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The comments about how Branderson's writing uses fantasy plots as a frame to present a mystery and a logical puzzle puts me in mind of say the 'death game' genre from Japanese fiction. A central part of the appeal of Kaiji, Liar Game etc. is to present a set of rules and then show how they can be manipulated. But it seems wrong to say that characterisation is irrelevant to those stories, so maybe Branderson just can't tell a story that feels well embedded in the game he sets up. But I mean, I haven't read him and I likely never will.
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Sep 13, 2017 11:11
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeFGaXCYktg
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Sep 17, 2017 10:46
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This retrospective by Banks' friend Ken MacLeod is relevant here.quote:However friendly he was to the radical left, Iain had little interest in relating the long-range possibility of utopia to radical politics in the here and now. As he saw it, what mattered was to keep the utopian possibility open by continuing technological progress, especially space development, and in the meantime to support whatever policies and politics in the real world were rational and humane. quote:In summary, Iain's political views were, by and large, what you'd expect from an Old Labour supporter and Guardian reader with an informed interest in the analyses of the radical left. What was perhaps more unusual than his views was the consistency and tenacity with which he held them, and his confidence that they must in the long run prevail if civilization was to survive. It's unsurprising, in that context, that the Culture series has a certain horizon to its idea of political possibilities. That said, there's a gap between the propositions 'the ideological universe of the novels is bounded' and 'this is artistically bad'.
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Sep 26, 2017 10:41
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I dunno, can't cynicism or pessimism be valid artistic stances?
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Sep 26, 2017 13:33
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The Federation is also a state with explicit laws and institutions, run by humans and humans-in-makeup, rather than an anarchy controlled by AI cliques.
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Sep 27, 2017 10:46
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That's just a semantic quibble, though. There's a big chunk of readers that want a set of imaginary rules they can think their way around and use to construct/engage with drama, in a setting with certain aesthetic elements - swords, dragons, fireballs. This sort of setting is called 'fantasy' and the imaginary rules are called the 'magic' or 'magic system' and that there's other connotations associated with the word 'magic' in other contexts doesn't really matter.
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Oct 2, 2017 17:05
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Its not a critique of semantics but instead a critique of narrative bankruptcy. I'm right there with you that most genre fantasy is hollow crank-turning rather than any kind of literature of imagination, but I've never been fond of focusing the complaint on a perceived failure of 'magic' to be 'magical'. It's a specific thing that a story could do to set itself apart from the Branderson style people love to hate, but a story could also do other things, like take up the human engagement with rigid laws as a theme in itself, or explore an interesting what-if scenario that happens to be categorised as fantasy rather than science fiction because it doesn't have spaceships. The focus on whether magic is 'magical' as the problem rather than a possibility feels like just another way to trap writing in gazing at its own navel and framing itself around its own marketing terms like 'magic' or 'fantasy' or 'science fiction' rather than first focusing on what you might want to achieve with a story and leaving librarians to argue over its genre classification.
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Oct 2, 2017 17:58
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I admire Sanderson's professional and hardworking attitude to writing and wish him well in completing his big fancy cosmic cycle thing, but I will never read any of his books.
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Oct 2, 2017 18:01
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The distinction between magic and technology in speculative settings is ultimately one of tone and implication, and the tone of magic slips a long way toward technology in 'magic system' style writing. This can be done deliberately - there's plenty of fantastical settings where characters have access to 'magitech'-styled airships and so on. People not liking this compared to something more numinous is a legitimate aesthetic preferance, but my complaint is with the implication or explication that this is a necessary aesthetic problem rather than a preference, and that genre fantasy's bankruptcy can be traced to this aesthetic decision rather than being of a part with a lot of romance being crappy crank-turning, a lot of thrillers being crappy crank-turning, etc. Genre fantasy authors could all be straining at the gills to produce atmospheres of mystery and wonder and it would still be mostly mediocre because that's how cultural mass production works in the early 3rd millennium, and that atmosphere of mystery and wonder would itself be a cliche I'd hope some forward thinking authors would try to unravel or look outside of.
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Oct 2, 2017 18:11
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Mel Mudkiper posted:While I cannot speak for BotL, one of the reasons I point out this criticism is that genre and the readers of genre tend to avoid any motivation to a level of higher aesthetic and artistic production by retreating into wholly subjective enjoyment. This is deeply frustrating for me because I want sci-fi and fantasy to be better, not simply insult it. big sff fan here, signing on with this i like the culture books, and i liked botl's post arguing they are bad, quite a lot actually, the more sacred the text the better to burn his negativity and refusal of subjectivist compromise are a salutary measure against the boosterism and self-absorption that have taken us on the devil's road to Ready Player One
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Mar 11, 2018 13:38
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i don't think much of sanderson as an artist but i kind of respect him as a professional
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Jan 30, 2019 09:51
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C.M. Kruger posted:If a writer used litRPG stuff as a plot point in a satirical near future/cyberpunk novel, people would criticize it as being "unrealistic" because of how stupid the whole concept is. this was Rule 34 by stross and it didn't really move me tbh for that matter why is every prose depiction of playing a videogame bad
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Feb 23, 2019 00:12
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you can depict anything well but I'd settle for 'not cringeworthy'
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Feb 23, 2019 00:16
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i enjoyed the last of us but the existence of the Sad Dad period of big-budget videogames is extremely funny bunch of artists mired in middle-age straining to lens their anxieties through the only genre they understand, and certainly the only genre they're allowed to make: goofy macho ultraviolence
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Feb 24, 2019 20:00
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sotc was good but I was playing titan souls this week and really feel like that general aesthetic (which also runs through e.g. dark souls) has become somewhat exhausted
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Feb 24, 2019 20:01
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The vampires, while clearly trying to 'do something', are the (a) weak link in Blindsight. The effort put into having them 'make sense' makes the ways in which they don't more glaring - why would something that died out before humans invented static structures have such a direct correlate in modern folklore? And why would such an inefficient solution to sophisticated problem-solving have survived through the long dawn of intelligence through apes and mammals, if a far superior solution were just a tiny leap away? These are nitpicks, but they're the game Blindsight has decided to play - the book was under no obligation to try the cheesy scientific-folklore parlour game in the middle of the other stuff it was trying to do. It's completely reasonable and worthwhile to ground misanthropic anxieties in science rather than religion in the modern age though. meanwhile it took me a bit of confused scrolling back and forth to figure out there are two different 'the X of Kings' books being discussed on the last page
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Mar 3, 2019 09:24
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if they're this influenced by videogames they could at least use different coloured text rather than capitalisation plus you can claim it's based on House of Leaves if challenged
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Mar 3, 2019 10:31
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alternatively use allcaps and a max word length - SHARDBLD
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Mar 3, 2019 10:31
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I'd say Blindsight and Echopraxia very much have rationalist metaphysics, however. 'Intelligence' as a unitary thing, the most important thing in the universe, that manifests mainly in playing seventh-dimensional manipulation games around your inferiors. Watts is just pessimistic about it and detaches it from its usual association with self-consciousness.
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Mar 3, 2019 15:54
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there is definitely a sense in which the scramblers and the vampires are cool as poo poo - this is why it has those superfans, it's perfectly placed within the rationalist worldview and aesthetics a lot of SF readers have - but I don't think a perverse fascination with the inhuman is necessarily a flaw for an SF novel
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Mar 3, 2019 17:33
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I've read it and I think the wiki fans are more exaggerating currents that are already there than being full of poo poo, as such. But I think it's nontheless a weak line of criticism that a book whose central horror conceit is the inextricable marriage of functional superiority with (philosophical) death tries to sell both sides of the binary.
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Mar 3, 2019 18:23
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That said I do think Blindsight is dragged down and Echopraxia outright crashed by the weakness of their basically comic book vision of intelligence, which is very much rooted in the subcultural model I think we're calling 'rationalism'. When you don't find their vision of how intelligence works plausible the whole thing loses force. When I think about it I tend to be put in mind of The Invincible by Lem and its intrepid humans and magnificent weapons brought to futility by a locally well-optimised expert system, which I liked a lot more. hackbunny posted:Are you familiar with the Dark Enlightenment? Yes, and you can use the aesthetic of bad singularity Nick Land thrills over to tell effective horror stories. That's basically what he's done to himself. I class Blindsight as cosmic horror.
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Mar 3, 2019 18:36
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Well I mean, yeah. I don't even like Blindsight that much, but you've now argued yourself into declaring misanthropy artistically illegitimate.
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Mar 3, 2019 18:55
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I'm fine with a lot of SFF genre conceits like cool widgets and worldbuilding I'm just less and less tolerant of bad writing.
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Mar 4, 2019 08:30
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I'm reading Ninefox Gambit and there's a ton of cool widgets and the world/technology are 'interesting' but they're described like this:p8 posted:Cheris knew the formation's effect had begun to propagate when the world shifted blue and the blacks bent gray. Pir's Fan offered protection agains the weather. It was usually better to rely on the weather-eaters, but Cheris had lost any faith that they would be effective on this mission. Unfortunately, the formation wouldn't shield the unit from a direct hit. She hoped to close with the generator before that became an issue. This is a space fantasy setting where the 'technology' works depending on what sacred ritual calendar the locals use. The scene here is a psychedelic battle where the geometric formations soldiers use have magical effects. It's the first scene of the book where the author will be looking to make an impact. And the prose flops like a dead fish, we literally know whether the pythagorean magic is working or not based on what photoshop filter is applied to the nonexistent screen.
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Mar 4, 2019 08:59
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can a vampire be an acorn
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Mar 4, 2019 21:09
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tbh I agree with the spirit of mel's dragon bugbear* and I would feel annoyed if a reader was fundamentally unwilling to engage in metaphorical transposition of the more abstract qualities of a dragon to an unexpected thing called a 'dragon' in a narrative like the tension is interesting and productive, it's the literature of imagination not the literature of dictionaries *a half-dragon bugbear has a strength of 23, 3d10+6 hit dice, and a CR of 4
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Mar 4, 2019 21:34
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I kind of like the ambition of Branderson's project and wish him well in completing it but I am not going to read a single page of it
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Mar 7, 2019 08:22
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the whale facts chapters of moby dick are worldbuilding
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Mar 7, 2019 22:32
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he shined too bright for this fallen world
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Mar 13, 2019 20:53
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all innovators are eventually dismissed as hacks by those who only know the world after they changed it
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Mar 14, 2019 08:08
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