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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 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
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Jul 8, 2015 17:18
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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???"
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Jul 8, 2015 18:14
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Jerome Agricola posted:Yo. That's... probably a sign you don't have the healthiest sleeping habits. Having the capacity to realize when you're about to fall asleep so you can put your book down and get into a comfortable sleeping position is not a superhuman ability.
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Oct 30, 2015 15:01
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The Saddest Rhino posted:i don't know anything about Wicked except Defying Gravity is a p good song to listen to when you need a pick-me-up Picture that, but with an hour of talking before and after.
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Nov 5, 2015 15:39
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The Saddest Rhino posted:good or bad talking? idk, it's not Defying Gravity so I didn't pay attention.
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Nov 5, 2015 15:52
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I'm pretty average looking and was just minding my own business, but I got treated like some sorta Fabio dude who was trying to steal their wives away. I just wanted to sit somewhere pretty and read a book. If you're a white guy in Ubud without a woman nearby, the rest of the white people lose their poo poo. This actually sounds pretty awesome, I want to spend a vacation standing around destroying yuppie marriages by proximity.
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Nov 9, 2015 23:16
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Wasn't he the guy that basically started the whole Puppies thing because obviously the only reason his masterpieces weren't winning Hugos was because the awards were rigged?
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Nov 20, 2015 16:36
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Practical Demon posted:You've just ruled out a disturbingly large amount of all scifi and fantasy. This is the correct thing to do.
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Nov 25, 2015 23:38
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If I ever acquire a time machine, the first thing I'm going to do is go back and tell Mark Twain not to publish Connecticut Yankee in order to spare the world from all the knockoff authors that somehow never realized Mark Twain was writing satirically. E: If you actually took Connecticut Yankee at its face it would easily beat out most of the candidates in this thread for terribleness. It's hilarious because Twain is basically shitposting about all the social trends that annoy him, but as an actual story it is unimaginably bad. the holy poopacy has a new favorite as of 16:22 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 16:18
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7c Nickel posted:Don't know if it's been mentioned and I don't care. This book deserves to be dumped on 24/7. I think you accidentally posted this before you got to the part of the book that's terrible, because everything you've said makes it sound awesome.
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Mar 3, 2016 18:40
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Antivehicular posted:Everything is a gross Just-So Story about what makes some feature sexually appealing or not, with a lot of broad, skeevy assumptions about what "sexually appealing" even means. Let me guess: poorly disguised pedophelia?
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Mar 24, 2016 18:23
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Tiggum posted:I liked Going Postal a lot and Making Money was decent, but Raising Steam was pretty much garbage. Nothing much happened and it wasn't funny. I felt like several of his later Discworld books seemed like they were written out of obligation or something, like he was out of decent Discworld ideas but just kept adding to the series anyway. Nation and Dodger were way better than any of the Discworld books that came out after about 2005. I... kind of agree? To me it felt like he had decent ideas about where he wanted Discworld to go but knew he didn't have enough time, so the last few books felt very forced because he wanted to move things along in a hurry.
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Jul 7, 2016 15:32
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YeahTubaMike posted:I didn't see the sentence where you say what that passage is about, and I thought that it was a passage from the story with the dog main character. It would make totally sense for a dog to be that excited/overwhelmed about a tailgate, not an adult human. I am listing LOTS OF THINGS. This makes me a GOOD WRITER, just like listing famous ballet dancers makes me A FASCINATING CONVERSATIONALIST ON THE TOPIC OF DANCE. It kind of reminds me of otterguy's gimmick: There were Many Items of Food and Drink; these Included Watermelon; Pickles; Bratwurst; Knockwurst; Liverwurst; other Sausages;...
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Jul 29, 2016 23:49
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grittyreboot posted:So I just finished Armada. drat, I thought RPO was bad. Here are some random thoughts. The part that kills me is that it's not just a dumb story with terrible writing designed to pander to nerds, it's also bad at pandering to nerds. It reads like a book that was farmed out to some elderly hack who was told to bang out a story about them newfangled Nintemdoes for the kiddies; it's hilariously out of touch with basically every part of nerd and gamer culture, and poo poo like the credit list for the invasion simulator just reads like someone typed "famous videogame designers" into google and called it a day.
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Aug 11, 2016 15:34
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Wiggy Marie posted:For a new contribution (sorry if I missed it), a friend and I hateread the Caine Black Knife series by Matthew Woodring Stover. The first book in the series has an...interesting premise, in that the main characters are Actors who phase into an alternate fantasy-style dimension in order to play out fantasy characters for TV shows back here in reality, where evil Jew producers and SS-style police are the enemy. Heroes Die is something of a guilty pleasure for me, and honestly not even that guilty. It's gloriously trashy and just smart enough to not take itself all that seriously--the attempts to shoehorn in some Big Idea philosophy in the vignettes with Caine's dad are admittedly grating but generally unobtrusive. Actually, come to think of it, yeah, basically all of the Earth scenes are garbage outside of the bare minimum studio intrigue subplot. I enjoy the main story in the fantasy world, though--it's cheesy as hell to be sure, but I have a hard time seeing it as anything except a conscious pastiche. Then the second book just absolutely goes 100% full retard. I wouldn't necessarily say it's downhill from there but it never gets much better, and the last book descends into some of the worst literary masturbation I've ever read. E: like you could almost spin the second book as metacommentary on terrible sequels because it ticks off so many sequel cliches, but it completely plays them to the hilt and instead of pulling back to reveal it's in on the joke it just dives into utter insanity. the holy poopacy has a new favorite as of 05:05 on Aug 28, 2016 |
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Aug 28, 2016 05:01
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Wiggy Marie posted:Another example, and the one that to this day I always remember when I think of this series, is something called the "blind god," which is the embodiment of all of the terrible things humans think and do. It's an entity which can possess people. It has promise for being interesting. Characterization: it possesses the evil Jew producer because he's already so evil, thus making him more evil, and he proceeds to rape a woman and then begins eating her while doing so. Biting chunks of her breasts off. While raping her. He's really evil. Also, Stover is really stuck on the whole moral relativism, "good and evil are just a point of view" brand of philosophical masturbation, and by this point in the series it has stopped being subtext and is now just spelled out in the narration. So the incarnate murder-rape-cannibal god also tries to argue that from a certain perspective it is objectively good (sadly, he does not do this literally in between bites of tits because that would have been hilarious.) The blind god is also basically the personification of consumerism, which fits in brilliantly with the themes established in the first book. And then he turns into the bad guy from Ferngully.
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Aug 28, 2016 16:44
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flosofl posted:Are you talking about the Domination series by SM Stirling? He wrote those as a deliberate dystopia as opposed to "things are differently bad, but they just work out anyway" . They're not supposed to be feel-good books in support of racism and eugenics. S.M. Stirling uses this defense a lot but he writes an awful lot of books where everything happens to work out wonderfully for racists and eugenicists, without anything much to suggest that this isn't super peachy.
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Aug 29, 2016 05:42
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Ryoshi posted:Uh considering it's a comic and it's only funny at all if you read it as an indictment I'm going to say that you're wrong there. With Penny Arcade you shouldn't necessarily assume that the interpretation that it's funny at all is the correct one, but I don't really care either way.
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Aug 31, 2016 22:03
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:For every "good" book in the star wars universe, there's like 10 mediocre to complete poo poo ones. For every bad book in the star wars universe there are 10 bad books
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Sep 23, 2016 15:52
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Wheat Loaf posted:I thought it was any service to the state, not just military service. The narrator points out that the alternate services are all things that are probably more likely to kill you than the military. Hazardous waste disposal, medical experimentation subject, etc. I don't remember if human target practice was one of the examples thrown out but that was pretty much the tone laid out. One way or another, you had to let the government try to kill you before you got any say in your government.
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Dec 6, 2016 19:52
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Foxhound posted:I can't say I've encountered it too much. I used to read a lot more than I do these days and read a whole lot of fantasy in my teens and the only series I can recall that does it is The Death Gate Cycle. I liked that series as a kid and am kind of scared to revisit it in case it was actually not that good and I'm just being nostalgic. Yyyeeah, it's probably for the best that you don't. I wouldn't say it's outright terrible and it does have a lot of cool ideas, but a lot of the writing and characterization is cringey as hell (particularly "funny" characters like the baby-talking dwarves or the crazy wizard.)
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Aug 10, 2017 17:11
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Groke posted:Right, I'm going to read that book judging it solely by its cover. Can't be any worse than World War Z.
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Sep 11, 2017 14:59
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Mr. Sunshine posted: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! Actually, that's one of Turtledove's better series. He peaked super early and has been spiraling downwards ever since. There's so much outright offensive alt hist schlock out there (such as Watch on the Rhine) that he's spent his entire career coasting on the merits of being able to string together words about nazis without accidentally turning into unironically pro-fascist propaganda, regardless of the quality of his writing.
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Oct 5, 2017 14:54
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Wheat Loaf posted:I believe Turtledove's chief controversy was how he always turned Mormons into suicide bombers or something like that; he certainly did in Timeline-191, which is the only long series of his that I've read, but I don't know beyond that. Most of all of Turtledove's writing is a lazy search and replace. To be fair it's not like he singled the Mormons out, he pulls out the suicide bomber card in every asymmetric war (including the humans vs. aliens one, and a couple other conflicts in the same series as the Mormons.) And almost all of his books are about asymmetric wars.
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Oct 5, 2017 15:23
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Internet Victory posted:You play as multiple characters, and the twist is one of them was the murderer the whole time. EXCEPT there's a point in the game in I think a clock shop or something where you are in the same room as the killer and he disappears and I'm pretty sure commits a murder in an impossibly short amount of time so you can't even come to the conclusion he's the murderer on your own by suspicious circumstance because you're literally there with him the whole time while he kinda just does a thing in 2 seconds. Yeah, the game contradicts itself on the murderer's whereabouts. Not just from the murderer's own perspective (which would be cheap but arguably permissible), it actually shows him in plain sight of another character to give him an alibi and then later retcons it to give him a lot more time out of her sight than what it had previously shown. It even calls attention to itself by including very prominent sound cues in the background of both versions of the scene so it's obvious they're not just fudging it a little, they straight up have him in two places at the same cues.
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Mar 8, 2018 18:18
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:The author is a sexual harasser. It’s the typical privileged white guy “oh it’s a joke” and/or believes saying crass stuff is innocuous, but it’s harassment all the same. This is fairly recent news to the public but per the industry he was known for making inappropriate remarks for years. He did the whole apology song and dance, much like he did four years ago when he made a racist remark toward author Jacqueline Woodson at a conference where she won an award. we were warned  Tunicate posted:the first three harry potter books are pretty good only if you skip the 2nd one and just read 1/3/4
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Mar 20, 2018 14:52
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Sweevo posted:Goons think they have to automatically hate PA because of some stupid feud Lowtax had with them back in the day. But I think you're right. I read it entirely out of habit these days. It's fine, but only fine. The humour has changed, and not necessarily for the better. I think there are plenty of reasons to dislike current PA that have nothing to do with goon hivemind. I genuinely liked it back in the day and think most of the peak stuff holds up reasonably well, but I haven't read it in like 5 years and that was already several years after it stopped entertaining me. EDIT: man I always forget how long PA was sucking. I keep thinking of 2007-2009 as being peak PA but I just went and clicked on a few random strips and it was already downhill by then, although still a ways from rock bottom. the holy poopacy has a new favorite as of 15:16 on Jul 17, 2018 |
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Jul 17, 2018 14:43
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Ravished by a Glass Tube in the Tower of London, by Charles Tingleton Esq.
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Jul 20, 2019 14:52
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how do you write multiple bestselling erotic romance novels and still sound like a middle schooler talking about their conception of what they think sex must be like
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Dec 6, 2019 15:54
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Have you ever watched porn not a ton of it, apparently I missed out on sexy porn tropes like "oh myyy, your dick is so flexible" and "wow, look at all the condoms you go through"
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Dec 6, 2019 19:13
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I didn't find Mostly Harmless noticeably different in tone from the rest of the series  Random, pointless, incomprehensible cruelty is a major theme of the whole series.
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Mar 5, 2024 02:06
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