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BravestOfTheLamps posted:I’m going to help with that and write proper reviews of everyone’s favourite sci-fi and fantasy (mostly fantasy, really), Best of luck with that stone, Sisyphus.
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Sep 9, 2017 21:55
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Bandiet posted:The only reason you should waste your time critiquing a genre is if you actually want to see it get better. There's no such thing as "better." Quality is an illusion devised by Satan.
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Sep 12, 2017 00:56
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Less facetiously, I genuinely don't understand peoples objections.Hieronymous Alloy posted:Well, you can call a novel "idiotic" regardless, it just doesn't necessarily mean anything. This is true, but it leads to the question, "by what criteria is BotL judging Assassin’s Apprentice?" Well: BravestOfTheLamps posted:Hobb’s “world-building” is as insipid as all such efforts, because any milieu is only as interesting as the prose that conveys it. BotL has judged the book on the quality of it's prose, and on it's depiction of society. Now, no one in this thread has argued that Assassin’s Apprentice has good prose (for good reason) and no one has argued that Assassin’s Apprentice depictions of society are not juvenile or offensive. So... what are peoples objections, then?
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Sep 12, 2017 01:48
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the old ceremony posted: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. Not a person of color, but Suzanne Collins otherwise fits the bill.
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Sep 13, 2017 00:05
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I'm holding out for the parody novel, 100 Years of Solitude and Zombies
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Sep 24, 2017 04:32
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my bony fealty posted:But that does not make the spaceship books void of meaning. They are especially meaningful in the context of science fiction, which I gather does not factor much into this grounded discussion. Okay, then. What is their meaning?
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Sep 26, 2017 15:49
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my bony fealty posted:In the sci-fi context - offering a leftist-informed vision of a post-scarcity future that is neither a utopia nor dystopia, but rather a genuinely nuanced imagined society, is pretty important. There are probably precedents but I don't know any that had the impact of Culture, especially given the time it came out - the mid 1980s, when the prevailing sci-fi attitude was "hypercapitalist cyberpunk future will doom us all." 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.
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Sep 26, 2017 20:44
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Can you give me an example of a story that used "magic" well? I'm not speaking for Mel Mudkiper, but I would like to put forward an example of a genre fantasy that I thought used magic quite well: Moorcock's Elric of Melniborne series. Elric is a sorcerer who has access to a wide variety of magic. Occasionally he does cast spells in the modern Dungeons and Dragons sense, but far more commonly it involves calling upon various spiritual courts his ancestors had made pacts with. The way those pacts come into play in the story tends to follow a predictable pattern. Elric and his allies will come under some danger that seems likely to overwhelm them, Elric recalls some pact his predecessors made with a particular spirit or spirit court and calls upon them for help, they appear and rescue him. Typically, they afterwards inform Elric that the pact is now void, and that from that point onward that particular spirit will no longer help him. This is almost invariably used as a kind of "get out of trouble" free card, often kills the tension (although there might be some pathos if a companion isn't similarly saved), and the fact that that particular spirit won't rescue Elric a second time doesn't mean much when the author can continuously invent more helpful spirits that just so happen to owe some debt to Elric's bloodline. This happens once a twice a book, for most of the six books. Despite how cheap and unsatisfying this may sound, it still works because of the story Moorcock is telling. Elric starts the series as prince of an ancient magical Empire, with a beautiful lover, undreamt of wealth, and by the end of the first book, his only major rival beaten. But his love of excitement and his fear of the gods lead him on more and more reckless adventures. As a result, his empire crumbles, his lover dies, and his wealth is pillaged. And every so often he gets himself into a situation that should by all rights kill him, only for a magical spirit to bale him out. That magic is one of his final inheritances, and every time he calls on it, it wanes just a bit further. For a story to use magic well is for the magic to serve the story being told. In this case, the stories are about a fantastically powerful and wealthy individual, fearful of the whims of the gods, ironically becoming personally responsible for losing everything. In the story, Elric's magic is just one more thing for him to lose.
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Oct 2, 2017 21:35
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All but maybe one of the Demon Princes were nakedly petulant nerds desperate to sooth their egos, it was great.
Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Oct 4, 2017 |
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Oct 4, 2017 22:07
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BravestOfTheLamps quoting Dragaera posted:I put the fire out and scattered the ashes, then I removed a dagger from under my left arm, tested the point and edge, and made my way into town. There was the blood of a king on the back of my right hand as I stepped out of the Palace and ducked around behind it. Did you happen to omit a few paragraphs between these two sentences?
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Dec 9, 2017 22:49
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:While Gersen is an inspired hero, The Demon Princes lacks a central element as equally compelling as Cugel’s Tantalus-like torments – save for what we may call its ‘sleaze value’. The cosmopolitan satire, the quest for justice, and the hunt for perverse fantasists never comes together as a whole, perhaps because the antagonists do not feel natural to the milieu. Vance thrives in depicting absurd institutions, and his fundamental misstep with the series that the antagonists, who are so central to the narrative, are not institutional. Instead, they are anomalous freaks and outcasts who appear incomprehensible and impenetrable for most of their respective stories. 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. In this, the stories make apparent, if not an appreciation, then at least a curiosity of such freaks. The exploration of their natures is much the point, and I think it's too key an element of the story (of the series as a whole) for any theoretical better version to excise.
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Feb 24, 2018 09:26
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hackbunny posted:What is literary criticism for, though? Why should anyone read it? In addition to all the other reasons given, greater critical literacy has lead me to better understand the things I dislike, and to better enjoy the things I do like. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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Mar 14, 2018 05:23
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Lyon posted:I think it's the same basic premise as to why people get upset that a movie or TV show is reset by a large sequence being a dream. If you've committed time and energy to the story, if you've had some sort of emotional response or connection to the characters, then that connection is now invalidated moving forward. Those characters might still exist but they'll be fundamentally different in all new works or they may no longer exist at all and will no longer be written professionally. I think there's another element to it. Retroactive dream sequences, story remakes, canon reclassifications and the like are almost always caused by the author or publisher responding to some pressure in real life. For example, an author's original idea for a storyline isn't liked by the audience, so they quickly reset things to how there were before, or a book series isn't selling well (by some measure) so the publisher stops hiring authors, or hires different authors to take the story in a different direction. In each case, it's the world of the story being tread upon by reality. It's not just that a story or a series was unsatisfying, but that the reasons behind it are unsatisfying. There's a sense that the story could have been good, if only the author didn't chicken out, or the publishers didn't lose faith, or whatever limitation didn't exist.
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Mar 26, 2018 20:18
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this broken hill posted:botl do earthsea hard agree
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May 30, 2018 02:55
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this broken hill posted:the funniest thing about earthsea is that when i talk to other fans, women say tehanu was the best book and men say it was the worst. every time, no exceptions I only read the first three, but of those I preferred Tombs of Atuan by far. If Tehanu continues Tenar's story then I'd easily believe it was the best of the bunch. edit: speaking as a man Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 04:33 on May 30, 2018 |
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May 30, 2018 04:19
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skasion posted:Bloodborne‘s writing is quite different in a lot of ways, mostly that it’s a game and its writing all exists to service that form. Also the race mixing thing is not present because it turns out dominant culture doesn’t need to have horror-angst about how race mixing is the end of the world and nautical-looking negroes are coming to push us all down the cosmic stairs to foetid abhumanity if they are so colossally xenophobic as to prevent it from happening in any profusion to begin with. The eponymous "blood birth" refers to the child of a comically pale woman and a cosmic monster.
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Jun 14, 2018 16:28
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skasion posted:Lovecraft’s aliens are almost always right out of War of the Worlds, which is in some ways even more blatant about the colonial subtext of alien invasion type stories. H.G. Wells the Time Machine is also a good reference point for Lovecraft's work, specifically in the dynamic between the Eloi and the Morlocks.
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Jun 14, 2018 17:35
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Shark Sandwich posted:Edit: The series also has some of the worst cover art I've ever seen: This image is missing is "From Levels 4-8!" and the TSR logo.
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Jul 14, 2018 05:18
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Mel Mudkiper posted:exactly, and, as a linguist, I find it a bit absurd that he imagines a future form of a language would be a poorly used understanding of an old form of the language instead of an evolution of contemporary language. This is a little off topic, but by any chance have you read Riddley Walker?
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Jul 21, 2018 21:26
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A human heart posted:Riddley Walker isn't an author, it's a book by Russel Hoban written in an imagined dialect. Yes. I mentioned it because it's written in an imagined form of English derived from projecting historical linguistics forward, as opposed to what it seems Gene Wolfe has done. It's also a story taking place in a regressive future being told from the first person perspective by a character who is diegetically not a strong writer. (In Riddley Walker, the character not being a good writer comes across through him writing phonetically, which further emphasize the linguistic changes in the language.)
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Jul 22, 2018 02:04
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Wheat Loaf posted:What do folks in this thread think of Philip José Farmer? I've only read To Your Scattered Bodies Go, and while the concept of "aliens playing god/doll house with the dead souls of humankind" was pretty decent as far as sci-fi conceits go, it was entirely in service to producing fanfiction of his favorite historical personages (plus their caveman buddy). Without the fanfiction elements it was a functional sci-fi story, but with them it was a functional sci-fi except more uncomfortable than typical. It might have been unique in '71, but now days if I find myself wanting to read Sir Richard Francis Burton/Alice Liddell smut I just go to AO3 like a normal person.
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Jul 22, 2018 20:51
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porfiria posted:I hate to respond to the dumb blog, but he talks about how until recently a book with a space marine on the fover would be about shooting minorities and not instead an exploration of being gay, but Forever War came out in 1974. Bill, Galactic Hero was '65.
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Jul 30, 2018 01:47
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Seldom Posts posted:It's a bad faith review written for lolz, not unlke the ones BOTL does (though not as good). What was misleading about it?
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Nov 8, 2018 17:46
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BananaNutkins posted:Only comparative analysis holds water for me, but he's already written off the entire genre, so he tries to compare genre fantasy to the literary genre, which won't ever work as a method of critique. The fact that you don't think it's fair for him to compare genre fantasy to the literary genre shows that you hold fantasy to far lower esteem than he does.
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Nov 13, 2018 01:11
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I assume that the margins of these maps were filled with pictures of man-eating trees. Frequently monstrous fishes or whales! https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolual
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Nov 13, 2018 22:55
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Even The Magician's Nephew? I've yet to read any grimdark that manages to match the bleakness of the decrepit kings of Charn and the Deplorable Word. Magician's Nephew probably comes closest to matching LWW, but it's entirely the parts of the story outside of Narnia itself that are actually any good.
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Nov 13, 2018 23:27
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Impossible. There is no such thing as bad pizza. Sodexo makes pizza.
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Nov 14, 2018 01:13
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Assume a Perfectly Spherical Discworld: A Topological Criticism
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Nov 14, 2018 16:00
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Seldom Posts posted:Well that was my impression of your whole dragon argument--that fantasy hacks just use dragons to mean the same thing when it could be anything, because they are hacks and fantasy is for plebes. Is that not what you were saying? As I understand it, Mel's arguing that fantasy writers are too restrained by convention to write fantastically, not that they should gently caress around with language more. The example of the dragon was meant to show how something that had traditionally symbolized the imagined limit of an apex-predator has, in modern genre usage, been calcified as merely a very specific type of imaginary big lizard. It's not that fantasy writers could call acorns dragons out of some contrarian whimsy, but that they're isn't anything contrarian about a dragon being acorn shaped. The concept of the dragon does not imply any specific shape, lizard or acorn or otherwise. In short, modern genre writers use convention in place of imagination in much the same way modern consumers use "tropology" in place of reading.
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Nov 14, 2018 21:52
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Seldom Posts posted:And further this part: How so?
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Nov 14, 2018 22:31
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Wheat Loaf posted:I have a sincere question: Mel's comment about a lot of fantasy not actually being terribly "fantastical" is interesting to me and I would be curious to know whether anyone has any views on what the most genuinely "fantastical" fantasy might be. Does anyone have any thoughts? A lot of Ray Bradbury's stories make good use of the fantastic, The Illustrated Man and The Veldt being two prominent examples, as well as basically every short story in The Martian Chronicles.
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Nov 15, 2018 15:08
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When you have magic without any rules then things just happen because the author decides they do. This is opposed to magic with rules, where things just happen because the author decides they do.
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Nov 15, 2018 23:34
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Mel Mudkiper posted:not if Vox Day can help it isn't that the british holiday after christmas
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Nov 15, 2018 23:51
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That reads like the flavor text on a Magic: the Gathering card.
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Nov 28, 2018 22:01
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Ambivalent posted:came to this thread because i actually really liked baru cormorant and wanted to mull over my gay feelings, but fortunately reading the last 15 or whatever pages has cured me of wanting to discuss anything I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but what were you expecting? Tangents about what counts as a dragon or a rocket aside, this is supposedly about discussing how genre books typically aren't read through a critical lens and also for reading such books through such a lens.
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Dec 13, 2018 23:00
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EmptyVessel posted:why not go straight for Wizard of Oz which is already proto-steampunk? this post knocked the wind out of me
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Dec 20, 2018 00:30
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EmptyVessel posted:Sorry, should have just put Oz - was thinking of characters like this as proto-steampunk. (What dirigible? Oz uses a balloon.) Verne's steam-powered elephant would have been a better example possibly. I think it's a keen observation. I wouldn't have thought of it myself, but the steampunk aesthetic is just Oz without the whimsy or charm.
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Dec 21, 2018 23:20
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BOTL am I to take you’re branching off into a different genre?
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Dec 22, 2018 01:14
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Do you remember when FYAD got renamed to some weird rant about deconstrutivist humour being lazy? I feel like that sums up Snow Crash. There are bits where it almost wants you to take it seriously, but it's constantly hiding behind some Illuminatus! type irony. So it's hard to figure out what it's a tually trying to say. Snow Crash was frustrating. The main impetus behind the events of the plot, the central conflict, and everything that matters on the large scale, flies drat near completely over the heads over every viewpoint character. Hiro, YT, et al can be somewhat entertaining in their obliviousness, but it's certainly conveniently how their lets Stephenson skip past having to explain how the events of the story actually change things. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Jan 1, 2019 |
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Jan 1, 2019 02:10
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All you need to say is simply "thing good" or "thing bad," any elaboration comes from the evil one.
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Jan 5, 2019 06:53
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