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Ryoshi posted:The first books that jump to mind are the sequels to Arthur C. Clarke's subtle hard-science-fiction masterpiece Rendezvous with Rama. While RwR was a story of discovery and exploration as humanity suddenly realizes that they're not alone in the universe by way of a giant unmanned spacecraft floating through the solar system, its sequels Rama II, The Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed were increasingly ridiculous farces written mostly by awful hack Gentry Lee. In the first novel there were thoughtful discussions on the physics of BASE jumping in low-artificial-gravity environments, by the third novel a child in a teenager's body is playing with anal beads with a mafia don (who has reprogrammed a robotic version of Abraham Lincoln to mow down everyone at a nearby wedding with 1920's style Tommy guns). There's an entirely too long discussion on how best to breed the only woman for millions of miles to create a genetically diverse family, which is obviously problematic since one of the only available sperm donors is a devout Catholic. It's all sex and drama and presidential robot gangsters for hundreds and hundreds of pages and it never manages to be interesting even when one of the male leads is raped by a race of glowing sentient spiders. This isn't even including the fact that the finale, the climactic sendoff to the thousand pages of Gentry Lee's writing, the payoff to the mystery of the builders of the cylinders and their true purpose, is literally 'God did it'. No pussyfooting around the issue, just 'God did it. Here's a video recording of the Big Bang, and of this station (where the cylinders were built and are coordinated from) popping into existence a microsecond later. Hope you enjoyed!'.
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Jul 2, 2015 07:37
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For those of you who don't know Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is generally considered one of the great classics of sci-fi. The idea is that in the distant future, when earth has been forgotten for thousands of years, and humanity has grown into a galaxy-spanning empire, a mathematician named Hari Seldon develops this theory of 'psychohistory', which is sort of a large-scale economic/social/cultural statistical model of the entire human race. What he finds, though, is that his theory predicts the coming fall of the galactic empire, which will plunge the entire human race into a thirty-thousand year dark age. He figures out a plan, though, which will be able to shorten this dark age to 'only' a thousand years, and he establishes a secretive 'foundation' to influence the course of history. Asimov wrote five novels about the evolution and struggles of the foundation, and then two more prequel novels near the end of his life about Hari Seldon and the development of psychohistory. The first three are classics, the others are simply good, but I don't want to talk about them. I want to talk about Foundation's Fear, by Gregory Benford. What you have there is pretty clearly a collection of stories and half-baked ideas that Benford was working on when he was approached to do the novel, which were unceremoniously bundled together and rushed to the printers with a big 'Foundation' sticker slapped on the front. The novel is ostensibly about Seldon continuing to develop his theory of psychohistory, but that part of the story is so tangentially related to most of what happens that I won't say a lot about it. So, there's a planet where they've been digging up old computerized sentient personality simulations of Earth-era historical figures (what?) so that they can make computer-Voltaire and computer-Joan of Arc have a public debate (what?) on whether or not robots have souls (what?). Voltaire and Joan of Arc, who are in fact the main characters of the novel, decide that they agree that robots do have souls, and then start having computer simulation sex in front of everybody watching (?????), and then escape into the planetary network of the galactic capital. There they dick around for a while and ponder their existence for three hundred pages, then they find out that there are aliens already living in the planetary computer network, who have abandoned physical form in order to live inside their Second Life accounts. Also, at some point, Hari Seldon decides to go to another planet and Matrix his way into the mind of a genetically modified chimpanzee with a chip in its brain, so that he can try his hand at developing a simplified version of psychohistory. Also at the very end Seldon finds out that Voltaire and Joan of Arc exist, they agree to be his secretaries, and the computer aliens remote-control some toasters to prevent Seldon being killed in a political assassination. That's it. This novel is a tragedy. It is very very bad. You know how for even really awful things, you'll still see a huge number of five star reviews? The astonishingly bad videogame Sonic 2006 has 36% five star reviews. This novel?  I feel vindicated.
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Jul 2, 2015 23:27
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The Vosgian Beast posted:My beef is that the "my sweet nerd hero owns those sociologists" part of Cryptonomicon is one of the worst things I've ever read, and I've read Dune prequels. Also, Stephenson's insistence on exclusively referring to Japan as 'Nippon'. Also Stephenson frequently referring to women as 'females'. Also failing to give Alan Turing, a fascinating historical figure, any characterization other than 'gayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy'. It is the neckbeardiest book.
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Aug 5, 2015 23:42
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hackbunny posted:I'm reading Stephen King's Cell. I'm at the "we only use N% of our brain" speech which I of course skipped to save myself from a cringe-related death. Does it get much worse from that point? because I had just finished kicking and shoving myself through The Dark Half (I have to make a post about that some time) and Cell seemed to start alright and free from the usual King-isms. The great value in most of King's writing is his strongly-voiced characters, and their interactions and dialogue. Cell is all about everybody cutting themselves off from everybody around them and refusing to talk to each other. I think it's the only novel of his that I started, but didn't finish.
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Oct 14, 2015 02:12
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Pounded in the rear end by stock photo models coming to terms with their fear of their own latent homosexuality.
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Nov 25, 2015 02:54
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muscles like this? posted:I'm re-reading Rendezvous with Rama and while that book is good it is just reminding me of how terrible the sequel (not written by Clarke) Rama II is. You know you're in for a "good" book when the opening is a lengthy prologue to explain how a book set hundreds of years in the future and previously shown to have mankind colonizing most of the solar system is just like the late 80s. With all the hoops Gentry Lee had to jump through to change the setting you have to wonder why he even bothered in the first place and why he didn't just make an entirely new setting just with a similar premise. Oh god yes. To quote the OP (and myself): Lamprey Cannon posted:
I mean, they're up there with the Star Wars prequels and the Brian Herbert/Keven Anderson Dune novels in terms of "Doesn't understand the source material in the least", plus they've got all of Gentry Lee's weird sex stuff.
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Apr 20, 2016 23:07
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So, here's the thing with the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson prequels: they are bad. Thing is, that as time goes by, they get consistently worse. You read the first one, which is very bad, and then they keep piling on nonsensical bullshit that clearly demonstrates they didn't get what was cool about the original Dune books. I present an example: So, in the first 'Dune', we are told that Leto's father, the elder Duke Atreides, was killed in a bullfight. This is something that says a tremendous deal about the society in which the story takes place, where not only would a major figure take place in such an event, but that there isn't any kind of advanced medical technology that could heal the wounds inflicted in such a fight. The first three Brian/Kevin prequel novels go through the backstory immediately leading up to the events of Dune, including that aforementioned bullfight, in which they reveal that it's a space bull with tentacles and acid for blood, which is loving stupid and overindulgent and completely misses the point of the original bit in the story. The Baron Harkonnen is a loving fat gross weirdo because he's a pinnacle of hedonism. He's fat because he loving loves eating food, he's a futuristic Caligula, at the pinnacle of excess. In the Brian/Herbert prequels, it's revealed that Lady Jessica implanted a gene modification virus thing in him to make him fat. That's it! Again, it's loving stupid bullshit technobabbly sci-fi that completely misses the point of the original novels. Then, in the double-prequels, we get to hear the story of the Butlerian Jihad, the vaguely-referenced event in the original books that led to the outlawing of all thinking machines. These are such a blur that it's hard for me to even remember. The way the story gets told here is basically 'evil robots took over the world, so now we're not going to let there be robots anymore'. There's an evil robot-overmind called Omnius that's taken over all of humanity, and there are a privileged few humans who got to stick their brains in robotic bodies and become 'Cymeks'. Everybody else is downtrodden peasants. Much like the Star Wars prequels, loving everything that happened in the original books gets some nod in the Butlerian Jihad novels. The story of the swordmaster school in which Duncan Idaho was trained gets told (electro-swords for fighting robots, see above for 'loving stupid, completely misses the point'). The invention of the space-folding technology that allows rapid interstellar travel gets described, and it turns out the guy who 'invented' it just took credit for his assistant's work. This assistant later gets vaporized by a cymek, but Doctor Manhattans herself back into reality. Then she founds the Bene Gesserit order. Then she founds the Guild Navigators. Then she fucks off to nobody cares where (this will be important in a bit, unfortunately enough). Also, Omnius puts on gladitorial fights with the cymeks. I don't loving know why, other than to have descriptions of 'cool' robot battles with lasers and explosions. Also, in maybe my favorite part of the whole story, there's a whole drawn-out conversation where somebody asks the robot overmind why the robots don't just live on moons and planets with atmospheres that aren't habitable by humans, and the overmind doesn't have any good answer, basically going 'well, it's the principle of the thing!'. Poking holes in your own dumb-rear end plot doesn't make you look clever, book! Also the Harkonnens are there, and there's one of them who's a total dick for no reason, and he founds the dynasty of dickish-Harkonnens. Also, some Fremen are there, and they have a SANDWORM BATTLE, where they bonk their sandworms into each other until one of them dies. At the end, the robots all get destroyed, but manage to send a signal out into deep space, setting up the inevitable sequel. gently caress those books. Double-gently caress the sequel. So, allegedly, according to Brian Herbert, his dad left a lock-box full of notes on what he wanted to do with Dune 7. Heretics and Chapterhouse allude to some force on the edges of the Galaxy that was driving the Honoured Matres back into the old empire, so there was a lot of speculation as to what it might be. Fuckin', it's the robots. It's the loving robots. So there. Now, at the end of Chapterhouse, the uber-Duncan Idaho who remembers all of his past clone-lives, and some other people, escape on a big ol' spaceship. In 'Hunters of Dune', it turns out that somebody has a null-capsule full of DNA samples from all the major characters of the original Dune novels! So we loving clone everybody. Paul Atreides is there, both Letos are there, the whole loving gang. Remember what I said about having to shoehorn in everything that was in the originals? Meanwhile, the villains of the story (who at the get-go seem to be the face-morphing people that the Tleilaxu keep cloning) have their own one of these null-capsules, so they clone their own Baron Harkonnen, and make themselves an Evil Paul Atreides, that the Baron will raise up to be super evil. Meanwhile, you know how the Tleilaxu have been trying to make synthetic spice for 5000 years, and never succeeded? Somebody gets the idea to, instead of cloning the spice, clone the sandworms. Apparently, nobody ever ever thought of this. And it works! They genetically engineer sandworms that actually like water, call them seaworms, and set them to work on some planet. There they make [b]ultra-spice[/i], which is like regular spice but a billion times more potent! gently caress you Kevin Anderson and/or Brian Herbert. So, the face-dancers spring their plan, but the plan fails because actually they've been played by the actual villains, the robots! The stupid robots are back from the edges of the galaxy with a gigantic fleet. How did they manage to turn a radio signal into an actual physical robotic device? Who the gently caress cares! Then the lady from the prequels who invented the warp drive and the Bene Gesserit and the guild navigators shows up and blips all the robots out of existence. That's it. I cannot think of another example in all of fiction of a better example of a Deus Ex Machina. Oh, then to wrap everything up in a nice bow, the evil Paul Atreides eats some of the ultra-spice, so he can become God or whatever, and he gets trapped in a vision of the universe, starting at the big bang, evolving to the present second, and then starting over. So he takes a bunch of drugs and goes catatonic, basically. That's it. That's your story. Night night. I understand there are actually a couple more BH/KJA books, but I just can't. I can't. Wikipedia posted:
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
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Apr 26, 2016 02:29
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I understand reading one Dune prequel, maybe two if you can't take a hint (I gave up 20-30 pages into The Butlerian Jihad and never gave the rest a second thought). Lamprey Cannon's depth of investment in this crap just baffles me, even as "hate-reading". Well, you have to understand, I read 'Dune' when I was in elementary school, so by the time I started picking up the prequel novels, I was in middle school. Most of the things that I mentioned, like acid-blood tentacle-bulls and robot gladiator fights, are really cool to a typical middle-schooler. I remember actually pre-ordering the last of the prequels, 'The Battle of Corrin', the year before I entered highschool, but even by that point, some of the dumber things in those books were starting to stand out to me. It wasn't until years later, I think I was home from college, that I decided to check out the sequel books, and after I started reading those, and it was *so clear* how awful they were, I had this flood of memories, and all of the embarrassing bullshit that I'd overlooked or enjoyed in the earlier books when I was 13 came back to me. I did feel it necessary finish 'Hunters' and 'Sandworms', just because it was such a hilarious MST3K-level trainwreck (and partly just to see how it ended).
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Apr 26, 2016 06:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:This was me, except with the Star Wars EU. Worth noting: this is from a Star Wars EU novel by Kevin J. Anderson! Also worth noting: Kevin J. Anderson looks exactly the way you'd expect he would! 
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Apr 26, 2016 17:48
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And that isn't even mentioning the thing that's the titular 'Foundation's Fear', in that there are aliens living inside the Trantor computer network. They gave up their physical forms and uploaded themselves to their second life accounts, or something, because humans were going to bulldoze their planet. I don't think they even show up until the last fifty pages, and then they don't really *do* anything.
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Jun 29, 2016 22:15
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Stuporstar posted:A couple cyberpunk-era authors have attempted pop music centered novels that I know of, but whether or not they're complete pieces of poo poo is up for debate. I read Norman Spinrad's Little Heroes over a decade ago, and the only thing I remember apart from him predicting computer-generated pop stars was that it was mostly a vehicle for Boomer nostalgia about the good old days of rock and roll vs. them damned kids and their MTVees. There was just enough self-aware comedy in it that I'd have to reread it to determine how bad it really is. My girlfriend at the time sold me on the premise of Radio Freefall by Matthew Jarpe. I'll quote the summary: quote:In the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress but with a healthy dose of cyberpunk: Radio Freefall is about a plot to take over the Earth by power-mad, sociopathic computer-geek billionaire, Walter Cheeseman. It’s up to a strange cast of rock stars and oddballs to stop him. Basically, there's a super AI hiding inside the internet, and the guitarist known as Aqualung stops the villain by telling him the password that he says will allow him to control the AI and thereby take over the world, except that the password *actually* takes the limiters off the AI and lets it roam free. A little bit like a Rock & Roll Neuromancer, except very stupid.
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Aug 30, 2016 01:05
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pookel posted:I'm thinking of all the long-awaited sequels to cult classic/fan favorite books, and I can't come up with a single one that wasn't terrible. Has it EVER been done well? Tehanu was awful, everyone said the new Harry Potter book was awful (I haven't read it myself) ... Doctor Sleep is a sequel to The Shining, 36 years after the fact, which has been received very well.
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Oct 29, 2016 22:46
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