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The worst part of World War Z for me was the bit about how the military nicknames their anti zombie rifle the "Meg" because it looks like the old Megatron toy. Ugh, no, nobody would ever do that. The last Tom Clancy book to just have his name on it was completely terrible, "Teeth of the Tiger." That's the one where Jack Ryan Jr joins an NGO which specializes in assassinating people. Because they're not the government they don't have to go through any of that red tape whenever someone needs to be put down. Also they don't have any of the pesky "oversight" and if any of them get caught, why Jack Ryan Sr just happened to sign a bunch of blank undated pardons as get out of jail free cards. Probably the strangest part of the book is how ole Clance (or his ghostwriter) decided for some reason that 9/11 still happened and everyone acts like its a big deal, despite the fact that his version of the world has had a bunch of terrorist attacks on the US, up to and including a goddamn nuke going off or how in a previous book like 90% of Congress was killed when someone flew a jet into the Capitol building.
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Jul 10, 2015 03:35
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To be fair, it was an old people orgy. That's pretty terrible.
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Jul 10, 2015 22:26
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Dan Brown does the same thing with Robert Langdon, saying he looks like Harrison Ford.
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Jul 12, 2015 15:21
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Part of Everything posted:Philip Jose Farmer's science fiction novel Dark is the Sun was excruciating. Please enjoy this exhaustive and frightening excerpt describing one of the characters... THE SHEMIBOB! I remember liking that book just because it has a bonkers setting.
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Jul 15, 2015 14:23
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I was just reading a summary of the "Tom Clancy" novels, written after he quit and thought it was funny that one of the first things the ghostwriters did was make Jack Ryan president again.
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Jul 19, 2015 17:33
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Ambitious Spider posted:I got an autographed copy for Christmas. I didn't start it because I'm tired of fantasy series not being finished but hearing this I might not start at all The funniest part of the whole thing is that before the first book came out the author was stating that he had all three books already written. Shockingly enough the series isn't done. First book was 07, second book was 11 and the third book hasn't actually come out yet. There was also a whole thing about how the main character's story involved him going to a university, getting kicked out and then doing a whole bunch of other stuff. Except he only got kicked out of the university at the very end of the second book. Which means its going to run longer than three books or a whole bunch of stuff is getting crammed into the third one.
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Jul 19, 2015 22:58
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loquacius posted:Like, for example The Tales of Alvin Maker! Actually he isn't supposed to be Jesus but instead Joseph Smith. Also even though the book is set in the 1800s in one of the books the main character figures out that DNA exists through magic.
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Jul 20, 2015 23:39
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Someone should do one of those readthroughs of the Brian Herbert dunebooks, because they are super-dumb in ways that are kind of interesting. I like how in the first prequel book he wrote he gave the Harkonnens no-ship technology, which wouldn't exist in universe for thousands of years. Also the Baron was fat because Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam hypnotized him to overeat.
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Aug 21, 2015 23:10
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For some reason dear ol dad forgot to mention that it was an insect in the scene where Jessica talks about how much she hates the preserved head.
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Aug 21, 2015 23:41
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While most people know of Rosemary's Baby as a horror film, it was actually a novel first. The novel isn't really all that bad, what is bad however is how 30 years later the books author, Ira Levin, decided to write a sequel "Rosemary's Child." It takes place 36 years after the end of the first book and has Rosemary waking up from a magic coma that she was placed in by the coven that organized everything in the first book. The novel has a bizarrely racist subplot where a woman tricks everyone into thinking she's Indian by just getting a tan and has quite possibly the stupidest ending of any book ever. Rosemary's son, the Antichrist, accidentally fulfills Satan's plan to kill everyone on Earth with poison candles and Rosemary herself is then dragged to Hell by Satan. Then she wakes up and it turns out that both books were just a dream... OR WERE THEY?
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Oct 12, 2015 05:44
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I don't disagree with you but I have to say that despite all that, Farnham's Freehold was worse. Yes, that's the book where the self employed middle aged engineer and his family get sent forward in time to the shocking future where BLACKS ARE IN CHARGE! The black rulers of course keep slaves (which they neuter) and are cannibals. They also don't have paternal inheritance and instead pass things down from uncle to nephew. The main character's (fat, old and stupid) wife leaves him for their captor but that's okay because their college aged daughter just happened to bring a friend along when they got sent through time and she craves that old man dick. Before they get captured there's also a delightful subplot where they're talking about having to repopulate the human race (because they thought they were alone) and the daughter mentions that she would be more than happy to sex up her father. Then at the end of the book they go back in time before the big war that destroys society and there's a bit where they're pretty sure just being back there has stopped the horrible black ruled future from happening.
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Nov 25, 2015 17:29
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He was definitely big into the hippy dippy version of "free love" where everyone should just have sex with everyone else.
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Nov 27, 2015 05:18
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Dies the Fire is even stupider because not even steam works anymore.
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Dec 1, 2015 21:54
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Oddly enough the whole "down in a mine for hundreds of years" thing was the original origin for Buck Rogers.
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Dec 12, 2015 16:08
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Once you get through the school stuff (which is only a part of the first book) the pace picks up quite a bit.
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Feb 29, 2016 20:36
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The thing that bugged me about Timeline was that it seemed like he kept forgetting it wasn't actually time travel.
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Mar 24, 2016 20:57
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divabot posted:That's one for the terrible movies thread - the option was about to run out, so they just made a piece of Ricesploitation as absolutely quickly and shoddily as they could. Here's a review from the extras. Queen of the Damned was still a pretty terrible book. After Interview with a Vampire that series really went straight off the rails. The first sequel was The Vampire Lestat where he told his side of the story which, big surprise, was that he was actually secretly super awesome and all those times in the first book where he looked bad were actually him being extra good. The Queen of the Damned introduced all the stupid history of the vampires thing where they were made Egyptian for some reason and Lestat, being the best vampire ever, gets a huge power boost by drinking the blood of the first vampire. The third book also introduces the first straight male vampire but he doesn't actually have a personality or talk ever.
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Mar 28, 2016 12:29
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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.
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Apr 20, 2016 22:14
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Kind of stupid how Brian Herbert and KJA don't seem to care that Frank Herbert had a reason that he skipped those chunks of the Dune story originally.
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Apr 26, 2016 04:06
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I'm glad he described what exactly a clenched fist means because that was the thing that lost me.
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May 2, 2016 12:16
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I was reading some short story collection years ago and got to a Poppy Z Brite one. One of the earliest lines was about using an oiled human femur for sex and I was like "That's enough of that!" and skipped to the next story.
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May 3, 2016 14:06
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Yikes. Mike Nelson is a very funny man, but he's funny in a way that just doesn't lend itself to fiction writing. It's been forever since I read it but I remember liking his book of essays he did.
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Jun 9, 2016 12:42
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"A military exercise... in fun" has to be one of the worst taglines ever. Also even in 92 it wasn't okay to say "the blacks."
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Jun 13, 2016 05:10
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Lamprey Cannon posted: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. Kind of odd choice seeing as a big part of Asimov's later Foundation books is the plot point that R Daneel Olivaw and the other robots hand picked an alternate universe for humans to live in where they were the only advanced form of life in the Milky Way.
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Jun 30, 2016 01:06
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Kumaton posted:I haven't read RPO either, but from pure Internet osmosis, I know that it starts out by being "oh man this guy's life sucks" but then subverts it and pretty much says that it's totally cool to obsess over 80's pop culture and generally be a Goon because the world is going to need it someday. If it existed in a vacuum you could make an argument that RPO was just presenting a world without endorsing it but then you look at how the author acts in the real world and how his second novel was pretty much exactly the same goddamn thing.
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Jul 15, 2016 11:43
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Did she ever go back and put out that version of Twilight from Edward's point of view or did she stick by her guns and keep it pulled?
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Jul 29, 2016 15:13
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Babe Magnet posted:Zen Pencils is the guy who made that comic about Robin Williams where he "defeats the demon" and "wins the game" by killing himself lmao He also did one where a guy becomes so obsessed with Game of Thrones it ruins his life and he eventually goes crazy and portrayed it as a good thing.
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Aug 6, 2016 02:42
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A lot of Rothfuss' hype came from before the first book actually came out. He got a lot of press about how he had a complete trilogy that was already all done and it was going to be awesome. Now almost 10 years later he's released a whole two of them and a novella. Good job. Also there's no way that he's actually going to finish up the story with a third book considering how slow the progress was in the second.
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Aug 30, 2016 19:09
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Sanderson is an okay author but he kind of obsesses too much on the mechanical systems of his worlds.
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Aug 31, 2016 17:22
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Apparently in the last Divergent book the main character is killed and brooding love interest is the one who saves the day. I've never read the books but I did see the first movie and something that really bugged me was how the smarty group's plan was to kill off all of the current leader caste. Except their whole thing was that they were selfless and nonviolent. So if they had just been deposed they probably would have gone along with it.
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Oct 19, 2016 12:13
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That sounds like someone read the plot summary to Never Let Me Go but didn't realize that it actually focused on the characters living what lives they had and not just moping about being walking organ banks.
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Oct 20, 2016 03:45
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Wheat Loaf posted:I personally think Unseen Academicals was the only "bad" Discworld book because it is the only one I didn't enjoy reading. The first couple of Discworld books can be kind of hard to go back to just because of how he didn't quite have the setting down yet. So the whole thing feels more like it takes place in just a generic fantasy world.
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Oct 28, 2016 13:09
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The first Shadow book was weird because it was basically Card stating that Ender didn't do anything and it was really Bean behind the scenes.
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Oct 29, 2016 18:28
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Pesky Splinter posted:Pretty much. It's things like "Oh, Dracula didn't kill the crew of the Demeter, that was actually a virus". And "no, no the true enemy was vampiress Elizabeth Báthory as Jack the Ripper". Bram Stoker himself appears at one point putting on an adaptation of his play and it's, like you said "Well, that's not the REAL story". Oddly enough Anne Rice pretty much did this to herself with her vampire series. In the first book, Interview with the Vampire, the main character is Louis. He is a vampire who was a plantation owner in late 18th century Louisiana. He was turned by a vampire named Lestat who then lived with Louis for a while. Lestat turns out to be quite the monster so Louis kills him and does a bunch of stuff that is the rest of the book. Then at the end of the book he reveals that Lestat survived the attack but is living like a broken down ruin in New Orleans. The book becomes popular enough for her to write a sequel which she decides to do as a prequel called The Vampire Lestat. It retcons all of Lestat's bad actions from the first novel as Louis either lying to make himself look better or not knowing the full truth of events. Like in the first book Louis talks about Lestat bringing sailors home and murdering them, while in the sequel Lestat is all "they were bad people." It also makes Lestat to be the super best vampire ever where he's much stronger than a vampire his age should be because he found the first vampire and drank some of her blood.
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Oct 30, 2016 17:16
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Most of the complaints I heard about Twilight were from the end of the series where things got weird like the baby and werewolf thing.
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Dec 4, 2016 17:52
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Representation is getting a little bit better at least. NK Jimison won a Hugo for best novel this year. Being a black woman she mainly writes stories where the main characters are dark skinned (and women.)
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Dec 6, 2016 04:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:Apparently there's been seven more "Ryan-verse" books released since Clancy's passing in 2013 An interesting thing is that he hadn't actually written anything for quite a while before he died. Even his last two officially written by him novels, Red Rabbit and The Teeth of the Tiger, are rumored to have been ghostwritten. Red Rabbit mostly because it is a prequel that he never felt the need to address before and The Teeth of the Tiger because the tone and quality of the writing is so different than his usual work.
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Dec 21, 2016 22:21
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Wheat Loaf posted:Did Anne Rice's novels end up being mainly sex stuff? I'm only familiar with her work through stuff adapted from it (Interview With the Vampire) or stuff inspired by it (Forever Knight). IIRC the vampire stuff didn't have a lot of sex because her vampires are incapable of it.
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May 6, 2017 13:50
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The best self insert novel is Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller which started out as kind of a memoir but then Laurie said that he thought his life was too boring so instead he made himself a spy.
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May 31, 2017 03:10
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My problem with The Last Ringbearer is that it went way too far in the other direction.
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Jun 13, 2017 16:24
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