththu fans with dismal and unbelievably lovely spinoffs (e.g. that second trilogy) is what she has left for a living now.

There is also an even worse RPG, basically author-blessed fanfic ("GIVE ME MONEY"), which is best experienced through the glory of the McLennan rpg.net review.

On the Divabot Trashy Glitz Scale, I somewhat enjoyed the first trilogy as sexy-goth-boy-porn. But they were terrible books that made no loving sense, and even less loving sense on a second reading. I didn't give them a third. I didn't read the second trilogy; the loved one did, and remembers it with a shudder.

divabot has a new favorite as of 14:12 on Jul 9, 2015

King Doom
Dec 1, 2004
I am on the Internet.

Her Dryer posted:

My dad was a big fan of Wilbur Smith when I was younger. He writes epic action adventure novels set mostly in Africa. I'd read them when he was finished, and enjoyed a few of them, but even then I thought his female characters were ridiculous, existing only to either romance the lead of get raped by a villain. I've forgotten a lot, but things that stand out:

-one fairly important female character getting hosed to death by a spear
-another almost dying by having packets of red hot chilli powder placed where chilli powder has no business being
-a full grown woman getting spanked nude by their own father because of reasons
-an ancient Egyptian wizard growing his own castrated dick and balls back on for the express purpose of loving a sex-witch to death with them.

The last one was the book where my dad and I both decided to maybe take a break from Wilbur. Not read a book of his since.

This post made me angry, because yeah, it's all true. The first book in the series, River God, is loving amazing. Read it when I was a kid, it's one of my favourite books of all time. Set in Ancient Egypt it is from the viewpoint of the Eunuch Taita, that Ancient Egyptian Wizard mentioned (he's more of a wise man than a wizard at this point) and the book is really entertaining and at the same time feels like it could all have happened and that Wilbur Smith did a metric ton of research. Everything that happens (barring possible the main character using something called Red Sheppen to go on a vision quest type thing) could realistically have happened. There's action, adventure, a tragic romance (Taita the eunuch is in love with his owner, Queen Lostris) and she dies in the end of the book, lamenting they could never be together. It's all very sad.

Years later he decides to write a sequel. I'm overjoyed.

I read the Sequel, called Warlock.

This is the point where Taita, who has up to now just been a very intelligent man, is suddenly a wizard. Personally, I suspect the author became some sort of mentally ill, because if I remember correctly, it takes less than fifty pages before people are shooting magical penis orgasm beams at each other, because that's how wizards work. Gone is any attention to detail or historical accuracy, now it's psychic sexual warfare and pages long descriptions of big throbbing cocks. Towards the end of the book, in the last few pages, that fairly important female character Her Dryer mentions? the one who gets spearfucked? her own sister does that.

The next book in the series is I think called 'the quest' and that I never read. I have heard that Taita magically grows his cock and balls back in this one. Remember a paragraph or so ago when I mentioned the tragic love between Taita and his owner, Queen Lostris? they end River God saying one day in another life they can be together. That time is now, in book three. Taita is around 120 right now, and Lostris has been reincarnated and is now I wanna say sixteen or so. The sex witch parts are new to me, but now I've heard about them and having Warlock, anyone who said they were made up and not in the book I'd call a liar.

Nanomashoes
Aug 18, 2012

Nanomashoes
Aug 18, 2012

The following is an excerpt from Jack Fish by J. Milligan:

Evfedu
Feb 28, 2007

Pocket Billiards posted:

I know it's part of the canon of cool books as judged by the internet but World War Z was on the nose.
God that moustache-twirling capitalist chapter was so offensively terrible. Didn't he literally muse about how many people would be waiting for him in hell then say "heheh I hope they don't expect a refund". Then skateboard-grind down the side of his survivalist bunker and do a rad kick-flip onto a babies skull.

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Nanomashoes
Aug 18, 2012

The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra: Translation by Chuck Berry: An Insight into Spook Culture by Anonymous is a terrible book that I have actually read and enjoyed and I think it says a lot more than it means to. It is available for free and also has a page watermarked "BOYPUSSY".

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