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James White's Sector General books. Written over almost 40 years, the first few have some old-fashioned gender stuff to them but they are consistently progressive for the time they were written in.
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Sep 6, 2021 22:47
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Bargearse posted:Well that’s disappointing. At least I’m not giving him any money when I buy his books. Pretty sure all of his books were written mid-stroke.
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Sep 7, 2021 02:06
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Bargearse posted:I don’t recall if The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was pre- or post-stroke, but it was an entertaining read if you can look past the libertarian horseshit. If you eliminate the libertarian horseshit what the hell is left? That’s all I remember from that book a few years after reading it.
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Sep 7, 2021 04:00
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chglcu posted:If you eliminate the libertarian horseshit what the hell is left? That’s all I remember from that book a few years after reading it. There was also the group marriage that inducted a barely pubescent child about two-thirds of the way through. And a sentient computer.
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Sep 7, 2021 04:39
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Late-period PKD, like A Scanner Darkly and VALIS, is quite a different story. He developed a fascinating voice toward the end of his life. My one caveat whenever I recommend Dick is that he can be extremely uneven. The books he wrote near the beginning of his career (Ubik, Man in the High Castle) and towards the end (VALIS) when he wasn't writing four books a year and taking ungodly amounts of amphetamine tend to be better prose experiences, with the stuff in the middle very hit or miss.
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Sep 7, 2021 05:39
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Lemniscate Blue posted:There was also the group marriage that inducted a barely pubescent child about two-thirds of the way through. That's also the libertarian stuff.
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Sep 7, 2021 06:43
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Libertarian, noun: A middle-aged white man who is very interested to know what a country's age-of-consent laws are.
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Sep 7, 2021 07:10
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Hellequin posted:My one caveat whenever I recommend Dick is that he can be extremely uneven. The books he wrote near the beginning of his career (Ubik, Man in the High Castle) and towards the end (VALIS) when he wasn't writing four books a year and taking ungodly amounts of amphetamine tend to be better prose experiences, with the stuff in the middle very hit or miss. That's fair. I have a collection that contains every PKD short story and while there's some gems, there's a fair amount that has good ideas struggling to get past mediocre presentation. Early on, there tends to be lots of shlubby middle-aged businessmen in suits and hysterical secretaries. Not so much offensive, as dated and bland.
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Sep 7, 2021 08:00
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I got Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land as a birthday gift by a friend, and my question is how the gently caress do you manage to get obnoxiously preachy about agnosticism?? Jesus loving Christ.
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Sep 7, 2021 10:09
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I remember trying PKD as a teen because I liked Bladerunner. This was before I understood that a writer's output could vary... I was confused why Do Androids.. was boring so I tried VALIS and did not know what tf I was reading.
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Sep 7, 2021 10:40
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Like I wanted more Roy Batty and instead got pink laser satellites perpetuating an illusionary Roman Empire and PKD turning to the audience at the end and saying "it's schizophrenoia innit??"
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Sep 7, 2021 10:43
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nonathlon posted:That's fair. I have a collection that contains every PKD short story and while there's some gems, there's a fair amount that has good ideas struggling to get past mediocre presentation. Early on, there tends to be lots of shlubby middle-aged businessmen in suits and hysterical secretaries. Not so much offensive, as dated and bland. Tone is important to bring up with re: hysterical secretaries and Dick, whenever I've read those passages they always come across to me as needling and mildly satirical. On an unrelated point I always feel it's worth mentioning that the bulk of SF/F written during the '50s-'70s was written very for very little pay (take Dick for example, he often made something in the area of $200 a book and seeing as most SF didn't receive reprints there was little chance for later royalties, he died very broke) and with little to no editorial oversight, if you wanted to make a living just writing you did it quickly and in bulk. While it can be interesting to track the development of certain writers' craft as they become increasingly proficient prose stylists and inventive storytellers, you also wind up with a lot of clunkers over the course of a career. Take someone like Michael Moorcock, the guy has won some serious mainstream literary prizes like the Guardian Fiction Award and the Whitbread, and I rank his Pyat Quartet very highly but there are also books in his bibliography that he admits to having written in a weekend on a bender and border on unreadable. With anything from that era if you're willing to do a little bit of sifting you'll find gold.
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Sep 7, 2021 12:10
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Hellequin posted:Tone is important to bring up with re: hysterical secretaries and Dick, whenever I've read those passages they always come across to me as needling and mildly satirical. You may have a point there - a character being a bland boring businessmen might be the point in some cases. And it was from a time in which there were a lot of nondescript grey jobs done by nondecript men in back offices. There were still a helluva lot of hysterical secretaries in those stories. You're right in that Dick and Moorcock transcended their pulpy origins. I once read a collection of early Moorcock and boy, it was not good.
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Sep 7, 2021 12:40
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Hellequin posted:The books he wrote near the beginning of his career (Ubik, Man in the High Castle)
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Sep 7, 2021 17:00
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Bargearse posted:Should have just given the whole trilogy to Rian Johnson and told him to do whatever. Or Timothy Zahn, I'd have liked to have seen that. Though I don't think Zahn is interested in screenwriting, is he? (sorry I'm late on this, just realized that)
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Sep 7, 2021 18:37
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Sham bam bamina! posted:You might barely be able to say that about The Man in the High Castle (published in 1962, written in 1961), but definitely not Ubik (published in 1969, written in 1966). Misread that as “written in 1969, published in 1966”, which would be the most PKD thing ever. Ubik is such a good book, I should read that again.
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Sep 7, 2021 20:02
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Lemniscate Blue posted:There was also the group marriage that inducted a barely pubescent child about two-thirds of the way through. poo poo, I totally forgot about that.
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Sep 11, 2021 01:12
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Satan Burger by Carlton Mellick III is my favorite (extremely juvenile, silly) terrible book. (By the way the original cover is extremely NSFW if youre going to google it.) Its narrated by a protagonist who sees his own body in the third person. Him and his gang of pals get mixed up in an altercation between Satan and God when Satan opens a burger restaurant in their town. Its really the details where this book gets me. Satan sells deep fried cheeseburgers that are so good they make your soul come out and float around in the restaurant so Satan can grab them with a butterfly net and put them in a tupperware container labeled HELL. Satan is a gay man in a suit who turns anything he touches into a living thing. These are demons. Sometimes he does this as a prank by touching the dreadlocks on someones head so they dance around like snakes or touching a zombie's penis. The waiters at Satan Burger are mostly anthropomorphic cigarette vending machines. There are two seating sections, Smoking and Heavy Smoking. Theres an asian man who dresses and talks like a pirate for no reason. Guess who taught the writing workshop that made this man go off like this.
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Sep 11, 2021 02:03
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Skulk Hogan posted:
George RR Martin?
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Sep 11, 2021 02:05
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Palahniuk
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Sep 11, 2021 02:28
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Skulk Hogan posted:Satan Burger by Carlton Mellick III is my favorite (extremely juvenile, silly) terrible book. (By the way the original cover is extremely NSFW if youre going to google it.) Its narrated by a protagonist who sees his own body in the third person. Him and his gang of pals get mixed up in an altercation between Satan and God when Satan opens a burger restaurant in their town.
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Sep 11, 2021 02:53
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ookiimarukochan posted:James White's Sector General books. Written over almost 40 years, the first few have some old-fashioned gender stuff to them but they are consistently progressive for the time they were written in. Didn't that have a story that insisted at length that the only circumstances under which a dude would want to bone an alien is if he had alien software plugged into his cyborg brain for too long?
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Sep 11, 2021 05:15
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Have the Dresden Files come up in this thread yet? This is my first encounter with them and I'm reading Grave Peril. The premise is that the town is being overrun with ghosts (I know this because the protagonist has told me several times now). I'm only 16% of the way through the book but there's only been one ghost but no less than four super sexy femme fatales (three of which want to have super sexy sex with the protagonist). I'm not sure if I'd mark the books as terrible, but cmon Jim Butcher, keep it in your pants.
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Sep 28, 2021 08:02
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Eh, the Dresden files are very much loveable pulp. Grave Peril is a fun test, because if you enjoy the ridiculous ending you'll probably love the rest of the series. If you don't, then it is time to move on.
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Sep 28, 2021 10:10
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Yeah, the Dresden Files have come up a few times, but on a basic level a) they are a deliberate (and originally spite fuelled*) attempt to write pure pulp, and b) the Urban Fantasy genre is so haunted by self insert protagonists, thinly veiled erotica and awful writing that the Dresden Files are easily in the top 10% of the genre by virtue of the protaganist having actual acknowledged flaws and broadly competant writing. IIRC there is literally one (maybe two?) sex scenes in the entire run of the books to date, and it is pretty cringey (writing sex is definitely not Butchers forte...) but thats incredibly restrained compared to some. Like I love the urban fantasy genre, "real life, but magic" just appeals to me, but its almost entirely trash. I'm willing to settle for the readable trash amongst it (Jim Butcher, Stephen Blackmoore, Daniel O'Malley, Ben Aaronovitch) over most of the rest. I have a post somewhere in this thread bemoaning it and listing many of the urban fantasy I've read thats worse that dresden, and I could almost certainly add another half dozen authors to that list by now. *I believe the story goes that Butcher submitted a fantasy story he was passionate about to a writing class for critique, and was given feedback that he felt would make it more cliched and generic. So he deliberately wrote a story with all the elements the instructor had mentioned, called "semi auto-magic" to show how bad it would be. But the instructor liked it, and Butcher reread it and kind of went "gently caress... There actually is something there" and reworked it into the first dresden files novel which ended up getting published. He did later go on to write and publish a fantasy series which is pretty much fine by the standards of the genre, I enjoyed it well enough. SiKboy has a new favorite as of 16:40 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 16:38
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How do you feel about his later books? I felt like the earlier stories are better, and much smaller in scale. When it’s “gotta save the city/world” every single time it felt overblown or formulaic to me. I think after the dinosaur, he just kind of decided he liked that scale. The later stuff wasn’t bad, I just felt it wasn’t as good. What do you think?
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Sep 28, 2021 18:27
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Domus posted:How do you feel about his later books? I felt like the earlier stories are better, and much smaller in scale. When it’s “gotta save the city/world” every single time it felt overblown or formulaic to me. I think after the dinosaur, he just kind of decided he liked that scale. The later stuff wasn’t bad, I just felt it wasn’t as good. What do you think? Honestly I agree to a large extent; They suffered from escalating scale, as Butcher seems to feel he always has to top the previous story. Cant go back to solving magic murders and missing person cases when you've had Dresden fight an entire clan of vampires! Except you absolutely could, he just didnt. He never lowers the stakes really. So the basic premise of "Magic Private Eye" sort of fell by the wayside. I'm not even sure when the last time he takes a case on (or when he stops having an office!) instead of "wizard council/vampires/Sidhe court decide to gently caress with Harry deliberately" being the standard set up. Now, "Harry takes a simple seeming case, but woah, it turns out theres more scarier magic at play that it first seemed!" was also a formula, but it was a formula that fit the pulp feel better. If I had to pinpoint it, I'd say that I started to get fatigued with it when Harry lost his home in the basement and his car, the blue beetle. At that point it felt like it was a deliberate decision to move the character away from where he started, give him a new more magic home base that allowed for him to take on EVEN BIGGER THREATS! Before that it kind of felt like the escalation was slower, there would be 3-4 books in a row with similar stakes, then one that swept a lot of pieces off the board and made a new status quo, but by the time we get to book 9 it feels more like every book needs to be a major event. Most of his supporting cast started appearing less and less prominently as well, outside of the very core group. This has continued to the most recent book, book 17 (major spoilers here) where monsters destroy most of a major american city, kill thousands of people, and also a major supporting character. To me this completely changes the entire premise of the books, if magic is revealed to be real to everyone, by for example monsters destroying a major american city, then it kind of ruins the conceit of "real world but magic" Now, in fairness Butcher claims to have a 22 book "plus a trilogy" plan for the series (whats the difference between a 22 books and a trilogy plan and a 25 book plan? hosed if I know...) so I guess this is him starting to wind things up, in which case raising the stakes and throwing out a large part of the original premise does make a lot of sense. No need to keep your fictional world useable if you are about done writing in it after all. Seems a little early though, he's allegedly still got another 5 books to go, this felt a lot more like a 2 books to go escalation. I'm still reading them, but a lot of the fun is gone from the series, most of the likeable supporting cast are gone or changed to be almost unrecognisable from where they started, leaving mainly Harry who... Yeah, book 17 harry is a lot less fun than book 5 harry. Still want to see how it ends though, and they are still broadly competently written (although its PAINFULLY clear to me that books 16 and 17 were probably written as one book that they realised was far too big so cut in half. Book 16 is almost entirely preamble to the events of book 17).
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Sep 28, 2021 22:46
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The first three or four were readable. Highly prefer Richard Kadrey’s take on the “badass broke snarky wizard” with his Sandman Slim series. Edit to add: Also Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces series. Ray Lilly > Harry Dresden, no contest. AlbieQuirky has a new favorite as of 23:04 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 22:58
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I couldn't get through 6 chapters of the first Dresden book. Felt really fan-fiction-y to me.
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Sep 28, 2021 23:01
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AlbieQuirky posted:The first three or four were readable. I read some of those, but... SiKboy posted:Evfedu mentioned the Sandman Slim series. The main character of which is the baddest bad rear end to ever bad an rear end. Escaped from hell, went back to hell and took it over, wears a trenchcoat and drives a demonic motorbike. It is literally like the doodles in the margins of a teenagers maths note in novel form. The main character might even be half demon, or half angel or something. He is a prick, all his former friends are pricks, his enemies are also pricks, but not noticibly worse than his friends. I fell away from them after a few. Not the worst of the genre by a long chalk, but I find it tough going to keep up with a book series where I dont like any of the cast. Different strokes for different folks obviously.
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Sep 28, 2021 23:03
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The first two books are particularly bad, though none of it's exactly literature.
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Sep 28, 2021 23:06
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SiKboy posted:I read some of those, but... I read the first three and the most recent three. I imagine reading all of them would be WAY too much. Kadrey’s so much more competent as a writer than Butcher that I forgive him more excess in protagonist badassery. I dipped out of Butcher because everyone’s lips were always quirking, like on almost every page, and he used “quirked” to mean “said” on occasion as well.
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Sep 28, 2021 23:07
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AlbieQuirky posted:I read the first three and the most recent three. I imagine reading all of them would be WAY too much. Yeah, Sandman Slim works for me because while Stark is superhumanly good at killing people, he’s given a whole lot of problems that aren’t “kill these guys.” That and the supporting cast calling him out on his edgy teenager poo poo on the regular.
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Sep 28, 2021 23:20
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SiKboy posted:Like I love the urban fantasy genre, "real life, but magic" just appeals to me, but its almost entirely trash. I'm willing to settle for the readable trash amongst it (Jim Butcher, Stephen Blackmoore, Daniel O'Malley, Ben Aaronovitch) over most of the rest. blackmoore sucks. i read the first book and the "mystery" was just incredibly obvious. MC is a necromancer who was wandering around and only comes back to LA because his sister was killed and finds out the killer left a message in a way that only he could see. so obviously theyre targeting him. then he meets a spooky ghost death magic goddess who says "HEY I WANT YOU TO WORK FOR ME AS MY SUPER IMPORTANT AGENT AND YOUR POWERS ARE PERFECTLY COMPATABLE WITH MINE, IF YOU SIGN A LIFEPACT I'LL HELP YOU." then he meets another ghost who tells him the death goddess is evil, manipulative and bad news. hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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Sep 29, 2021 00:00
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I hear Jim Butcher got his start in roleplay MUSHes and as someone who was deep in that hobby at one point, it really shows in his early writing. I didn't mind his prose so much in the first Dresden book but I loving despised Harry so I never bothered reading any more. I thought the first Furies of Calderon one was all right. If that was him.
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Sep 29, 2021 00:00
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HopperUK posted:I hear Jim Butcher got his start in roleplay MUSHes and as someone who was deep in that hobby at one point, it really shows in his early writing. I didn't mind his prose so much in the first Dresden book but I loving despised Harry so I never bothered reading any more. I thought the first Furies of Calderon one was all right. If that was him. Yeah, he did the Furies of Calderon. Which is pretty good up until the last book and a half or so where it gets pretty stupid as you have scaled up from watching the one non-wizard in a society of wizards get by with cunning and grit to having a literal DBZ battle with a Zerg queen.
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Sep 29, 2021 00:05
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HopperUK posted:I hear Jim Butcher got his start in roleplay MUSHes and as someone who was deep in that hobby at one point, it really shows in his early writing. I didn't mind his prose so much in the first Dresden book but I loving despised Harry so I never bothered reading any more. I thought the first Furies of Calderon one was all right. If that was him. i run a mud (yes in this day and age...) and we had a brief period while i was away and another team was in charge and fuckin dresden was their favourite books and they were constantly trying to find ways to rip that poo poo off to put into the mud in ways that didn't fit at all and that made for truly awful gameplay. even by mud standards. in conclusion even if those books were any good i wouldnt be able to read them.
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Sep 29, 2021 00:41
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The sandman slim series is a pro read to me simply for the fact that over the series the main character acknowledges the fact he's hosed up, he's been through some seriously traumatic poo poo, and goes through the whole PTSD thing of getting help/recognizing the problems/changing his life around. That doesn't really happen much in urban fantasy. Not saying there aren't some rough books, but kadrey does tie everything together really nicely. The main issue I have with butcher regarding Dresden is basically the power creep. He peaked about book 7? with "normal" kinda stuff and now literally every book past that is Dresden just dbzing his way through whatever the new bad world ending thing is. I get it's hard to change back to just regular normal stakes for stuff, but the downside to escalation for the bad guys is always resolved by Harry dbzing his way through the bad guy of the book, regardless of him being personally threatened and in danger like the early books, or the world is gonna end threats like the later books. Blackmoore I dig, because the overall story uses a neat blend of Mayan/Aztec culture, and there's not much power creep overall. The verus series is pretty good but I haven't had time to read the last 2? that have come out.
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Sep 29, 2021 03:52
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:The main issue I have with butcher regarding Dresden is basically the power creep. He peaked about book 7? with "normal" kinda stuff and now literally every book past that is Dresden just dbzing his way through whatever the new bad world ending thing is. I get it's hard to change back to just regular normal stakes for stuff, but the downside to escalation for the bad guys is always resolved by Harry dbzing his way through the bad guy of the book, regardless of him being personally threatened and in danger like the early books, or the world is gonna end threats like the later books. The latest two books (which were originally one before he started writing too much and split it) are actually looking at changing the dynamics of it. The human world finally got part of the masquerade broken by how much poo poo happened in Chicago, a bunch of important characters died or had huge changes to them, and nothing is resolved permanently in a way that doesn't keep it from coming back to be a problem later. Butcher always said he wanted to end with an "apocalyptic trilogy", so it was always going to scale up.
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Sep 29, 2021 04:00
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yeah verus is good. i like that the author has a clear understanding of how large organizations and social movements work and that the protagonist is Just Some Guy. also that alex isn't capable of solving every or even most problems and takes some pretty big Ls. its also genuinely hilarious how richard just effortlessly verbally annihilates alex in pretty much every confrontation.
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Sep 29, 2021 04:05
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