Nckdictator posted:

"Dragon's Fury"

Thinky Whale posted:

There are less erotic words than "knickers," but not many.

Carnival of Shrews posted:

Ah, Lisbeth Salander and her Deeply Alternative bisexual hackerpunk autistic-loner lifestyle. Here's Salander, as we first meet her in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; it's hardly the worst book ever, but it certainly has its moments. No-one I've discussed this with -- including some serious Larsson enthusiasts -- has believed that the description can be as dire as this, until they read it again:


Utterly inexplicable

At some stage after writing the first book, Larsson must have re-read his early descriptions of Salander, and thought about them a bit more, because by the second book, she's spent some of her hacking cash on breast implants, and had a frankly worrisome holiday fling with a 16-year-old boy (one year over the Swedish age of consent; Salander is about 24 at this stage). I suppose the point was to prove, albeit clumsily, that the appetite of this free spirit is not improbably restricted to cool lesbians and older male journalists, and that she definitely doesn't want to be thought of as physically immature. It doesn't get round the problem that someone who weighs 40kg/88lb is a deadly combatant who repeatedly beats and maims men who are literally twice her size (granted, she's usually armed with something, but I can't recall it ever being anything as odds-levelling as a gun). But most readers seem to love this aspect of Lisbeth, so I'll let it slide.

What I couldn't let slide was that the start of the second book, Salander has become obsessed with a famously elusive mathematical problem; it's no spoiler to reveal that inevitably, it's Fermat's Last Theorem. But spoilers ahead.

And amazingly but inevitably, Lisbeth does indeed manage to come up with the missing proof – not the Andrew Wiles one, but the one that supposedly wouldn't quite fit in the margin.

Upon which, she's almost immediately shot in the head. She survives, but can't remember this sweetest of all proofs, one that had the power to not only make her internationally famous (which is probably pointless to her) but to propel her to a university where she can study all the maths she wants with minds of her own calibre (a possibility she simply must have considered at some stage). Although not particularly taken with Salander, I did feel for her at this point. What a devastating blow; how will she cope?

Answer: Fermat's Last Theorem is never referred to again.

I'm convinced the only reason all this stayed in the books is because of the difficulty of getting someone to revise their work from beyond the grave.

quote:

SF/F literature seems almost permanently stuck on the subversive switcheroo. If we’re going to do a Tolkien-type fantasy, this time we’ll make the Orcs the heroes, and Gondor will be the bad guys. Space opera? Our plucky underdogs will be transgender socialists trying to fight the evil galactic corporations. War? The troops are fighting for evil, not good, and only realize it at the end. Planetary colonization? The humans are the invaders and the native aliens are the righteous victims. Yadda yadda yadda.

Sham bam bamina! posted: