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there wolf posted:I don't get the love for Sanderson, at all. Is Stormlight a million times better than Mistborn or something, because that series went to poo poo fast. I liked Warbreaker, which was probably mostly because it's just one single fairly short book. He's better when he's just constrained to a single straightforward plot, which is probably also why Mistborn 1 was so much better than the sequels. SiKboy posted:Honestly, Rothfus is okay to good by the standards of the genre (A genre incidently I loving love, but I'm fairly honest with myself about how most of it is complete trash) but I'm always suprised at the hype/recognition he gets. The two novels hes released so far are enjoyable (I never read the novella because gently caress you finish the series before trying to sell me a spin off) but pretty much all my friends who have even a passing interest in the genre have read them, which isnt the case for a whole bunch of other, more interesting authors. The protagonist is a dude who is always the smartest person in the room, always ready with a scathing  , super competent at everything he deems important, and who is only ever disliked by certified assholes because of prejudices. It's essentially pure, distilled nerd wish-fulfillment. Case in point, the literal (literally literal) sex goddess complimenting him on his loving talents right after taking his virginity.
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Aug 31, 2016 09:11
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Fashionable Jorts posted:I loved the first half of Name of the Wind. The first half could be the best book I've ever read, I just couldn't stop reading. But by about the tenth time he gets awkward and frustrated with that manic-pixie-dream-girl, I was struggling to go on. That means you also skipped the magic sex ninjas, so yeah you did get pretty lucky.
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Aug 31, 2016 18:23
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Bamabalacha posted:How has the thread not been graced yet with "Oh John Ringo, no!" Ringo is basically just easy mode for this thread. I mean, I can't really think of any other series that stoops as low as having the heroic protagonist literally (as in, literally literally) be an admitted pedophile rapist with an actual underage harem. Like, Ringo doesn't even mince words or try to put some sort of spin on it. In one book he brutally rapes an underage forced prostitute and threatens her with death if she tries to run, in another he makes frequent use of a child-prostitute who is 14 years old at best. And the book never stops to consider that maybe those are bad things, it's always just presented as a manly man blowing off some steam in a super manly way. And of course the protagonist is also so extremely good at sex that he literally fucks women blind. Once again, literally blind, Ringo makes up some poo poo about orgasms causing a loss of blood flow to the ocular nerve, because his understanding of sex is basically that of a horny 13 year old. As it happens there's currently a let's read of it going on in TFR, if you want to experience the horror directly: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3751991
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Sep 15, 2016 09:58
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Electric Lady posted:Reminds me of: Spikenard.
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Sep 22, 2016 22:02
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Seriously, what is it with fantasy authors and surprise bestiality? The same thing happened in Lev Grossman's The Magicians. It starts out as basically Harry Potter aimed at an older audience, with magic being kind of a highly complex applied science and there being a college/academy where it's being taught and studied. Then out of nowhere there's a scene where they're practicing transformation magic, the whole class is transformed into foxes (I think). Of course the whole thing immediately turns into a fox-orgy because base animalistic instincts or whatever, and the characters later comment on how cool and liberating that was. Okay, so far, so weird, but you might think that's just one isolated incident. But then later on there's a scene where one of the characters is involved the summoning of some demon/spirit thing. Which is an anthromorphic human/fox hybrid because of course it is. The ritual goes wrong, the demon starts killing everyone, and the character offers to sell him her soul to save her friends. And, how else could it be, the process of taking her soul involves a drawn-out, detailed rape by the foxman.
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Oct 17, 2016 10:47
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Well, this sure could turn out to be amazingly terrible. The decent parts of the books don't really translate to film, while the obnoxious ones most certainly do. Best odds we have is they give it the Legend of the Seeker treatment, striping out everything but the bare bones and turning it into a something bland but reasonably entertaining. The only good thing about all this is that pretty much no matter what they do, the fanbase will likely get deliciously mad. 
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Nov 30, 2016 12:49
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I Killed GBS posted:I haven't seen fanfic that poorly-written or blatantly gary-stuish in quite some time. Jesus. From the looks of it, it seems like once upon a time the idea was to build Kvothe up as this huge impossible legendary hero first, and then show the actually pretty mundane and lovely reality beneath the myth. Except apparently Rothfuss at some point decided that the latter part was too much effort and instead just plays the whole thing completely straight.
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Dec 5, 2016 10:50
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food court bailiff posted:Have you actually read the book? Because it ends with Kvothe almost getting killed by some random mook demon at his run-down lovely country tavern because of a nasty and apparently permanent case of magical erectile dysfunction. The whole point really is that no matter what heroics he's done in the past, he's completely washed up by the time the first book starts and he begins telling this huge story about himself. The second book goes extremely off a cliff. It spends maybe 5% of its length paying lip service to "well current-day Kvothe is kind of sad I guess" while the remaining 95% are wholly and utterly devoted to telling us how Kvothe is absolutely the raddest and most awesome dude to ever exist in his world.
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Dec 5, 2016 18:13
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WickedHate posted:I've never really read any of the Clancy books, but the weird right wing bullshit is rampant in the video games too. The entire premise of Splinter Cell is that there's a special heroic agency that exists to do things the government can't normally under the constitution, which is..uncomfortable. Yeah, thinking back on it there were a number of pretty uncomfortable parts. I think it was the second part where you were working together with an israeli agent for most of the mission, but about halfway through your handler suddenly tells you to shoot her as she's about to leave. You actually have a choice in the matter, but when you refuse to do so it'll turn out she's actually a traitor, and you'll have to contend with additional enemies later in the level. So the implicit lesson there is that it's cool and good to immediately follow orders to murder whoever without asking, because those at the top always know what's best.
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Dec 21, 2016 12:46
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They're not nearly as bad as most of the stuff posted in here, but I'm kind of getting fed up with the Honor Harrington books by David Weber. I mean, there are certainly some good parts in there, the dude knows how to write an engaging space battle. But the problem is that the primary antagonists just suck too much. Not (just) suck in a literary sense, but they're simply bad at everything. The antagonists are called the Republic of Haven. They're a large group of several star systems with a theoretically class-less society, a huge population count, a massive navy, always expanding and-... they're the Soviet Union in space. The whole thing is the Cold War in space, with the Republic's Soviet Union against the protagonist's Great Britain. The problem is that any time we're shown any insight in how they function, it's always focused on how they're utter garbage in every singel way. Their society sucks. Their economy sucks. Their politics suck. Their culture sucks. Their technology sucks. Their military sucks, with the only saving grace being its sheer size. Pretty much every time the books are written from the perspective of someone from Haven, they all hate and despise their side. And that really takes much of the fun out of seeing them defeated. Hell, they're not even mustache-twirling villains where you could have some schadenfreude to see them get theirs. The only reason why Haven is even looking to attack is because their entire economy and society is on the brink of collapse (because they're spending so much on welfare, you see  ). That's not a challenging antagonist to heroically struggle against, that's loving Blaster from Beyond Thunderdome.And then in the third book the two powers clash in earnest for the first time, and it's just a dry fart. Haven bumbles into a series of ambushes (partly due to protagonist planning, partly due to simple bad luck) and just utterly falls apart immediately. They sound a general retreat and their navy is mauled to the point where they're actually weaker than the protagonists' side. And as if that wasn't enough, the whole thing is immediately followed by a popular coup back home, killing what few actually capable leaders they had. All three books so far build up to that confrontation, and it was pretty much the opposite of a climax. Oh, and last but not least: The name of the guy leading that coup who killed all of the old guard? Robert Stanton Pierre. Rob S. Pierre. gently caress you, David Weber.
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Jun 4, 2017 20:29
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Apraxin posted:It's both. I dunno if Weber always intended it that way or if he decided to shoehorn it in after he'd already laid out the Hornblower-in-space elements, but there's a lot of SOCIALISM BAD stuff as the series goes on; like paragraphs on how the proud, free people of Manticore would never submit to the horrors of a graduated income tax. If I remember right, one of the later books explains that the reason Haven is this great expansionist power but also teetering on the brink of collapse is literally that they made the mistake of instituting a social welfare system - being given unemployment benefits made Haven's citizens a bunch of lazy slobs who refuse to work, so the only way the government can keep funding the welfare payments is to conquer neighboring systems and loot their economies. Yeah, both work quite well. Weber did go out of his way to engineer things so that warships would still line up in great rigid formations and exchange broadsides, after all. I'd homed in more on the Soviet comparison mostly because of that. He goes on and on about how their basic income is basically the root of all evil, bankrupting their state and turning the population lazy and useless. Book 2 also featured a proxy war between two minor neighbouring systems that felt very Korea-like. And a fair bit of smugness about how the supposedly egalitarian Havens have significant problems with nepotism, while the literal nobility of Manticore pretty much without fail prove themselves worthy of their station. And yeah, there's a bunch of obnoxious fairly modern political stuff that I ended up mostly skipping right through. Lots of snivelling stereotypes of "Progressives" and "Liberals" who dare to suggest that maybe colonialism and eternal war might be a bad thing, and who are quickly put into place by the right-thinking military types who know that the only solution is to give Haven a jolly good thrashing. Honestly, the more I think back on it, the more it feels like a somewhat more competent John Ringo without (most of) the rape. Which, admittedly, is not very much like Ringo at all, but you get my point. Perestroika has a new favorite as of 16:41 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 12:02
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Nckdictator posted:So, someone on another forum has been doing a read-through of Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War by William Lind, a writer for various far-right sources and former aide to Senator and Presidential candidate Gary Hart. You know, sometimes I idly wonder what it'd be like to write something like this but with the opposite political slant. Our protagonists are a mixed-race lesbian couple with a few adopted children trying to make sure they'll live in a tolerant world where they won't have to struggle against prejudice. But they're beset on all sides, harassed by racists who are inflamed by nonwhite women doing anything at all, and persecuted by a theocratic government who wants to put them into re-education camps until they come out straight. And then I realise why I wouldn't want to write anything like that, because that poo poo hits too close to home and would just be depressing. 
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Jul 12, 2017 10:07
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I actually read RPO cover to cover because it was gifted to me, and I basically can't remember a single drat thing that happened in there. Not having grown up in the US just about 80% of the references were pretty much white noise to me, and the actual plot was so drat barebones it might as well not have been there. I can't even recall how it ended. Pretty much the only thing I do recall is that at one point the protagonist starts to get fat from playing videogames all day and having his food delivered, and his solution to that was buying some sort of integrated treadmill thing so that he could work out while still playing. Also he shaved off all his hair so he wouldn't have to deal with hygiene. This was supposed to show some sort of admirable devotion, rather than the mother of all red flags.
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Jul 29, 2017 10:46
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Uh, I hate to break it to you but in a later book he goes back there like twenty years later and rapes his daughter (who was born out of the original rape). Jesus Christ, what is it with fantasy authors and rape? 
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Aug 10, 2017 09:24
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Actually can we talk about Prince of Thorns again because it's really hard to explain how bad those books are. The protagonist is: Yeah, the final twist was about the last straw when I noped the hell out and threw the goddamn book into a corner. It was just so utterly half-assed, and only popped up like 30 pages out from the end. It actually could have made for something potentially interesting if it had come up somewhere about halfway through: Imagine a character who has been ludicrously, cartoonishly evil for most of his life and had built a reputation upon that, but then it turns out that whole thing was due to an outside influence. That gives you an interesting hook for having the character try to deal with their position in life now that they actually have a functioning conscience, and trying to deal with the trauma of actually having done all that hosed up poo poo. A certain conflict between just how much of everything was due to the compulsion and how much they did out of their own free will. But instead it comes in at the very last moment as basically a cheap "Welp, turns out he's not actually culpable for anything, so I get to have my cake and eat it, too". Perhaps that whole issue is brought up in the sequels, but gently caress reading anything more of that. 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. It's not super common or anything, but it does seem to pop up surprisingly regularly. There's no easy way to give examples without giving away the twists of some books, so read at your own risk: The aforementioned Prince of Thorns is one example, I think at one point you have the protagonist walk through an old bunker and interact with some remnant computer system, dumping a whole lot of exposition on his head and I think giving him some WMD or something. Another fairly recent example would be the Shattered Sea series by Joe Abercrombie, who embedded that whole thing a little more gracefully with only a few surviving artefacts that turned out to be modern firearms.
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Aug 10, 2017 11:59
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Great Metal Jesus posted:Man it's kind of worrying how many books I've seen in this thread that have been recommended to me by otherwise cool and good friends. Prince of Thorns, Name of the Wind, and Ready Player One have all been thrown at me at one point or another. Name of the Wind is fairly tolerable for long stretches. The sequel, Wise Man's Fear, is where poo poo starts getting really dire what with the sex ninjas and the Actual Sex Goddess.
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Aug 10, 2017 20:26
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Suleman posted:Speaking of Dan Simmons, how about Flashback? Ahaha god drat. This is so goddamn masturbatory it should be listed in the erotic literature genre. Sexually frustrated housewives write stories where a trio of godlike Adonises pine after the protagonist and ravish her in increasingly infeasible ways, whereas politically frustrated conservatives write this. Also: quote:Then came last year's Black Hills, a less satisfying story that posited an American Indian's mystical union with the soul of General George Custer. What are the odds this ended with the native American eventually being convinced that Custer was cool and good and eradicating the Natives was kinda justified?
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Aug 11, 2017 13:35
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NoneMoreNegative posted:
Yeah that just loving owns.
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Sep 11, 2017 22:29
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Wapole Languray posted:Dresden Files is straight up modern-day pulp. As in cheap disposable fiction writtent competently but workmanlike, with an emphasis on sex, violence, and the lurid. It's the 21st Century nerd equivalent of Doc Savage. They're fun, have only a few creepy/messed up moments (in urban fantasy overall getting sex stuff pretty OK is a BIG accomplishment. I mean, he unilaterally equates rape with evil fuckers, and actively discourages sex that isn't between two equals with total consent between them) but I wouldn't call it fine lit, but poo poo man there's so much worse it's not even worth picking on them. Dresden Files is basically the fast-food equivalent of urban fantasy. Not high literature by any means and in some ways pretty bad, but generally quite entertaining and very well-paced. When I find myself finished with a book series and unsure what to read next, I often pick those back up. They're just plain fun to read and you can blast through each book in a couple of days easy. And as for The Magicians, I basically nope'd right out of there after the second graphic furry sex/rape scene. Once is a mistake, twice is a pattern.
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Sep 14, 2017 12:23
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food court bailiff posted:I don't know, it's the Something Codex I think? There was a really brief excerpt I read somewhere a long time ago and it sucked. Codex Alera. I haven't read it, though from what I've heard it's intensely bland. I have read the the steampunk one, Aeronaut's Windlass, though I don't really remember anything too remarkable from it except that some of its gimmicks (Cats can talk and are super catty and arrogant! All the magic users have super weird mental quirks!) got pretty played out in a hurry.
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Sep 14, 2017 14:21
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taiyoko posted:One I pulled for an order tonight at work, and I thought the blurb was so bad it belonged here: The Selection. Reminds me of Cryptonomicon, which also had a character named America Shaftoe, who usually went by Amy. But her grandfather also named her father "Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe", so it's really more of a case of a mildly insane family. 
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Sep 20, 2017 12:37
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that main character's name.
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Drunken Baker posted:This is what delights and infuriates me about crap books/films/whatever. You get an idea like RPO and it is done so, so terribly. But it gives you a little spark of insight and inspiration because it COULD be the bedrock for some really fascinating fiction. The same thing happened for me in Name of the Wind (or perhaps the sequel, I don't remember). At one point the protagonist has money troubles while at the magic academy and meets up with a loan shark who's a former student and runs kind of a black market for magic stuff. And right there I got a glimpse of the potential for an actually interesting story told in the same world. A story about a wealth of incredibly useful knowledge jealously hoarded away by a privileged group, a student falling through the cracks of their ridiculous standards and finding her own way of getting back at them, all the ways that magic is actually changing life for the regular people on the ground, all that good stuff. But no, instead we're stuck with Captain Awesome's story about loving all the sex ninjas, pursuing the most boring romance in the world, and stumbling into seemingly every single important prophecy and event in the world because of course he does.
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Oct 5, 2017 12:49
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khy posted:I like David Weber books but I am so sick of the phrase "bomb-pumped x-ray lasers" I tried to read Weber's Honour Harrington but ended up dropping it about three books in because his antagonists just suck so much. Not just "suck" in the way they're written, but in that they're simply bad at everything. Every time we get a glimpse into their world, we're told how their politics suck, their society sucks, or their military sucks. When we get a PoV character from their side, they usually think about how much their side sucks and how they hate it, but they still fight for them out of some atrophied sense of patriotism or simply inertia. At that point, it doesn't really feel so much like our protagonists heroically struggling against overwhelming odds, but more like them beating up a retarded child. This was particularly apparent in the third book: The so far mostly cold war finally goes hot, and we get the first serious clashes in what has been hyped up as the both inevitable as well as utterly decisive showdown between the two major power blocs. And what happens? The antagonists instantly lose on every front in ridiculously decisive ways, and their government immediately collapses. That just kind of killed any sense of having stakes or a struggle.
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Oct 6, 2017 07:54
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Wheat Loaf posted:One of the first things I can remember reading which I thought was overwrought enough it made me go, "Oh, come on Oh man, I actually read that series, though it was like a decade back and I don't really remember a whole lot about it. But yeah, from what I do remember it was pretty generic if serviceable fantasy. Now I can't help but wonder how the Mormonism played into it.
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Oct 18, 2017 12:49
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Inescapable Duck posted:Dresden Files has a recurring issue that wizards are somewhere between walking EMPs and Murphy's Law when it comes to technology after a certain point of advancement, and more drastically so when they actively use magic or attempt to use the device in question. This occasionally has advantages, like how it's hilariously easy for them to kill security cameras and even cause weapons to malfunction, but an increasing amount of disadvantages, especially since other supernatural beings usually have no such weakness at all as long as they take the time to figure out how technology works. There's even a plot point in one of the books where people deliberately use modern technology to hide information from wizards, and the protagonist has to rely on his friends to use modern technology and the internet for him. Also makes life a bit hard for wizards, since many can't use cell phones, air conditioning, refridgerators or hot water systems. It's mostly just a fairly simple plot device to allow Butcher to hark more closely back towards the classic noir detective stories. It makes it easier to have Dresden need to go everywhere in person and/or end up stranded in bad spots all alone without constantly having to think of reasons why he couldn't just look poo poo up on the internet or call for backup on his cellphone. Though it's pretty fun how he managed to interweave that with the world, like at one point he mentioned that before electronics were really a thing the same effect manifested by stuff like curdling milk or making animals infertile, which eventually became associated with witches in popular culture.
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Dec 15, 2017 11:22
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hackbunny posted:
200 pages of mundane description of the protagonist going through their regular daily routine. Then on the last page they are unceremoniously nuked as the antagonist's plan comes to fruition, because the two of them running into each other beforehand would be a *scoffs* irrational contrivance.
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Jan 3, 2018 21:30
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Perhaps the dorkiest thing about Peterson is that he believes he can't have a "proper" argument with a woman because there's no implicit threat of violence. Apparently, to him a proper argument only carries weight when the people involved could theoretically come to fisticuffs about it or whatever, which doesn't work when a woman is involved. Mind that this is coming from the same guy who, by his own proud admission, got into some sort of simian stare-off with a three year old boy (who'd gotten into a fight with his daughter on the playground) and fantasized about how much better the world would be if he was allowed to beat the poo poo out of that child. So yeah, dude's a massive dweeb hiding behind a shitload of bluster.
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May 1, 2018 17:09
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:You do not recall correctly. At all. In fact, you recall with the Platonic, quintessential definition of recalling incorrectly. Yeah, even though it got worse (much worse) in the later books, Ghost still had impressively terrible scenes. On the  side you had the thing where he picks up two random college girls on his yacht for an extended cruise (mind the implication) where he introduced them to BDSM in the most cringy way possible. On the  you had the part where he buys an underage prostitute who had almost certainly been trafficked and threatens her with death while he rapes her.
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May 6, 2018 14:38
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It's been a pretty long time since I read Ennis, but I seem to remember that at least Preacher had a pretty annoying subtext along the lines of "Good people have normal, regular hetero sex. Meanwhile anybody who fucks weird is definitely a depraved bad person". And of course a giant heap of edginess for its own sake.
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Jun 3, 2019 20:33
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Dienes posted:What's really telling in this one is how defensive Rothfuss is about it. He knows drat well how sexist it is, but he is too in love with it to change it and instead tries to insult the reader preemptively. Hell, that entire arc just shows how incredibly infantile the whole book is when it comes to women. Early on Rothfuss gives Kvothe the one designated flaw that he's "useless with women", which mostly just meant that he didn't pick up on their signals when they inexplicably threw themselves at him. So what does he do to "cure" Kvothe of that flaw? Perhaps have him meet somebody, have a relationship, and grow as a person? Nah. Instead Kvothe goes into a forest, meets an Actual Sex Goddess, impresses her with how good at sex he is despite being a virgin, and learns how to be the best at sex. And that's it. He has sex once and after that he becomes Ladykiller incarnate, easily seducing just about every woman he wants, except for the designated love interest.
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Dec 22, 2019 21:47
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nonathlon posted:I missed the earlier discussion, but the moment I say this, I thought REAMDE. Yeah, it was a hell of a whiplash for me, too. I'd come fresh off of Cryptonomicon, which I'd enjoyed quite a bit (despite some of the cringy STEMlordery), and figured I'd enjoy his at the time newest book just as much. But nope, there's just... barely anything in there. Keeps going round and round without much of a point.
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Jan 22, 2020 13:50
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At one point it kinda flirted with the idea of "This supposed legendary hero is in reality just kind of a sad tosser whose myth was built up intentionally, and now this historian will uncover the grimy truth behind the legend.". Which could be a genuinely interesting concept in the hands of an actually competent author. Of course, Rothfuss stuck with that idea for like five seconds and then immediately pivoted "Actually this guy is the most legendary motherfucker to ever gently caress a mother and if anything is even radder than the stories say!"
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Jul 30, 2020 19:30
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I met Boyne in person a year ago. He is... a writer. Finished the first draft the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in a week with no research, which has earned him some ire: https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2010/03/boy-in-striped-pyjamas-by-john-boyne.html Yeah, it seems the dude's entire thing is writing books about topics he's incredibly unqualified to write about, and then getting super salty when people point out his dumbass mistakes. Also he's apparently very quick to sue people who publicly criticise him, while also being a signatory on that big "We are super concerned about cancel culture and free speech" Harper's letter a few weeks back.
Perestroika has a new favorite as of 19:26 on Aug 3, 2020 |
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Aug 3, 2020 19:20
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Cobalt-60 posted:Most readers are lazy; we liked certain books, and we want More of the Same. As long as something scratches that itch, and is at least a page-turner, we'll buy. That's how the pulp series, no matter how god-awful, sell. That's how every copy-pasted romance novel sells. Very few people are interested in criticizing their pleasure, and even fewer to the level of actually changing what they read. Are there flaws in Parick Rothfuss' writing? Yes. Did I enjoy his books anyway? Yes. Will I buy the last book? Yes (this question is largely academic). Yeah, this is basically where I'm at with using goodreads. I pretty much just dump all books I liked into The Algorithm and let it spit out books that are reasonably similar, then use the tags and summary to guess whether I might like them. Which seems to work reasonably well for me, giving me stuff I enjoyed with better accuracy and less effort than just thumbing through new releases in a bookstore. I've never touched the social media aspect of it ever, and it seems like that was probably a good decision.
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Jan 15, 2021 09:11
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IshmaelZarkov posted:Hi thread. There's a Sword of Truth Let's Read over in Trad Games. The series is perhaps not quite as outright vile as Ringo, but there's still a lot of entertaining terribleness to be found: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3668845
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Aug 28, 2021 14:28
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Amazing. As if the author went "Writing erotica? Oh, that's easy: PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS."
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Aug 30, 2021 11:57
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Cornwind Evil posted:The thing that really got me once you got past the endless torrents of horrible poo poo is how grey and joyless the book is. None of the characters seem to have any sort of passion, even the lunatic passion of the murderous racist. They nuke most of the world in the end and then basically sit surrounded by the ashes, almost like they're resigned to their own deaths as well. Even 'winning' does nothing for them. They're empty shells at the start and at the end, and so void of everything they can't even realize THAT. That kind of reminds me of a sci-fi series I read a while back, Theirs Not To Reason Why. It's five books, but to give a very brief summary: The protagonist is born with exceptionally strong precognitive abilities (psychics are reasonably common in this universe), and sees that all life in the galaxy will be extinguished by an apocalyptic invasion coming in a few centuries. She sees that there's only one particular sequence of events that give life a chance to survive, and the books are basically about her setting up the dominoes in exactly such a way that those events will come to pass after her death. For the most part I actually kind of liked the series. But one part of her big master plan was the complete genocide of a particular alien species. It's a constant throughout the series that this is coming, and it goes to great lengths to point out that pretty much all other sentient species in the galaxy are fine and dandy and coexist peacefully, this one in particular is just irredeemably evil and impossible to coexist with. A lot of hay is made about how her prescience shows explicitly that only a genocide will work and there's absolutely no other way to solve the galaxy without it. And then in the last book the genocide finally happens and it's just... completely perfunctory. There's a short chapter about a bioweapon killing most of them and then the protagonist destroying their home planet, and that's it. It's not framed as a particular tragedy or triumph, nor used as an impulse for introspection. The whole run-up to it takes up a significant amount of screentime (including a particularly distasteful scene of the protagonist psychically torturing somebody into going along with the genocide), but in the end it serves pretty much no narrative or thematic purpose. The theme that the protagonist will do literally anything to ensure her plan comes through has already been established more effectively in the first few books and didn't really need any more reinforcement at that point. It really felt like like the author went into the series with the idea of "gotta have a genocide to make it gritty and hardcore" and then just plain didn't really know what to do with it.
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Mar 27, 2022 19:51
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Jokerpilled Drudge posted:So it's like dune ( all 6 books) but really lovely Pretty much yeah. The inspiration was very obvious, but without the sort of introspection that Dune (at least the first couple books) manages. In its favour I'll say that the author does write pretty entertaining space battles, and she does manage to make the galaxy feel interesting and well lived-in. But even apart from the whole genocide thing, it does run facefirst into the issue of "how do you generate tension when the protagonist is functionally omniscient?" and the answer was pretty much "you don't". Early on there are some more upsets as the protagonist still learns how to use her power and occasionally her gambles go the wrong way, but as the story goes on that's eventually discarded. Especially the last book contained a lot of "Remember this thing the protagonist was planning to make happen? It happens just as expected, no surprises here because she literally cannot be surprised anymore".
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Mar 29, 2022 09:45
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Ambitious Spider posted:Been reading Wise Man's Fear, the second King killer chronicle. Now, I know what's coming, but the majority of the book is more of the same. And then out of nowhere he's brought into the fae by the sex fairy queen. And he's super good at sex despite being a virgin. And makes her fall in love with him, because he's super good at writing songs and magic and also a virgin so she lets him go to see how good he'll be when he gets some experience. And then she keeps training him in the erotic arts because her greatest lover will never disappoint another... Look forwards to when he gets back home and he proceeds to gently caress his way though the university and creeps on basically every woman there, but a female character explicitly goes "Oh, it's not creepy when he's ogling you, it's totally hot and flattering actually!"
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Apr 17, 2022 13:44
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Strategic Tea posted:It's the crest for one of the necromancer houses from Gideon the Ninth - here! https://www.muddycolors.com/2020/07/the-skulls-of-gideon-the-ninth/ God I just love Gideon's aviator shades skull. Makes me crack up every time.
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Apr 18, 2022 13:59
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