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Only book I ever threw away because it was so bad was "Watch on the Rhine". It had John Ringo's name on the cover, but it was actually written by some other rear end in a top hat. I bought it because I needed something to read on the train, and the premise of "Nazis in 1000 ton tanks fighting aliens" seemed gloriously ridiculous. WotR is a sequel to some other Ringo book(s) about evil aliens invading earth, which I haven't read, and it opens with the EU parliament watching footage from a Washington DC devastated by the aliens. We're talking full on terminator-style fields of skulls and poo poo. And the POW character for that scene is a french politician ruminating about how pleased she is with seeing the USA hosed over. Anyway, the EU states decide that, hey, maybe we need to have a plan for defending ourselves from the evil aliens. Only, of course, the weak, liberal, feminized, politically correct europeans are no longer able to muster the will or the ability to fight for their very survival. What to do? Well, luckily, there are also some friendly aliens who want to help humanity out! They have super-technology, but can't fight the evil aliens themselves, for plot reasons. The Germans then round up every surviving member of the SS from old folks' homes from across the country, use friendly-alien-super-tech to restore them to youth, and reinstate the Waffen SS divisions complete with black uniforms, nazi symbols and banners, the loving works. Oh, and they get equipped with 1000 ton super tanks by the friendly aliens. All the SS soldiers are portrayed as simple patriots wanting to defend their country from destruction. No mention of the holocaust, war crimes, racism, genocide or any hint of nazi ideology. The only exception is a single "rotten egg" who joined the SS only so that he could rape foreign women. The enemies for the first half of the book are not the evil aliens, but rather pacifists and leftists who are irrationally upset that Germany has brought back the loving Waffen SS. A riot breaks out outside the SS base, instigated by degenerate homosexuals, feminists and "pacifists" - who are hypocrites that are only unwilling to use violence against aliens bent on humanity's complete destruction, but won't hesitate to use violence against other humans who only want to save the human race. I stopped reading after that part. What is it with right-wing rear end in a top hat writers and portraying their ideological enemies as completely insane lunatics willingly and knowingly trying to destroy everything that is good and just? Okay, when your protagonists are the loving Waffen SS I understand that you have to bend reality to gently caress and back to make your antagonists look bad, but come the gently caress on!
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Sep 21, 2017 09:11
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Angry Salami posted:Aww, that means you didn't get to the part where a bunch of Jewish soldiers have to fight alongside the SS, and they're so impressed by them they end up joining SS regiments and wearing their insignia! You know, even as horrendously tasteless as that twist is, it does not surprise me in the slightest that the author of WotR included it in his book.
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Sep 22, 2017 06:39
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I got "In the balance" by Turtledove a couple of years back (for pretty much the same reason I got "Watch on the Rhine" - nazis fighting aliens). It's the first in a series of books. For those who don't know, the premise is that aliens have been planning an invasion of earth for like the last thousand years. The invasion fleet arrives expecting to face off against knights on horseback, but instead finds itself in the middle of WWII. So now the nazis, the commies, the chinese, the japanese, the yanks and the brits all have to team up to fight evil alien invaders! And it's so loving badly written. Now, mind, it's not the frothing rant that "Watch on the Rhine" is. It's just...boring. Every character is a one-dimensional stereotype. Every non-american character exists only to contrast themselves and their nation against the US. Two german officers will be talking and constantly go "Let us drink beer and eat bratwurst, as is the way of us orderly germans, unlike those free-spirited americans who only drink coca-cola and eat hamburgers". I can't even remember who any of the characters were. There's the german noble officer, the chinese peasant girl, some russian farmer and they're all constantly inner-monologueing how they sure aren't like those americans. The only good bit in the book is when the germans fire off a round from the Schwerer Gustav railway cannon against a alien landing site. The aliens send up advanced countermeasures designed to knock out guided missles...which does jack all against a solid 7-ton lump of metal coming barreling out of the sky.
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Oct 5, 2017 13:21
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Having read nothing of RPO except this thread and a few internet takedowns, I suspect that the move will be better than the book, or at least less obnoxious. 'Cause the book seems to go "This was a Firelfly class spaceship, based on the design of the Serenity from hit TV series Firefly by cult director Joss Whedon (who, did I mention, also happens to be president of the world)" at every other turn, but in the move it's just gonna be a spaceship unless you know where it's from. ...unless of course they're gonna have the protagonist go "This is a Firefly blahrgablaa etc ad infinitum" every time some piece of nerd culture shows up.
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Oct 7, 2017 21:23
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I read Lamps' takedown of Ian Banks and I largely agree - especially the part about the Culture's eccentricity vs everyone else's barbaric perversity. Like, everyone in the universe is hosed up but somehow the Culture gets a pass because they're hosed up in the right ways. I don't agree, however, that the settings' binary choice between regressive assholes and all-permissive ultra-liberalism is somehow a philosophical or ideological failing of the book or author. Banks doesn't strike me as trying to write some kind of liberal "Atlas Shrugged" - the Culture is just this quirky place he gets to use as a backdrop for his spaceship books. To bring this back to terrible books - I've actually only read Consider Phlebas by Banks. Goons have been recommending Banks as an author of decent hard sci-fi, so I wanted to give him a try. Apparently Consider Phlebas is the first Culture novel, but as an introduction it gave me absolutely zero insight into the larger setting, and no desire to find out more. The main character is a shape-shifter who gets hired by the Culture's enemies to go bring back a Culture AI that's crashed on a planet that only shape-shifters are allowed to land on. And none of this has any impact on the story. The protagonist starts out disguised as an old man, gets stranded in space and picked up by a bunch of pirates, and slowly starts shifting to a younger body. When the rest of the crew notices, it's just shrugged off as an effect of rest and recuperation. After a weird sidestory where the protagonist gets stranded on an island with cannibal cultists he shifts to take the identity of the pirate captain and steal his spaceship. He casually blows his cover (or has it blown, don't remember) after about 24 hours aboard the ship, and none of the crew gives a poo poo. Then they land on the forbidden planet, but for some reason everyone who isn't a shape-shifter gets to come along anyway. The fact that the protagonist is a shape-shifter has absolutely no impact on the plot, and nothing he does or experiences has any relevance. He just stumbles from one weird place to another (Now he's on a planet ruled by old people! Now he's on an abandoned supercruiser! Now he's on an island of crazed cannibals! Now he's playing poker for the fate of a doomed planet!) and nothing matters. In the end I think he actually doesn't give the the AI over to the Culture's enemies, and in an epilogue we find that this was such a splendid action that they named a spaceship after him 500 years in the future or something. That's it, end of story. Then in the back there's a timeline of events that they never mention in the book and has no relevance to the events taking place, and the entire setting is actually in the past and the Culture are actually not humans? Or something? And the entire book is filled with these grotesque details. Like, the story opens with the protagonist locked in a dungeon with sewage pipes connected straight to toilets installed in the chairs at a banquet of the ruling class, so he'll eventually drown in sewage. The rich and powerful are literally going to poo poo him to death while they eat and drink. And the cult he gets caught by later has these hosed up tenets where only the leader is allowed to eat meat - everyone else is forced to live off garbage and excrement. The cult leader is grotesquely fat, eats the meat off of people's bones while they're still alive and eventually suffocates a prisoner with his gigantic rear end.
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Oct 18, 2017 10:23
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divabot posted:see, I came to Consider Phlebas from The Wasp Factory, where Banks being as gross as he could was basically the point. So I thought it started right but I was disappointed when it didn't continue in this vein. Yeah, I haven't read The Wasp Factory, but from what I can gather from summaries it is very much not my thing. That kind of body horror/torture porn just grosses me right out, and whenever it showed up in Consider Phlebas it was really jarring.
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Oct 20, 2017 07:42
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I keep getting hung up on this paragraph:The Paragraph in Question posted:It's a special kind of mindfuck to realize the moment between “Down With The Sickness,” and Shostakovich’s “String Quartet No. 3 (3rd Movement),” was twenty years for the world and maybe two blinks for everyone on that plane. For the record, Shostakovich is as Metal as Classical gets, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. At first I thought it implied that “Down With The Sickness” and “String Quartet No. 3" were recorded 20 years apart and the people on the plane missed those 20 years. But the I realize that the author probably means that the protagonist was listening to both these songs, and that the plane hopped 20 years into the future in the silence between songs. But the way it's written ("everyone on that plane") makes it seem like the pilot was just blasting Disturbed over the airplane speaker system.
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Oct 25, 2017 13:58
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TheKennedys posted:"for once the TV show is actually way better" The book was a loving slog to get through, because it was written in such a boring, unimaginative language. With the movie the actors can at least inject some nuance and uncertainty with their performance, unlike the book where it's just "No, really, this dude tracking you down and dragging your black-out-drunk rear end to his hotel room is actually good and romantic". And really, your favorite tea is Earl Grey? That's like saying your favorite meal is food. Seriously.
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Dec 15, 2017 10:42
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:I despise 50 Shades. Not from the scoffing “mommy porn” perspective, which is misogynist twaddle, but from the normalization of horrifically realistic (minus the money) abusive relationship it popularizes. Then again maybe that’s why it’s popular - it’s relatable? Nah, it's popular because it's about a handsome billionaire who gets so infatuated with a woman that he can't control himself in her presence, showers her with expensive gifts and has awesome sex with her. Like, a lot of sex.
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Dec 15, 2017 16:20
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I loving loathe The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. The morale of the story is an absolutely rage-inducing luddite take that it is better to murder billions of people and condemn the survivors to a stone-age existence of starvation, disease and suffering than to allow humanity to live in a perfect, tailor-made utopia ~because it isn't real enough~. E: gently caress, even thinking about it makes me irrationally angry. Go chisel your trash novel onto a loving slab of stone, Roger Williams you loving hack, because words on a computer screen aren't loving real enough for you. Goddamn. Mr. Sunshine has a new favorite as of 16:18 on Jan 9, 2018 |
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Jan 9, 2018 16:15
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I dunno how you got that message from the story, since the point that the protagonist keeps repeatedly hammering on is that unless suffering and death are ~really real~ life has no purpose and you might as well have murdersex with a serial killer for all eternity (and once you're bored with that it's morally justifiable to murder every other human in existence save one in order to ~bring back reality~). E:I mean, I don't even remember what the AI might do to the rest of the universe being an issue. It's all about the protagonist and her thourogly hosed up idea of what is best for humanity. Mr. Sunshine has a new favorite as of 17:33 on Jan 9, 2018 |
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Jan 9, 2018 17:14
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I feel like I must have missed some portion of Prime Intellect, because I have no memory of alien genocide or human rebellion playing any significant role in the story. Only the protagonist's obsession with pain and death, and her attempts to keep her incestuous descendants from inventing any technology more advanced than sticks and stones. Hell, the AI crashes itself and reboots reality because it can't reconcile it's imperative to keep humanity safe and happy with the concept (explicitly derived from the protagonist herself) of "what is best for humanity in the long run". Anyway, I'm sorry if I come off as a raging dick - there's just something about The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect that triggers my reflex to throw people into gulags.
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Jan 9, 2018 20:52
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Krankenstyle posted:
Sounds like my sex life.
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Feb 9, 2018 21:53
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*mounts a disgruntled mare*
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I got the Joe Haldeman "Peace and War" trilogy for my birthday. The first book, "The Forever War", is a sci-fi story about the weirdness of waging war across thousands of light-years against an alien enemy you cannot understand. Due to relativistic fuckery, a single battle that takes a few hours for the participants takes decades or centuries back on earth. The protagonist participates in a total of three battles. Every time he comes home the society he encounters is more and more alien. When the war ends he's the oldest human being in the universe, and has been at war for a thousand years. There's some strange things in the book, like how it starts out in 1990 with space gates and power armour (and also how the army has instituted mandatory sex between enlisted soldiers, to improve unit cohesion and morale). But overall its a neat take on just how hosed up an all-out war in space would be for those involved. The last book, "Forever Peace", is only thematically connected to the first, and is a near future story where the industrialized world is engaged in some sort of unending anti-terror/counter insurgency deal against a third-world resistance movement. Nice take on the kind of "not quite peace, not quite war" unending clusterfucks that the superpower du jour likes to engage in, though a bit of a hippie ending. The second book... now, the second book, "Forever Free", is something else. It is a direct continuation of "Forever War". The protagonist from the first book has retired to some backwater planet, but is growing tired of life in the 31st century. So he and a couple of other war veterans hijack a spaceship intent on taking it out a couple of hundred light-years above the galactic plane and back again - a trip that would take them a few years, but would have several hundred years pass back home (why it would be preferable to live in the 36th century instead of the 31st isn't quite made clear). Almost immediately, things start going wrong. People go crazy. Ship systems fail. Hydroponic crops die. Eventually the ship's antimatter fuel starts evaporating, against the laws of physics. The crew board escape pods and return to their point of origin. They arrive several years later, only to find every sentient creature on the planet gone. In fact, it seems like every sentient being in the galaxy has gone missing. For a while the novel concerns itself with the survivors trying to reestablish civilization on their own. The a couple of them take a shuttle to Earth, to try and find out what's going on. The big, bizarre mystery that the book's been setting up is resolved in the last ten pages, when the protagonist goes to Disney Land, encounters a species of shape-shifters that have apparently been living alongside humanity in secret for thousands of years, and meets god. Apparently the creator of the universe has been running the Milky-way galaxy as some kind of experiment, and got miffed when some of his subjects tried to leave by travelling outside the galactic plane. In revenge, he hosed up their spaceship and removed every other sentient being in existence, because of course that's what gods do. Oh, and god also violently kills and then resurrects a couple of the survivors, I guess just to show off. Then god changes a couple of physical laws, and leaves the universe forever. The immortal shape-shifters' only impact on the story is that one of them suggest that maybe all of this is due to god being pissed off, literally seconds before god reveals himself to the protagonist. I cannot begin to describe how out of left field this ending is. It feels like Haldeman had the novel maybe half done when the publisher starts nagging him to finish it, and then he does some weird spite-writing, churns this out and goes "You want a loving ending? Well, how do you like this poo poo, motherfucker?"
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Feb 14, 2018 09:47
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RPO theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMBylNJQEbg
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Mar 13, 2018 09:21
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Ccs posted:... or how they were so surprised that Sweden was such a dangerous place because the Nordic countries always seem so safe. ...people do know it's fiction, right?
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Mar 23, 2018 09:46
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SerialKilldeer posted:
"Oyster-white teeth"? I assume the author meant mother-of-pearl, but now all I can imagine is some lovecraftian horror with rugged grey teeth covered in barnacles.
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May 8, 2018 13:14
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Liminal States was good, but I thought Reificant was more interesting. That was the prequel that Parsons published here on SA, where you get to follow the alien ant/mantis creature that shows up briefly in Liminal States, and get some more insight into the white goo.
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Jan 12, 2019 11:09
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Here's part one: https://www.somethingawful.com/news/reificant-battle-spire/1/
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Jan 13, 2019 08:24
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I had a strange experience with the Vorkosigan books, in that I started with "Cordelia's honor" and assumed that the series would be about Cordelia, but then as soon as she's married she becomes a non-entity and the books are about her son instead. I read a few more, but then there's a couple of books in the middle of the series that weren't available in Sweden for some reason, so I jump ahead a few books and suddenly Miles has a clone brother that's sort of a weirdo? It wasn't until a couple of years later that I managed to get a hold of the books where the clone is introduced and Jesus christ what is wrong with you lady!?
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May 24, 2019 12:55
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Basically, a twist ending should make the rest of the story more interesting, not less. Exactly. A good twist ending have you going "wow, now I get those weird parts earlier in the book!"
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Nov 19, 2019 17:16
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It's wonderful. It's a grown woman writing a grown man with the inner monologue of a terminally horny 14 year old boy.
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Jan 2, 2020 00:33
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The original übernerd JRR Tolkien was the first and worst of this, but at least he had the decency to keep the worst of it to an appendix. "Frodo's name - in his native Uytferlian - is actually Iofrexich, which sounds similar to the Eolvefen word for 'small badger' and can thus be seen as a pun on etc etc etc which has some similarities with the medieval saxon word 'frood', thus Frodo."
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Feb 13, 2020 00:08
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Tiggum posted:Actually there are too many. The last good one was somewhere between Jingo and Going Postal. Thud! definitely represents the point where it distinctly felt like he should have moved on and written something else, with fresh characters and without all the accumulated baggage. I agree, but for a different reason. I think Thud is actually the book where you can first see Pratchett's disease start effecting his writing - there's just something off in a lot of places in the text. In Unseen Academicals it's really apparent something's not quite right - there's a lot of strange tangents, plot-points that never go anywhere, inconsistent characters and bizarre non-jokes dragged out for way too long. Snuff and Raising Steam just shouldn't have been published. The plot is barely coherent and dialogue - an area where Pratchett used to absolutely shine - is just an absolute slog of monotonous monologues where you can't tell one character from another. Reading Raising Steam was just a deeply tragic experience, seeing in writing a previously intelligent, eloquent and witty man reduced to a rambling, incoherent mess.
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Feb 21, 2020 22:14
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Elviscat posted:Yeah, I found a "Top 20 sci-fi novels!" Listcle in google, and one of the books suggested included the phrase "raped her until she went autistic" Yeah, that's Stephen Donaldson's "The Gap" series, isn't it? The entire plot of the first book is exactly what you said, some space pirate gets a hold of a girl with some kind of control implant, and not only rapes her but literally enslaves her, forcing her body to act against her will. It must be 20 years since I read that book, but I still vividly remember a part where he makes her give him a blowjob, and then pushes some buttons on the control to make her smile at him afterwards. But as bad as that book was, the tonal whiplash in the sequel was somehow worse. Now the girl has to cooperate with her rapist in order to save humanity from some alien menace and he's actually just some misunderstood poor soul with a heart of gold deep down and shucks, what's a little rape and enslavement between friends?
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Feb 28, 2020 22:42
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The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is one of the few novels where I find the underlying ideology of the author more revolting than the (still quite revolting) contents of the story.
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Nov 26, 2020 13:20
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Ernest Cline is an author in the same way that a Subway sandwich slave is a chef.
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Nov 27, 2020 10:36
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divabot posted:i read it once, thought "yeah i can see why this is self-published", thought it did an ok job of being what it was, didn't read it a second time and have no plans to. What was the author issue? Radical primitivism. The entire not-so-subtle point of the book is that it is better for a handful of people to live in stone age savagery than it is for billions of people to live in an immortal post-scarcity utopia.
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Nov 27, 2020 12:06
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I've never met the man, but from what little I've read of RP1 and 2, Cline strikes me as someone who has no conscious moral or ideological convictions, but who would (if pressed) call himself a liberal. He has unconsciously internalized mainstream US liberalism, so he gives a paper-thin show of tolerance for racial and sexual minorities, without ever reflecting on what tolerance means or demands. He glorifies the self-made billionaires (while at the same time villifying billionaire corporations) without ever reflecting on the kind of society these billionaires are creating and thriving in. Of course he likes Elon Musk.
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Nov 30, 2020 00:05
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divabot posted:please someone find an actual quote of this sort from the book, it is artistically necessary Who did you piss off to get that redtext? Some bitcoin billionaire who figured out how to translate his wealth into :tenbux:?
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Dec 13, 2020 01:14
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How would you characterize the Devine Comedy or Paradise Lost, if not as biblical fanfiction? gently caress, Dante even has self inserts and Mary Sues.
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Jan 17, 2021 22:54
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I did read the novelization of the Super Mario Bros movie once. I still distinctly remember that there was a single simile in the entire book ("he spat the words like they were poison"). It stood out like gently caress, because the rest of the book was just a clinical description of what was happening on screen.
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Jan 18, 2021 09:37
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Does the Hitchhiker's Guide sequel authorized by Douglas Adams's widow count as this cause man it was not any good at all Gonna do a hot take here and say that Douglas Adams was only good when he stuck to the script of the radio play. The last half of "Life, the Universe and Everything" is just nonsensical, "So long" has like two jokes in the entire book, and "Mostly Harmless" is just miserable. Dirk Gently isn't very good either, and the Netflix series is superior to the books. Mr. Sunshine has a new favorite as of 18:06 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 18:03
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steinrokkan posted:Yes, thankfully Dante wasn't writing fanfiction. Nonetheless, since you asked, allow me to thank you for also democratizing literature and language, something that has been limited to the 1% cabal until you wrote your Transformers inflation fetish and published it on your blog. It was always stupid and inefficient how all people were taught literacy but there was literally nothing to read. You sound mad. On the internet. Just lol at the idea that fanfiction is some unique manifestation of the social and moral ills of late-stage capitalism, and not just a modern word for what people have been doing since five minutes after literature was invented.
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Jan 22, 2021 10:33
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I mean, yes? What's the useful difference between someone getting a modern Sherlock Holmes novel published, and someone uploading a similar novel to fanfiction.net?
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Jan 22, 2021 10:38
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gently caress, 99% of fanfiction sucks rear end. But so do most actual published works. poo poo like RP1 still gets published by actual publishers and then turned into a movie - and RP1 isn't even fanfiction. It's just a rusting bucket filled with the detritus that usually forms the basis for fanfiction.
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Jan 22, 2021 10:44
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I personally would make the bold claim that there are no solid borders separating "respectable literature" from "worthless fanfiction". I am happy to acknowledge there's a tremendous difference in quality and cultural impact between Paradise Lost and some 14-year-old's Lucifer mpreg yaoi slash fic, but both authors are indulging in the same fundamental exercise - exploring an existing literary canon and its characters, and expanding it in new ways often unsupported by the original work.
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Jan 22, 2021 11:02
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Seems like a couple of people itt just poo poo themselves in rage every time they hear the word "fanfiction".
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Jan 23, 2021 14:46
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Many years ago, I saw Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, and while it was performed in german there was this huge text screen above the stage continously giving translation. Pretty neat.
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Jan 25, 2021 23:19
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Odysseus is fanfiction.
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Feb 4, 2021 15:45
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