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HIJK posted:but if what I like is bad then what does that say about me as a person!!??!?!??!!!??!?! This is a  in its own right. I've seen goons arguing that liking certain kinds of fiction says something about the reader as a person all over the place, and I'm not sure they're always wrong. To be fair, this argument is most often applied either to very overtly political fiction or to power fantasies of a certain very extreme and specific type, but sometimes it shows up beyond that.
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Sep 12, 2017 22:24
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Atlas Hugged posted:What's always been weird to me are the fans who discuss the magic systems as if they matter at all to the story or are somehow a selling point. It's often used to justify another aspect of the writing being weak, like you might here someone say, "The characters are pretty two dimensional, but the magic system is fascinating." As others have said, a setting isn't a story. World building isn't a conflict. A magic system isn't compelling writing and it can't make up for other areas where the author fails. I assume someone like Sanderson would say that he isn't trying to imitate Tolkien; codified magic systems are for stories where the protagonists often use magic to solve problems, unlike in LotR where Gandalf isn't even around most of the time.
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Sep 13, 2017 01:46
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Schwarzwald posted:It's pretty bold to claim that none of the "post-scarcity future" series that preceded the Culture series had as much impact when Star Trek came out 21 years before hand. I thought Star Trek only established the Federation as a communist utopia in TNG, which began in 1987. And the Federation as a setting is never really fleshed out very well anyway.
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Sep 26, 2017 20:51
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Schwarzwald posted:All but maybe one of the Demon Princes were nakedly petulant nerds desperate to sooth their egos, it was great. I've discussed this in the main Sci-Fi thread, but it's amazing how much more interesting the three human Demon Princes are than the alien and the vampire. Actually, I'd say only three of the Demon Princes were nakedly petulant nerds (and it's portrayed a lot more bluntly with Viole Falushe and Howard Alan Treesong than with Kokor Hekkus). Lars Larque was dealt a genuinely lovely hand in life (what we know of Darsh culture makes it likely he was sexually abused as a child, and he initially became an outlaw for "stealing" water from someone who was already dead), as opposed to Falushe and Treesong being really mad at people who made fun of them in high school. I'm not sure if Malagate is even human enough to be capable of being a nerd.
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Oct 5, 2017 00:54
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my bony fealty posted:Jack Vance did magic the best in the Dying Earth stories It was actually sort of jarring, having previously heard about The Dying Earth mainly in the context of its influence on D&D, to read it and find out that "Vancian magic" doesn't play much of a role after the first couple stories. The focus of the plots changes pretty radically after the first couple stories as well; I was actually a little disappointed that the rest of the book wasn't about Tsain and Turjan outwitting evil wizards.
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Oct 7, 2017 18:41
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Cugel is consistently a terrible person except for one incident near the end of Cugel the Clever/The Eyes of the Overworld. We only root for him at the end of The Skybreak Spatterlight/Cugel's Saga because Iucounu is worse, and even that is a retcon. As an aside, am I the only one who finds it weird that no one (even Wikipedia) seems to use the Vance Integral Edition titles? To be sure, some of them are terrible. The VIE titles for Assault on a City and Showboat World are absurdly over-long, Mazirian the Magician makes no sense as a title for The Dying Earth because he only appears in the first story, and there's a fair number of titles that are proper nouns with no meaning outside the context of the story. That said, some of the original titles are worse (Tschai is a meaningless proper noun, but still better than Planet of Adventure). Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Oct 20, 2017 |
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Oct 20, 2017 19:10
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Thranguy posted:They've said good things about Peake. But I'd like to know what the 'from the last 50 years' qualified answer to that is, and, whether that's a null set or not, for takes on authors that at least seem to be aiming in a literary direction: Wolfe, Mieville, Atwood, Murakami, Chiang, say. I know BotL likes Jack Vance, and he wrote a fair amount post-1967. But taking your question in the spirit it was probably intended (i.e., authors who started writing after 1967 or so), I'm curious about BotL's answer myself.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:50
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:No one's written any good literature in the last fifty years. This is objective fact. I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:54
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BotL's Vance post is pretty good. There are some interesting aspects of Demon Princes in particular that BotL doesn't comment on, though. The last three Demon Princes books are considerably better than the first two. Much of this is due to their better villains; the human members of the Demon Princes are a lot more interesting than the alien and the vampire. Part of the problem is that we never meet Malagate or Hekkus as themselves until very close to the end of the books. I also feel the need to quote a post I made in another thread about the setting. Silver2195 posted:I have mixed feelings about the setting. It feels like simultaneously too much and too little has changed in 1500 years. One thing I can't help but notice is that while there's a lot of cultures, even within the Oikumene, with radically different values, there's still an implied core interplanetary culture (which I suppose is the dominant culture of places like Alphanor) that's basically just America circa 1962. To some extent this is necessary to create contrast, but with regards to gender roles in particular, it often comes across as an unintentional failure of imagination. (The Oikumene as portrayed in The Book of Dreams seems to have become more gender-equal, probably because it was published in 1981 while the first few books were published in the 60s.) What's even weirder is how much people seem to have changed biologically in just a millennium and a half; some of the new ethnic groups that have emerged seem to be outright new subspecies (like the descendants of the vegetarian colonists of New Concept, who have become sheep-like). Even some of the cultural developments are a bit much, like an entire inhabited planet (Thamber) passing into legend and the apparently complete replacement of the religions of today's world with new religions. Even cultures like the Darsh and the planet of poisoners that have radically different values from all real-world industrialized societies are pushing it. I think the general idea Vance is going for is that people who live in environments radically unlike Earth will be undergo more rapid cultural and physical changes than we do, but I have trouble buying it.
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Feb 24, 2018 08:43
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:The Oikoumene is essentially a satirical setting, which is why it's simultaneously banal and exotic. I'd never thought of it that way, but I guess Baron Bodissey is a bit like the Guide with its opinionated exposition. The Oikoumene/Beyond setting does have a satirical edge to it a lot of the time, but sometimes (especially with the Darsh) I'm not sure I want to know what it's meant to be a satire of; the political subtext of Vance's works can be a bit uncomfortable at times. I think Gersen's characterization is better than you seem to give it credit for; while his derivation from characters like Edmond Dantes and James Bond is obvious, the key difference is that Vance seems fully aware that Gersen isn't a particularly admirable person. (Dumas acknowledges that Dantes isn't a particularly admirable person at the end of The Count of Monte Cristo, but it's rather halfhearted in comparison). Palace of Love even begins with his girlfriend breaking up with him after she makes arguments against his revenge quest that he's unable to effectively refute (in particular, that there's no real need for him to kill the Demon Princes by himself instead of working with the IPCC). In general, Vance takes a surprisingly dim view of the resourceful and determined male adventure-story heroes he writes about; the short story "The New Prime" probably expresses this most clearly. Edit: Actually I misread you a bit there; you did like Gersen's characterization. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Feb 24, 2018 |
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Feb 24, 2018 09:16
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Schwarzwald posted:I think you have downplayed an aspect to the stories. While it's true that the villains aren't greatly explored for most of their respective stories, by the end we do know something of each of them and there is a pattern: they all have similarities to Gersen. They have the same exaggerated tenacity, they all have a keen talent for navigating and manipulating institutions, and they're all devoted to their own quests. They're all trying to get revenge of some sort. I like how The Face ends with Gersen, after killing Lars Larque, deciding that Larque's plan was actually a pretty good idea and completing it for him. Really, Lars Larque is the only one of the Demon Princes who's even slightly sympathetic. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Feb 24, 2018 |
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Feb 24, 2018 09:40
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Wait until my review that will settle the question (spoiler: it's the sexlessness). My inclination is to assume that LotR is popular in spite of its sexlessness. Hence the movies moving the Arwen/Aragorn romance from the appendices to the main story.
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Mar 12, 2018 20:17
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Mel Mudkiper posted:However, that doesn't mean you are speaking honestly to the human experience if your novel is full of hot sex with beautiful women who orgasm constantly. Since this line of discussion started with Lord of the Rings, I'm interested in people's thoughts on the treatment of sexuality in John Boorman's never-filmed script. Boorman's Gimli posted:Galadriel! A mighty piece of stone she is, for a Dwarfish tool to carve. Boorman also gives us Arwen, age 13, having a four-way makeout session with Aragorn, Boromir, and Aragorn's sword. Ick.
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Mar 13, 2018 00:56
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CountFosco posted:You know what would be perfect for the BotL treatment? Harry Turtledove. I think Turtledove falls into the Ready Player One category where it's already the conventional wisdom here that his books are bad.
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Jul 7, 2018 03:14
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Kefahuchi_son!!! posted:I like bad books but this thread is cool. May i request something by Zelazny? Lord of Light would be a great one to see teared apart. Somewhat relevant: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mainstream_writers_of_sf
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Jul 12, 2018 13:35
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's sortof a mechanical problem inherent to using fantasy to tell stories about minority oppression Only if you make the oppressed group the one with the superpowers. The alternative cliche of aristocratic rear end in a top hat wizards comes up sometimes too. Although there's the risk of a related trap where the author or reader implicitly identifies with the rear end in a top hat wizards on some level.
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Jul 31, 2018 21:42
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my bony fealty posted:Jack Vance wrote some very fun rear end in a top hat wizard stories and I freely admit to wanting to chill with Rhialto
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Aug 1, 2018 19:21
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My impression is that everything was ultimately up for debate among the LARPers, and we don't see them debating things because Baru doesn't know their secrets. Since Baru becomes one of them at the end, we'll presumably see more of their discussions (and the culture of Falcrest, for that matter) in the sequel. (I'm not expressing an opinion either way about the rest of TheGreatEvilKing's points because I don't feel like reading General Battuta's commentary.)
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Sep 22, 2018 20:56
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Who was arguing that? The use of “sodomite” in The Traitor Baru Cormorant was criticized by another poster in this thread. And some people are even more extreme about this sort of thing; see https://curiosityquills.com/limyaael/modern-language-in-fantasy/ for an example of this view.
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Nov 3, 2018 00:40
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Mel Mudkiper posted:While we are on the topic why is most fantasy made up of the same components in mildly different arrangements They don't always look and act the same, though? Silver2195 posted:What I like about dragons is that they can fulfill so many different narrative roles and fit into so many different settings. They can be anything from wise wonder-workers to cunning villains to useful mounts to fierce and mindless monsters. They can appear in settings drawing from all sorts of different real-world cultures and still be a natural fit; most obviously Germanic dragons and Chinese dragons, but also Greek, Slavic, and South Asian dragons, and even South American Feathered Serpents. Earthsea even had dragons in a Pacific island world. They can also have a variety of different kinds of powers while still feeling dragon-y: Some dragons breathe things other than the traditional fire, and they also often can take human form, use the same kinds of magic that humans in their setting can use, or entrance people with their gaze - and that's without getting into all the powers specific to Chinese dragons. There's also room for a lot of different visual designs. I do agree that dragons are sometimes used where they don't belong, though. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 18:52
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Well sure, but I meant more in that they are always formidable and singular alpha-predators That's probably mostly true. The first Discworld book had swamp dragons that were considered unimpressive and gross, but that was just a throwaway joke.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:02
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BananaNutkins posted:Not untrue. There's a reason power fantasy is popular. But to explore an idea like the dumb dragon immigrants thing from just one side wouldn't be funny. Comedy has to be true for it to work, and an idea like that has to be given a fair shake from all sides. You have to burn everyone. and there has to be a scatalogical component. This is some South Park bullshit.
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Nov 13, 2018 23:39
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The thing with magic is that as it is usable to team protagonist the fantasy authors need to walk a thin line between having a "Mary Sue" character but also having a Cool Special Snowflake self-interest. When magic is the province of vile necromancers, dark lords, and cackling demons opposed by some plucky dude with a sword no one cares about rules and we assume that magic has limits that don't let the demons instagib our hero in his sleep. Worth noting that Achilles in the Iliad is never said to be literally invulnerable; that aspect of the myth comes later. (And even according to that version, he had one weakness, which resulted in him getting killed.)
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Nov 18, 2018 00:08
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Just found a "steampunk" version of Frankenstein at Half Price. It's Frankenstein, but illustrated with Photoshop collages full of cogs and poo poo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA
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Dec 19, 2018 16:30
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Jack B Nimble posted:I just read an excerpt and, look I know the book is a product of its time and I can get that on an intellectual level, but I got to the part where the man "prefers to rely on a matched set of samurai swords" and felt my right index finger physically searching for an eject button. I haven't read Snow Crash, but based on reading The Diamond Age, I suspect those elements are somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
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Jan 1, 2019 00:06
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Amethyst posted:A common refrain from fantasy fans is that they like "magic systems". Speaking of magic systems, RPGs, and Vance, it's interesting how little focus the famous memory-based "Vancian magic" actually gets in the Dying Earth books. The first couple stories in the first book involve it heavily, and near the end of the second book Cugel uses it a bit when he steals Iucounu's spellbook, but that's about it; almost all the magic Rhialto and his frenemies do involves magical artifacts or genie-like beings rather than memorizing and forgetting incantations. Based on what I've read about Vance, it seems that this is because he became disillusioned with the "gadget stories" he used to write, where the protagonist encounters situations that force him or her* to use (and usually use up) all his technological or magic resources in turn, like a James Bond movie. The later Vance preferred to focus more on other things, like anthropological world-building and picaresque. * Protagonists in the Vance corpus are overwhelmingly male, so the sections from the POVs of T'Sais and T'Sain provide another way in which the first few chapters of The Dying Earth/Mazirian the Magician are unrepresentative.
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Jan 4, 2019 03:04
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I Before E posted:It's been a decade or more since I read Diamond Age, I should revisit it. I remember it being a really fascinating read. Might as well repost my own thoughts on it here: Silver2195 posted:Just finished The Diamond Age. Not sure how to feel about it. There's a lot of interesting ideas, some great dark humor, and memorable prose. I'm just not sure it holds together as a whole very well. It almost feels like it should have been a trilogy rather than a single book; there's a lot that happens offscreen, there's some subplots that could have used more explanation, and it feels like the stuff about Nell's childhood and Hackworth getting coerced into making lots of copies of the Primer came from a different book from the stuff about the Drummers and the Seed, which in turn felt like a different book from the stuff about Boxer Rebellion 2.0. Some of the stories from the Primer, particularly Dinosaur's, don't even feel like part of the same series. Don't get me wrong, Dinosaur's story is hilarious, but it doesn't have much to so with anything else.
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Jan 4, 2019 18:24
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poisonpill posted:Morte d’Arthur is bad because it’s genre and they have stirrups anachronistically I've often thought that interpretations of Arthurian legend that embrace the supernatural and anachronistic weirdness are preferable to more "historical"/"grounded" takes (especially because a lot of those supposedly historical interpretations, like the 2004 King Arthur movie, are actually full of historical errors). It's interesting to reflect that Morte d'Arthur is in some respects a more "grounded" take than the French romances it's adapting, especially in terms of geography; Malory tends to place events in actual specific locations in the British Isles, while the French writers tended to be vaguer about geography. I've sometimes thought that the British Isles seem too small to fit all the "canonical" Arthurian stories and still leave room for others (how many lords who don't acknowledge Arthur's authority, lands under strange enchantments, etc. can there be?), although that might at least partly be a case of modern technology distorting my sense of distance.
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Jan 8, 2019 22:06
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Mel Mudkiper posted:it should be noted that short story collections and multi-volume YA books are both not examples of serialized novels which I think the original dude was referring to There has been a return of serialized novels of sorts. (I'm somewhat interested in seeing how much BotL hates Wildbow's works.)
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Jan 28, 2019 21:35
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Because it isn't actually comparable to the pulp fiction mill of the '50s that Theodore Sturgeon was trying to defend? One group was motivated by the desire to write great books. The other was motivated by tight deadlines, low pay, and an undiscerning market (which is not to say that creative aspirations weren't also a factor, but they were far from dominant). I've been fortunate enough to live near multiple secondhand book stores with large collections of mid-century pulp paperbacks, and while they look cool and have a few diamonds in the rough, the sheer mass of absolute poo poo on those shelves puts the lie to that line of thinking completely. Never once did an ambitious modernist sit down to pen his masterwork and end up with D-99. This is probably true, although it's hard to say for sure, unless your secondhand bookstores also have large collections of the lesser works of minor modernists (plus "modernist" is a fuzzy category to begin with).
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Feb 2, 2019 19:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I feel like the truth of the "99% of everything is crap" statement depends on how much your "everything" encompasses. All books? All genre books? All non genre books? Etc. A good rule of thumb is that less curation means more crap. The crap percentage for fanfiction is probably actually higher than 99%, but the percentage for traditionally published works is lower, and the crap percentage for books significant enough to be reviewed somewhere is lower than that, and the crap percentage for works that have stood some sort of "test of time" is even lower.
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Feb 2, 2019 19:58
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pikachode posted:confession time, i've never actually read any bendy badstan and am bigoted against him based on his religion alone. so to make myself a better person i'm reading the way of kings (2010) and will report back fairly and without prejudice I actually enjoy some of Sanderson's books, but large portions of Way of Kings are a dreadful slog. You'd be better off reading The Emperor's Soul instead.
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Feb 3, 2019 02:22
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uberkeyzer posted:It's incredible. There's are several characters who are supposed to deliver burns so sick that the targets are left gasping for breath and everyone around bursts into applause at his cleverness. Only...Brandon Sanderson really, really can't write comedy, so you're left with large chunks of the movie reading like the on-air segments of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Here's an example I found via googling: IIRC, Jasnah calls Shallan out on her quips not actually being all that funny, and Wit isn't even trying to be funny so much as obnoxious. This doesn't really contradict your point about Sanderson not being able to write comedy, though.
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Feb 3, 2019 03:04
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Karia posted:honestly, my bet is that shorter formats would suit him better, forcing him to get to the point. Probably, hence my suggestion of Emperor's Soul instead of Way of Kings.
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Feb 5, 2019 03:20
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:The fallacy though is that the literature of the past we consider "great" only represents a small portion of everything that has been published. You can check, for example, a list of American bestsellers from the end of the 19th Century, and only two or three books might be remembered by people outside of specialist scholars (Prisoner of Zenda, Red Badge of Courage, and Quo Vadis). Four books, actually. You missed Trilby.
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Feb 8, 2019 18:27
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hackbunny posted:The worldbuilding in the Divine Comedy is top-notch You’re not the first to point this out: https://books.google.com/books?id=z...aphy%22&f=false
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Feb 11, 2019 05:16
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Mostly just the hero struggling against the Great Strawman Government. I do not find the Masquerade an interesting or useful model of the modern US, but it is supposed to be a stand in per the author's blog. I liked the first book, but I haven't read the author's blog; the idea that the Masquerade is supposed to be a direct analogue for the modern US seems so completely baffling to me that I can't help but suspect that you misunderstood the blog post. Link?
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Feb 15, 2019 23:31
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I've noticed this too, with the caveat that the genre/non-genre distinction here isn't so much fantastical vs. realist as literary vs. pulp. I like this observation from an introduction to The Count of Monte Cristo: https://books.google.com/books?id=_...0cristo&f=falsequote:All these are described with as much economy as possible in order to avoid holding up the narrative. This is one reason why the popular novel tends to reinforce rather than challenge prejudices. Edit: I should add that even very highbrow early 20th century fiction can have rather appalling gender politics. It just doesn't traffic as much in ethnic stereotypes. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Feb 20, 2019 |
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Feb 20, 2019 04:05
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my bony fealty posted:I only read the Huck Finn edition that refers to "slave Jim" tyvm WELL, ACTUALLY, in the book Jim is never referred to as friend of the family Jim, as though the racial epithet was part of his name. That comes from racist early 20th century critics.
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Feb 20, 2019 16:30
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chernobyl kinsman posted:hell, same No, that means shark.
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Feb 22, 2019 01:57
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