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i'm excited for this thread, your rothfuss takedowns are great
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Sep 10, 2017 11:09
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 15:05 |
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all through high school i was working on a hundred thousand word pastoral travelling scene that i called a novel, all the adults in my life encouraged me because they were all certain i'd be published on the basis of my age alone and at least make a few novelty bucks out of it, and i hated christopher paolini with fierce, theatrical violence. i loathed that man. sometimes i would open my copy of eragon, which was given to me by my sweetest cousin who later committed suicide so i simultaneously despised the book and was driven to hold onto it like a talisman, and stare at paolini's author portrait in silent hatred. of course i never got published and now i'm almost thirty and my youthful promise has gurgled down the twin infested drains of university education and the global financial crisis. i am haunted by paolini. the toilet paper comes away from my rear end with his face smeared onto it like a jesus toast. i see him in the rainless clouds. when i catch the bus to my welfare appointments, where a tired-looking woman tries to convince me to get a certificate in aged care and spend the rest of my life scrubbing the elderly, the bus driver with his competitive hourly rate and his union membership and his loving long-service leave is christopher paolini. the welfare lady is paolini. the elderly are paolini. i look at myself in the mirror and all i see is the teenage paolini, proudly smirking. worst of all i think eragon survives as something like a perfect cultural object, a fantasy novel that was written by an actual adolescent rather than the psychosexually adolescent adults that populate the genre and this thread
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Sep 10, 2017 11:32
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it's a cracker. a cracker. it's a bloody cracker
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Sep 11, 2017 10:21
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when i was 11 i read weaveworld by clive barker and it affected me profoundly, for most of my teenage years i was convinced i'd come from inside that carpet and sometimes in class i'd zone out and think i could feel it distinctly tugging at my mind as it called me home. also i am now sexually attracted to ghosts
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Sep 12, 2017 12:00
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i broke my coccyx falling on my rear end on a basketball court and it wasn't diagnosed for like three years so for all that time i was secretly hoping my persistent rear end pain was because i was growing a tail
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Sep 12, 2017 12:05
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as for robin hobb i've never read her stuff because medieval fantasy was stale back in like 1970 you pit of stagnant nerds
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Sep 12, 2017 12:07
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speculative fiction, as i was taught to call it in high school, has fallen victim to authors playing it safe to protect their work's marketability. the whole point of the genre was always to isolate specific problems in contemporary society and deal with them in a rarefied and entertaining environment, but while genre authors are constantly trying to outdo themselves in edginess and gnarly deaths and rapes-per-page rate, actual social commentary is sorely lacking. WOMEN ARE AN ABUSED DEMOGRAPHIC shows up in every work, but there is never any attempt to deal with the specific ways in which women are abused beyond the inevitable rape scenes. there are no fantasy novels about sex trafficking, or the full complexities of an abusive relationship, or learning to live in an arranged marriage, or coming out as transgender, or being the single mother of a daughter in a patriarchal society, or being expected to care for ailing family members, or any of the problems that women in the real world deal with every single day. there are just endless male authors writing rape scenes, usually obviously with one hand, and patting themselves on the back for being progressive and dealing with real issues. feminism is just the obvious example here, but of course it's not the only one. i'm sure patrick rothfuss genuinely thought he was writing a hard-hitting look at the realities of living in poverty and being
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Sep 12, 2017 23:33
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okay, jemisin exists. i don't like her work, but i like her - she is doing important stuff for the genre just by existing and i'm glad she's getting acclaim and success. now can you name a second female author of colour dealing with real-world issues who enjoys widespread acclaim and success? not just a few short stories published in a small-scale magazine run by sympathetic allies with no money, or a minor award with no prize and not much publicity - i'm talking major awards, contracts, sales.
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Sep 12, 2017 23:58
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this is getting out of the ground covered by sf/f and into the politics of the publishing industry itself, but the two are inextricable i guess. one black female face in a sea of white men is not representation. i didn't think i'd have to explain that, but i guess this is the book barn
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Sep 13, 2017 00:00
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HIJK posted:I had an ex boyfriend who recommended the Rothfuss books to me and he got genuinely angry when I told him I wasn't very enthused about the story because the prose was bad. He was convinced Rothfuss was a fantastic writer and he was absolutely furious when I didn't agree.
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Sep 13, 2017 03:36
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HIJK posted:He cited Rothfuss as one of the reasons he was breaking up with me.
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Sep 13, 2017 06:04
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please do one hundred years of solitude please please please whether you like it or not, if you don't like it then you and i will engage in a battle to the death
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Sep 14, 2017 00:15
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we're not talking about tv shows we're talking about literature you absolute lunatic. one hundred years of solitude made me fall in love with the noble piano accordion. at the time i was a teenager and unable to afford one of my own so i asked my grandmother to get me one for my birthday and she squawked in outrage and said all in one breath, as if she'd been rehearsing (and i quote) "you are not playing the piano accordion, only disgustingly jolly fat women in red stretched satin blouses at the polish culture club play the piano accordion!" i now have an accordion and am teaching myself to play it much to the dismay of my neighbours because it is deafeningly loud and i am deafeningly untalented, anyway that's my story
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Sep 14, 2017 03:07
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my confession is i've never read any peake, which is why i'm talking about one hundred years of solitude, but i have just bought the illustrated gormenghast trilogy (with a foreword by china mieville!) just because of this thread actually can you cover mieville next, there's a chance some goons have read his stuff unlike garcia marquez the old ceremony fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 03:08
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font color sea posted:In the genre thread?
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Sep 16, 2017 09:23
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Mel Mudkiper posted:lol look at this dumb poo poo
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Sep 16, 2017 23:43
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magic realism is a genre of fantasy, it takes place in a universe where the laws of reality are different. there's no unreliable narrator in one hundred years of solitude because it's told in the omniscient, so there's no question that the weird poo poo in the book actually happens. characters really do ascend to heaven in a flutter of levitating bedsheets; a humanoid cryptid with cloven hooves and the voice of a wailing baby really is killed in a spike pit; children really are born with pigs' tails if their parents are related. none of that is less fantastical than dragons or people shooting fireballs from their hands or whatever nihilist-lite lovecraft ripoff and/or bitchass satan rothfuss's chandrian bullshit turns out to be. remedios the beauty is a much weirder character than any of rothfuss's poo poo nymphets. (sorry for overusing rothfuss, he just epitomises everything wrong with the genre to me.) the events and the people in one hundred years of solitude feel realer than any of that poo poo but that's because it's a better book, not because it's not fantasy. personally i hate the term "genre" and the whole concept of genres. it's been imposed on an artform by publishers purely for marketing reasons, because in their marketing handbooks there are separate chapters on "marketing fantasy", "marketing romance", "marketing mystery" and so on. but i can't pretend that it doesn't exist, because the fantasy that we get to read - i.e. the stuff that gets published - is what the publishers have chosen based on whether or not they think they can sell copies. that mindset is what has to change. or hopefully, even better, get devoured by alternate publishing avenues enabled by the internet.
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Sep 17, 2017 02:09
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the idea of a dichotomy between sci-fi and fantasy is weird to me too. as i understand it the idea is that in fantasy the miracles happen because of magic, and in sci-fi they happen because of technology. the border between magic and technology was always blurry especially when stuff that we can't even form a scientific consensus on got involved (like aliens or ftl travel) allowing for total freedom of speculation, but the books that got classified as sci-fi rather than fantasy were the ones that went into more detail on their imagined systems. then this started attracting an audience that liked the systems more than any other aspect of the story, and because that audience were usually computer guys and computer guys have always had plenty of disposable income, publishers catered to them. so sci-fi evolved into what they wanted, which was a long convoluted stupid instruction manual for a machine that doesn't exist with sex, cussing and some elaborate violence thrown in to keep the readers' attention and stand out from the competition. now replace "machine" with "magic" (because they were always the same thing) - does that sound like genre fantasy in the year 2017 to you?
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Sep 17, 2017 02:19
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because ice is loving amazing you dolt
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Sep 17, 2017 03:23
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d&d is a bad tolkien pastiche though bad for a novel anyway, as a game it's fine
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Sep 17, 2017 05:00
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where does one hundred years of solitude end and gormenghast begin, though? the characters both shape and are shaped by their world in both cases - the worlds are otherworldly dreamscapes but the characters inhabit them utterly, and the worlds wouldn't exist as they are without every character willingly playing their part. where would you place mieville's the city and the city on the spectrum of genre fantasy vs non genre fantasy? i put the twin cities on about the same level of reality as macondo and mieville's world is an extreme example of characters' psychological conditioning impacting on reality. but that book is considered genre fantasy and marketed as such. and it is a fantasy, because it takes psychological conditioning ever so slightly further than is possible in the "real" world - but only slightly, because to do otherwise would undercut the point the author is trying to make. all three of these books are fantasy. hobb and rothfuss are fantasy. beowulf is fantasy. the torah is fantasy. you are all my fantasy, and i am dismayed by it
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Sep 17, 2017 08:29
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i've read that thread, like two people even made it through the book and the rest of you gave it up because you couldn't make sense of the countless aurelianim, you wretched corn man, you science fink
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Sep 17, 2017 13:34
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CestMoi posted:Magic realism is just fantasy that suffers from an underdeveloped magic system.
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Sep 17, 2017 22:30
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i wouldn't know tbh i've never played it
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Sep 19, 2017 14:19
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failing forward posted:Wtf 100 Years of Solitude is the loving tits. How could people pick that book up and then PUT IT DOWN without finishing it!?
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Sep 24, 2017 04:24
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Schwarzwald posted:I'm holding out for the parody novel, 100 Years of Solitude and Zombies
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Sep 24, 2017 04:41
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yeah i was given a banks book once and two pages in the story just stopped dead to make way for a thousand-word physical description of the protagonist's appearance and outfit like something out of fanfiction.net
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Sep 25, 2017 04:16
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my triptych of firm and unyielding buttocks
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Sep 25, 2017 23:30
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InnercityGriot posted:I just want to say that the Titus Groan reading was excellent and I wish more people would read that book. This is a good thread. i'm most looking forward to the third book of the trilogy because it's apparently a complete mess but in like an outsider art kind of way (even more than the first two) because the author was actively dying as he wrote it
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Sep 29, 2017 12:16
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gormenghast verdict: loving insane poetic/evocative writing by the current crop of sf/f dorks is masturbatory at best, however peake has slow deep majestic sex with the english language right there on the page in front of you and he's not even ashamed
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Oct 1, 2017 11:52
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i'm fat (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 2, 2017 23:06
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i'm hopelessly enmeshed in gormenghast and it's the best thing that's happened to me in a long time, i love it, i love botl
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Oct 6, 2017 03:26
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absolutely (tbh swelter is pretty benevolent compared to actual chefs i've worked with)
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Oct 6, 2017 04:20
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fuchsia is me
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Oct 6, 2017 07:48
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half-mad virgin who hates the elderly
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Oct 6, 2017 07:59
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:I am a prune doctor
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Oct 6, 2017 11:56
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nobody in the botm threads has ever read a book unless it was titled "officer bouldercrotch destroys the space ants" and had at least one breast on the cover
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Oct 9, 2017 22:47
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botl owns and these forums need him more than they will ever know
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Oct 20, 2017 22:17
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wow i just realised he's on probation for a month, fair dinkum mods
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Oct 21, 2017 00:22
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