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Despite most of his books having no ending, I enjoyed Neal Stephenson's early output: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, etc. I even thought his technothrillers were - while not great books - decent reading. But Cryptonomicon was where the smell started. Everyone was praising it, while I was plagued with the idea that it was much less than the sum of it's parts. And that some of the parts were very bad indeed: * Amy Shaftoe: barely has any personality or impact on the book. Exists only to develop a strange and unexplained attraction to schlubby computer programmer. * The heroes of this novel (in the modern day anyway) are basically looters and tax dodgers. * Digressions upon digressions. Which are fun and amusing but piled on so much that the plot disappears. * it's long, oh so long * Mysterious character Enoch Root pops up, acts enigmatic and disappears again. What? Anathem was long and dorky and silly (it largely uses the tropes of a Harry Potter story, with lots of made up words and a ninja fight scene thrown in) but was entertaining enough that I give it a pass. Reamde however: this is what I said elsewhere in the Book Barn: quote:Look, it's surprisingly readable page-to-page. You'll want to know what happens next. But Stephenson has basically reinvented the Robert Ludlum novel, except with a lot more digressions about MMOs.
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Nov 10, 2015 15:49
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While I'm dissing SF giants: William Gibson. Or, to be more specific, some of Gibson's books. I think even fans (and I'm one) will admit that he writes for effect and colour and that there's often a lot of nonsense rolling around in his books. The question is, does the nonsense distract you? Cue, the Blue Ant Trilogy: * Pattern Recognition: a cool hunter tries to track down the creator of a series of mysterious videos, her super-rich boss makes lots of portentous statement. Probably doesn't bear examination, but reads fairly well with lots of nice observations of people and places. * Spook Country: a cavalcade of diverse characters try to hunt down a mysterious shipping crate. Some of them don't even know what's in the crate but assume it must be valuable. Surprise - it's a million dollars. Arguably less than has been spent chasing the drat thing. Passable if irritating. * Zero History: an ex-rock star who is strangely like previous leads is sent by super-rich boss to hunt down a mysterious ... set of jeans. Seriously, WTF? And Gibson apparently got friends to send him descriptions of places in London, which explains why it seems to be set in some strange parallel not-quite London, complete with multiple "stared at their reflection in the burnished surface of the elevator".
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Nov 10, 2015 17:15
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The Saddest Rhino posted:people who write books you dislike can still be authors quote:So how about you fling open the stupid gates of your dumb categorizations of people and let writers be people who write as little or as much as they want to or are able, so long as it makes them whole and happy. Including those who write nothing. Tumblr: the very incarnation of Poe's Law.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:56
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Thinky Whale posted:I remember a part in Stranger in a Strange Land that was all about their free love religion where you just follow your heart and get down with whoever you please, it's a healthy and beautiful thing, anything goes, be free! Oh, don't be gay, though. Gross. I seem to remember there's some story there about Heinlein's second wife being a heavy influence on what he wrote. I think she suggested he write something that appealed to the hippy crowd and was also responsible for his swing to the right. My predominant memory of Stranger in a Strange Land is that the school library had it and I read it when I was 15. Thought it was kinda stupid at the time but was unsure if I just didn't get it. nonathlon has a new favorite as of 15:33 on Nov 27, 2015 |
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Nov 27, 2015 15:29
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divabot posted:I read the cyberpunk trilogy in the wrong order. First I read was the third one, Mona Lisa Overdrive. It's like disjointed fragments aspiring to be filmed. Neuromancer and Count Zero are at least a bit like books. Burning Chrome was suitable background to the trilogy. But yeah, he so should have stopped there. OTOH, it beats a day job. Mona Lisa Overdrive started the grand tradition of the third book of every Gibson trilogy fizzling out. It, All Tomorrow's Parties and Zero History all have that vague feel of a panicked author delivering a contractually obligated book. Disjointed action, murky plot, opaque motivations, bringing together all the old characters for a big send off, "everyone lived happily ever after". Now, the Gibson who wrote Burning Chrome? I'd like to see more work by him.
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Dec 4, 2015 23:35
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PS: why has there not been more talk about Matthew Reilly? I mean, A terrible book by William Gibson is mainly just disappointing, but Reilly? His books are entertaining fiascos ...
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Dec 4, 2015 23:37
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:I thought Zero History was the best of the three, though I was kind of hoping there'd be some better Bigend wrap up. Yoiu're not alone - amongst my circle, everyone else seemed to love Zero History. I thought the London flavour sounded really fake and it turned out he wrote it up from notes provided by Cory Doctorow. But then, I live in London so maybe I'm being unfair.
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Dec 5, 2015 14:26
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an overdue owl posted:Collectively, the worst books I've ever read are fantasy novels that try and ape the Pratchett style but are way too stupid and way too derivative (obviously) to be even halfway entertaining. Put enough footnotes in and obviously your book is going to be funny, right? Agreed - one of the unfortunate legacies of Pratchett is the wave of imitators. Throw in some zany characters, cod-English decorations, a few puns, something that looks like a Kirby cover and away you go.
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Jul 15, 2016 09:24
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WeaponGradeSadness posted:I'm not a big sci-fi fan at all but from my fairly limited experience with the genre, unnecessary weird sex scenes and asides about how bad religion is that have nothing to do with anything both seem to be staples of the genre. It's a fault with genre fiction generally, where strange foibles and fetishes are ignored or even expected by fans, who will defend prosaic writing with "oh but the characters are interesting" or "the world is so fascinating" or even worse "but the story has potential". Fans of genre - be it SF, horror or crime - want the literary equivalent of comfort food. I once heard it described as "commodity fiction", it's like bread, they're going to buy it anyway.
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Jul 24, 2016 18:05
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I'm halfway through their one on Snow Crash, and it seems to be largely them complaining how the satire doesn't work, and then reading out bits of satire that they're treating as serious. Agreed. They seem to fundamentally misunderstand SC. I mean, you can criticise a lot about the book - it's more a collection of pieces than a coherent story, and is a little self pleased - but IDEOAT didn't focus on any of that. On the other hand, they took Da Vinci Code apart. Have they ever done Girl With The Dragon Tattoo?
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Sep 22, 2016 16:11
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The_White_Crane posted:So I came across The White Man and the Pachinko Girl while I was looking for a completely different book on Amazon... " THE WHITE MAN AND THE PACHINKO GIRL is the winning selection of an international book award with over one hundred forty thousand submissions" No reviews. And it has a sequel.
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Feb 3, 2017 10:50
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Senior Woodchuck posted:Now I'm imagining some book written 2,000 years from now describing ridiculous sex acts being performed in the stands at an NFL game. Heaven only knows what future bullshit historians will say about the Dawg Pound. "See, the Gulf War was just like a game of Wruejks-Hiegumsoe Tossing. On one side you've got Fluefloshe the Destroyer IV, at the height of its powers. On the other, you got GSV Irregular Apocalypse, at the the height of its powers ..."
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Apr 2, 2017 19:43
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Barudak posted:Thats the Sleeping Beauty Quartet which while hosed up, isnt as hosed up as other fantasy erotica aimed at women which is impressive. Isn't there a lot of if not non-consensual then coercive sex? Male and female in all combinations? My knowledge of the Sleeping Beauty "quartet" (my, how pretentious) stems from a game I had with some friends: open one of the books at random and read what you find. From memory, it was almost always a sex scene, with lots of the the main character being humiliated and protesting but, nonetheless, "growing aroused" ...
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May 6, 2017 13:04
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Okua posted:I work in a used bookstore. There are so so many bad books, espicially because there is a spirituality/new age section. I see Anne McCaffrey has entered the James Patterson phase of her career.
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May 19, 2017 14:48
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there wolf posted:That's a pretty bold statement since "Lord of the Rings but with my spin on it" might as well be a subgenre of fantasy. Carrey's version gets points for being a blatant subversion, but looses them all on nigh-unreadable prose. How do you write a book that's a middle finger to Tolkien's catholic asceticism and make it drier than his own writing? This is a good opportunity to recommend the not-terrible (but pretty odd) "The Last Ringbearer" by Kirill Eskov, which is what happens when a Russian evolutionary biologist reads Lord of the Rings and says, "huh, I just can't understand the economic system or geology of Middle Earth". It assumes that LotR is basically propaganda by the winners, Mordor is a nascent industrial society, the West are superstitious Luddites being lorded over by an oligarchy of wizards and scheming elves. It's a bit stiff (understandable given the translation from Russian) and wonky in parts but surprisingly entertaining.
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Jun 13, 2017 12:54
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I liked the concept but I got bogged down in the part where it turned into a crappy spy novel in Umbar, and never got through it. That's fair comment: it does slow down about halfway through. Interesting about Arda. Looks like revisionist Tolkien is a genre in Russia.
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Jun 13, 2017 23:30
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Antivehicular posted:... so much of the population lives in grinding hopeless poverty that a mega-billionaire's "learn everything about all of my nerd obsessions and maybe win my fortune" contest can seem like the only way out to so many people ... So, it's pretty much the plot to Charlie & the Chocolate Factory?
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Jul 31, 2017 19:01
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That article captures Matthew Reilly perfectly: it's utter trash, but the guy is so gleeful and enthralled with his own stories that are nothing but action-action-action ("Quick as a flash, he unslung his sniper rifle, aimed and fired it at the first oncoming RPG!"), that it all kinda works.
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Aug 8, 2017 14:20
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BioEnchanted posted:To get off the RPO hate-wagon, a series that I read most of and enjoyed was The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson, which is a weird series. It's about a leper who falls unconscious one day after years of becoming used to being an outcast and having most of his body mostly numb from his illness, and in his mind ends up in a fantasy world that has innate healing powers and a Big Bad Evil Man to fight. Of course, it heals his leprosy and through his visits he becomes a legendary hero, as a few hours for him in the real world makes decades pass in the dream world. Thomas Covenant was huge in its day. I think a lot of it's allure was that the protagonist was so un-heroic (without being a an outright dick) and spent so much time trying to avoid his fate. I gave the rape in the opening chapter a pass because it was drawn as a horrible action done by a tormented man who was out of his mind who spent the rest of the series beating himself up for it. And you say there was a second rape. I may have been wrong. The second trilogy? Eh ... Then there was Donaldson's other series, The Gap into Power which I was utterly unable to get into because everyone was unpleasant and the whole thing was just grim and sordid. I think the big problem may be that Donaldson's shtick has just become the norm.
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Aug 10, 2017 14:58
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xiw posted:For even more whiplash, Simmons' Ilium and Olympos are a duology. Ilium is a fascinating multilayered posthuman setup leading up a totally loving metal cliffhanger climax. Olympos parks all the fun stuff for half hte book then swerves into explaining how it was all the fault of evil Muslims. To be fair, Ilium has distinct tendencies in that direction. It talks about "effete liberals", there are lots of manly men being macho, a few side swipes at academics. Not enough to ruin the book but enough to distract. And I never quite bought how classic ancient heroes, no matter how badass, could possibly present a credible threat to post human armies. Book was really enjoyable tho'
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Aug 11, 2017 09:56
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there wolf posted:I think Stranger in a Strange Land has some serious time-capsule value as a sample of what passed for progressive sexual politics back in the day. Like if someone tells you that the sexual revolution benefited men at the expense of women, just go read this book all about sexual liberation being a divine gift that will free us all where the two most significant women female characters literally become interchangeable at the end. I recall reading somewhere that Heinlein deliberately wrote SiaSL for anti-establishment youth. It's definitely a period piece: it reads like the Summer of Love and generation gap never ended. And late Heinlein novels are just full of sexy women who love being sexy. Charitably, I'd say he was just writing what his audience wanted. (Just like Neal Stephenson.)
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Aug 11, 2017 10:06
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SiKboy posted:There is no loving way anyone writes "Torolf entered her like she was a lottery." in a supposedly erotic context and expects it to be taken seriously, that has to be a parody. And “Her body was like a beautiful flower that was opening and somebody was pushing their dick inside it.” is quite literally one of the funniest things I've read, possibly ever. Yeah, there's a bunch of other obviously joke lines (from memory, "the sound of Torolf's abs galloping into the distance" decided it for me) such that it must be a parody. albeit an astonishingly extended one. What's her other work look like?
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Sep 12, 2017 10:30
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Sounds like somebody reads a lot of genre fiction. You drove me to look up how genre fiction was defined, which ended up being the logical (if circular) idea of fiction that is written to fit within a genre, using genre tropes. Related anecdote: some years ago, I asked a knowledgeable bookseller friend to recommend me some modern crime genre novels, that were acclaimed but not the Big Name, mass-market stuff. Without exception, every book was cliche-ridden bollocks: angsty cops that never slept and lived off coffee and cigarettes (literally not figuratively), genius serial killers with absurdly ornate MOs (e.g. this one poses their victims in the style of Italian paintings of the 14th century), sudden romances with inexplicably beautiful expert lawyer / art professor / DJ who is drawn into the case and who will later get kidnapped by the serial killer. And let's not get started on the garbage that wins major SF awards.
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Oct 10, 2017 13:50
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catlord posted:Clickers 1 and 2 are... ok. They're these b-horror books about giant lobster/scorpion things, and are definitely flawed (there are chapters giving new characters backstories and everything only for them to die the very next chapter without doing anything to the plot?) You've reminded me of a Terrible Book from years ago (the mid-80s?): Airscream. For a while, it seemed to be in every used book shop and pile of free books, so as a bookish youth I ended up reading it. Essentially it's the lead to a horrific mid-air collision and the public inquiry afterward. The court material is decently readable, but the crash itself features lots of characters being finely detailed and then suddenly killed. The one that sticks in my mind is a whole chapter about a farmer, the details of his life, his worries about the farm, the conversations with his family, what he does that day, etc. etc. Then in the final paragraph of the chapter, he's eviscerated by red-hot falling debris and never mentioned for the rest of the book. I think it may have been a genre in the 70s: disaster-porn.
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Oct 11, 2017 12:48
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Wheat Loaf posted:The main thing I remember about Deception Point was how the requisite Bond villain henchmen are a team of nameless Delta Force operatives who at one point attack the heroes in Antarctica using guns that can compress snow into ice bullets; Brown dutifully informs us in the end-notes that this is 100% real technology which is regularly used by the US military today. This sounds just like a Matthew Reilly novel, a comparison that manages to insult both parties.
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Oct 17, 2017 09:17
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John Lee posted:There's actually a short story where the Culture finds Earth, but in like the 1960's. 1970s. State of the Art: the crew of a Culture are highly amused by Star Wars and make replica light sabers to have fights with. Aside: I had the impression that the Culture was largely humanoid but I don't know if that's ever explicitly said. Certainly almost all the narrators are humanoids or Minds.
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Oct 19, 2017 12:01
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Mr. Sunshine posted: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. There are a few things going on here, I think: * Consider Phlebas was the first Culture novel and so is not indicative of the rest of the series (series? what would we call it?) * CP is also a travelogue novel, a "let's come up with an excuse to tour this world I've built". Which can be a lazy genre. * Banks' ideas on the Culture evolved. I once saw him talk and (from memory) The Culture started out as a utopia (due to the superfluity of dystopias in SF), whiplashed back to a dystopia and ended up shifting between the two depending on his mood and thinking. * Late in the series, there is an idea that the Culture is something special. Civilizations are supposed to "transcend" or fall into chaos and the Culture is supposed to somehow have avoided either fate, perhaps due to being able to adapt.
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Oct 19, 2017 12:12
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Fun fact: Theodore Sturgeon was the inspiration for Kilgore Trout before Trout started to be self-parody of Vonnegut Some year ago I read a Sturgeon collected set, about 6 volumes, something like "The Complete Theodore Sturgeon". It was surprisingly good like so much of the science fiction of those years isn't. (Around the same time I read a similar collection for Philip K Dick. A lot of that hasn't aged well at all.)
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Dec 12, 2017 13:25
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Wheat Loaf posted:How are the Billy Jack movies? I've heard about them but never seen any of them. I think the general consensus is that the first is decent but subsequent ones go badly off the rails. Decent for its time: Billy Jack is super earnest and full of early 70s sincerity and love, complete with talking power to the man.
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Dec 24, 2017 07:01
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Just listened to the I Don't Even Own A Television episode for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". It's fairly entertaining (I'm finding IDEOTV a bit hit-and-miss these days) and I actually read the book some years ago. Stray observations: * It is really crazy how that book became super-ubiquitous for a few years, given its content and quality of writing * IDEOTV asserted that the English edition of the novel was translated from an unedited manuscript and so contains a bunch of stuff that was snipped from the Swedish version * I found the book strangely readable. (Explanation for my first point?) I mean, it was weird and goofy and the plot was absurd and gave away too much about the author and his hangups. But the pages passed by surprisingly fast for a 700 page novel. * But that plot resolution just stunk: I mean, the daughter goes missing, there's no trace of her, someone is sending messages on the anniversary of her disappearance ... Even the protagonists suggest that maybe she left the island and is still alive. But no, we're assured repeatedly that's impossible. Only to find out that she left the island and is still alive.
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Mar 15, 2018 13:43
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Ugly In The Morning posted:It was a run of the mill airport thriller wrapped up in another book about financial crimes explained in excruciating and often difficult to follow detail. There was a lot of "Lisbeth Salander is awesome / owed / kicks rear end" going around the net. Which, as you say, is weird when you find out she's an emotionally stunted, self-hating sex abuse survivor. Hard to see her story as any sort of triumph.
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Mar 16, 2018 23:46
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DACK FAYDEN posted:loving Dan Simmons and everything he wrote that isn't Hyperion It's weird to read the later Simmons' books and it's all like: interesting, hmmm, I see, cool, uh-huh, MASSIVE RIGHTWING CLICHE OUT OF NOWHERE, uh-huh, nice action ...
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May 22, 2019 12:52
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The Vorkosigan books have always been a bit weird. I read a few of the early ones and each contained a line like "women were attracted to Miles because he was small and unthreatening". Which is a helluva thing to unpack. I also never bought the idea that Miles would be a super competent soldier at 5 foot height (or was it less?) but fandom just loved the series and you couldn't say a thing against them.
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May 24, 2019 10:15
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Ambitious Spider posted:
There's a tonne of regressive, weird ideas in comics, even in acclaimed series. (Preacher, anyone?) It speaks to the uncritical nature of much of their audience.
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Jun 3, 2019 11:45
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Squidster posted:When you're an rear end in a top hat 24/7, eventually you're an rear end in a top hat to someone who had it coming. Ellison loved to tell stories about how he made witty ripostes / got back at someone / put them in their place. Stories that weren't always true.
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Nov 22, 2019 07:59
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food court bailiff posted:While Rendezvous with Rama isn’t a terrible book, its sequels literally inspired this thread. Most all of those "written by Arthur C Clarke and (Hack Author)" are freaking awful. One of them included Clarke's original 5 page treatment for the book, tipping you to the facts that 1. That was all Clarke had contributed, 2. The actual book had no resemblance to the treatment, 3. It was all Hack Author's fault
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Jan 5, 2020 16:36
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I got the impression it's someone trying their hand at a classic Conan style story while trying way too hard to be old-style with the prose. And doesn't it not really have an ending? The usual form of Eye of Argon doesn't have an ending, I think because it was discovered in a university fanzine (in the 1970s?) and in the repeated photocopying and mimeographing, the last few pages were lost. The ending has been (re-)discovered twice with reference to the original story. And that (classic Conan) is exactly what it's trying to be. The guy who wrote it was 16 and was later terminally embarrassed by it. I can't get too interested in EoA: it's an adolescent story never intended to be widely distributed and more a thing that fans have worked themselves up over, insisting that it's insanely funny.
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Jan 6, 2020 11:40
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FreudianSlippers posted:Isn't Eye of Argon the story that's only known because people at fantasy cons would compete at who could read it out loud the longest without laughing? That's it. Pulled from obscurity for that reason and only that. Seems to me it'd be much more interesting to read and poke fun at mainstream trash, rather than an unpublished teenagers scribblings.
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Jan 6, 2020 12:51
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C.M. Kruger posted:The context of furries and terrible writing reminded me that despite the recent attempts of the fandom to purge it's chud elements, there was a recent furry MilSF story anthology that had to publish a retraction and apology after "accidentally" publishing a Islamophobic story where (IIRC) a robot bird blows up some Muslim kids with a grenade while they're hiding on top of a mosque and then flies off after doing some monologue about how Islam is violent and can never be dealt with peacefully. Yeah, that sort of thing doesn't happen "accidentally", does it? They just thought that no one would care. Some argue that SF has long had a regressive aspect and MilSF is just a lot more blatant about it.
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Jan 15, 2020 09:50
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Qwertycoatl posted:Yeah if I remember correctly, the literal only thing they do with the MMORPG after the terrorist stuff takes over is use it to send someone an in-game message, basically a less-traceable email. I missed the earlier discussion, but the moment I say this, I thought REAMDE. Goddamn that's a terrible book. At least at the beginning, it held the potential of being an interesting, nerdy infodump. But then it turns into a technothriller, everyone is a badass, everyone gets paired up by the end and it's all so transparently boys own adventure. Confession, I read several of Stephenson's early technothrillers and they're fine, even good trashy reads. But REAMDE is a book that doesn't know what it wants to say, and spends 1000 pages not saying it.
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Jan 22, 2020 13:35
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