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Oh my God, those strikethroughs should be a criminal offense. I've always found Stephenson a little cloyingly over-clever, but this is a new loving level.
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Mar 16, 2019 00:38
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onsetOutsider posted:suggestion: add a rule to the OP that this is not a thread for talking about you-know-who. 
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Mar 16, 2019 02:46
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FactsAreUseless posted:Does anyone have some examples of genre fiction that does a good job with descriptive language? I've always been frustrated by the inability of a lot of authors to describe these worlds they're trying to create. It's especially bad in fantasy - I see too many authors rely on either suggestion or some Lovecraft-style "the thing was too horrible to describe but hoo boy, believe me when I say it sucked" prose - but I know there have to be some that are decent at it. I remember Bradbury's prose being strong but it's been so long since I read any of his work that I can't say whether or not it actually was. Mervyn Peake's stuff isn't an easy read, but his Gormenghast books have a lot of really great descriptive/tone work.
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Mar 16, 2019 12:18
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:We have a good mystery thread that's just getting rolling -- the knox's rules one. At the moment my plan for next months BotM is to pick a genre mystery to help that thread get.kickstarted -- it has great potential but almost went to archives. I've been having a hard time getting into BotM threads (never did finish Bear, which is shameful because it's like 120 pages long) but I'd certainly participate in a mystery BotM. I enjoy mysteries but have a hard time getting out of the Agatha Christie Comfort Food Hole, so it'd be good to expand my horizons.
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Mar 16, 2019 23:51
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Flesnolk posted:Then explain the term literary fiction and how it is always contrasted with genre It's a term about content, not quality. "Genre" designates a story as having specific kinds of content, and "literary fiction" is used as a catch-all for stories that don't have that kind of content -- usually, by exclusion, stories without speculative/fantastic elements and without certain kinds of codified plots or settings associated with specific genres. (This can get mushy -- I've seen crime fiction considered "mystery," "thriller," or "literary" a bit arbitrarily.) It's true that, in literature criticism, "genre" and "literary" have been conflated with quality, but it's not really what the terms are intended to or should mean. This thread aside, there's plenty of good to great genre fiction, and plenty of mediocre to godawful literary fiction. (For more on that, I recommend B. R. Myers's A Reader's Manifesto, which is long-form takedowns of several popular authors of literary fiction. I imagine some of his takes would spark fights on these forums, which is fair enough, but at bare minimum I think he's right on the money about Paul Auster.) Antivehicular fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Mar 17, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 23:57
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FactsAreUseless posted:Literature doesn't have to be thematic - I'd suggest looking at an author like Daniel Orozco whose stories focus on experience, not theme. Literature needs to have good prose, but otherwise there's a wide range of things it can do. This is off-topic, but I'll recommend Daniel Orozco's short story collection Orientation at every opportunity, so... yeah. If you like short stories at all, go read Orientation.
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Mar 17, 2019 04:28
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Xotl posted:Since his most famous creation by far is Travis McGee, you'd also be good to start with the first one in that series, The Deep Blue Good-by. I plan to tackle that one later if I feel the interest is there. I'd be interested! That was a good post and I'd like to read more. That first passage about the executions was impressive -- pulpy, sure, but effective and clearly written with full authorial control.
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Mar 17, 2019 05:02
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:i do kind of wish people could get over this, like, 'i had one bad teacher so i wrote off a whole field' angst. but as a teacher, i can understand why the grudge seems to persist. I think it's something that a lot of people can hold grudges about, but it's always kind of odd/sad to me that literature (and possibly the arts in general?) is the one where people take this "one bad teacher" grudge to mean the entire endeavor is stupid and worthless. I had a pretty lovely physics teacher in high school and never really pursued the field afterwards, but that didn't turn me into a geocentrist.
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Mar 17, 2019 11:09
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Wait, so Sanderson is writing a racism analogy where sufficient virtue can actually turn you into the privileged class? holy hell
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Mar 18, 2019 06:48
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I'm cis and those examples sound absolutely transphobic, or at least in wretched taste.
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Mar 19, 2019 21:51
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"seen as" transphobic Just keep fuckin' that chicken, buddy
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Mar 19, 2019 22:08
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Yeah, Lolita is a work I struggle with in this regard; I feel like it's obvious even within the work that Humbert is full of poo poo and a vile child rapist, particularly when he himself has this revelation at the end, and I could go off on a long rant about how alternate readings are largely a product of our culture's grotesque willingness to permit "educated/artistic" middle-aged men to sexualize and abuse adolescents, but other readings are so common that I don't feel comfortable yelling YOU'RE WRONG AND PROBABLY A SHITHEAD at people about them. Well, I am comfortable with that, but I probably shouldn't be. Like I said, struggles.
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Mar 19, 2019 22:32
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Thranguy posted:I mean, to this reader the entire point of Pierre Menard is the absurdity of his project, so it probably makes the opposite point. The absurdity and Quixotic nature of Menard's task is a big part of the point, but I would argue that reading that as "Menard is a fool" is as shallow a reading as "Don Quixote is just a big dumbo." The point of the story is to consider Menard's efforts both as an absurd task and as a legitimate artistic undertaking worth real consideration.
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Mar 19, 2019 23:16
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Solitair posted:gently caress it, why not? I just finished the book and I'm in no mood to defend or play devil's advocate for it right now. I appreciate you sharing this passage and don't want to force you into defending it, but this really isn't very good either, although it's way better than strike-through boob ogling. The voice isn't awful, but the entire passage just feels expository; this isn't developing a character, it's developing a thesis about Shakespeare, and the character feels mostly like a plausible mouthpiece for it. (I don't know enough about how Shakespeare was viewed by his contemporaries to know if this Irish-bigotry theorizing was a contemporary idea, but it just feels very dry -- like I said, more of a pre-assembled thesis than a character's sincerely-held opinions. I also don't know if the veneration of Marlowe and disdain for Hamlet is period-accurate or not, but I know it feels like it's just parroting the talking points of any number of modern "anti-establishment" college snots.) It doesn't help that the other character in the scene has so little of his own to say on the topic that he comes off as a Socratic-dialectic-style foil, just there to go "huh, yeah?" as the protagonist talks. If he actually offered any opposition or difference in opinion for the protagonist to answer, this passage would probably come off much more like real dialogue.
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Mar 20, 2019 09:28
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my bony fealty posted:Sanderson seems very much the successor to Dragonlance. I have not read those books in a long time but recall religion being treated in a similar way. Well, it's a very D&D-oid way of treating divine power in general: deities as power sources, who grant magic and can revoke it if you don't fit their expectations for behavior (in practice, generally when the Dungeon Master thinks you're being a dick), and generally also as discrete anthropomorphic entities who act directly within the setting, go to the world to screw around, fight wars, get stabbed, etc. It's all antithetical to religion as an act of faith or mystery. I'm sure clever authors can write (and have written) fantasy gods like this in a way that's interesting and human, but Sanderson pretty obviously doesn't have the time or inclination to do so.
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Apr 8, 2019 06:43
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Seamless as oil, silent as maggots
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Apr 10, 2019 22:07
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Strom Cuzewon posted:mo Syzlak  ?
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Apr 29, 2019 01:51
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Yeah, I feel kind of the same about Wolfe; people I like and respect dig him, but every quoted passage I see just doesn't click at all. It probably doesn't help that the Book of the New Sun gets recommended constantly and every quote from that book I've ever seen makes me not want to spend hundreds of pages in the narrator's head.
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May 6, 2019 23:05
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:His prose style is kinda ehh but he's really, really, really good with unreliable narrator tricks. He's more an *interesting* writer than a *good* writer That's fair enough, although it reinforces the feeling I have that this poo poo feels like homework. The amount of work everyone seems to expect people to put in to comprehend BotNS, all for the "pleasure" of spending untold hours reading an unreliable dullard narrator who seems to treat women like weird sexy bugs... yeah, sorry, not sold.
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May 6, 2019 23:51
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The only Greg Bear I've ever read was Blood Music, which was a pretty serious trip for my twelve-year-old self. I have no idea how it holds up, and God knows the premise makes precious little sense if you know anything about biology, but the loving ending, goddamn!
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Jun 2, 2019 23:54
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Tree Bucket posted:My favourite part of Christie mysteries are how all the characters, when quizzed by the detective, can say things like "I heard a loud bang at 5:47, and saw a dark figure running away at 6:13." So precise!! I like Christie as light reading in general, but it can be argued a major attraction of the novels these days is historical, looking at Christie's version of the "modern" British culture of her time. There are other 20th-century mystery novel series written in then-contemporary settings that have the same appeal; IIRC, someone in the mystery novel thread read the Nero Wolfe novels in original chronological order and commented that they're sort of a rolling snapshot of American life from the '30's to the '70's, albeit through the eyes of characters who never age.
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Jun 4, 2019 09:55
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Pretty sure every genre has plenty of people self-publishing; desire to "be an author"/inability to recognize middling talent is fairly universal. If there's anything unique about the speculative genres in this regard, I think it's that the people who would much rather be making TV/movies in those genres are more likely to "settle for" writing, because the barrier to entry for SF/fantasy audiovisuals is much more obvious. Someone who wants to make films with lit-fic themes can just make probably-terrible low-budget films, but someone who wants to do a vast fantasy saga or galactic-scale milSF really only has books (or webcomics, I guess?) available as production options. Antivehicular fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Jun 17, 2019 |
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Jun 17, 2019 02:33
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my bony fealty posted:It seems certainly true of many genre authors that they would rather have their made up worlds conveyed in a visual medium. In the age of Marvel and Star Wars movies every few months especially. But then you've got folks like Sanderson who very much leverage the written word in a way that wouldn't work on-screen - no one would want to see a fantasy movie where the action stops every 5 minutes to worldbuild some boring rear end detail, or to explain some dumb magic system rule. But for whatever reason people seem to love reading it. Maybe Sanderson and readers would rather his 800 page tomes be 20 hour movies, I dunno, but I don't think so. Djeser posted:Also writers can enjoy writing even if their output is kind of crummy on a prose level. It doesn't have to be a case of wanting to make a movie and being unable to, they can just be enthusiastic but not very good at engaging people on the sentence level. Oh, sure, both of these are good points. Bad writing can come from a lot of different places and problems, and of course a lot of it is just "not good at writing"; my point was just that, if you look at bad writers by genre, most of the ones whose issues are "would rather be creating TV/movies" are going to be in SF or fantasy vs. litfic or romance or what have you. I'm not sure that issue is even the plurality of bad SF/fantasy writers, though; I kind of assume "really wants to worldbuild/write an encyclopedia, sees character and narrative as unpleasant necessity at best" people are at least as common, and they're all beaten by "just not any good at this."
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Jun 17, 2019 10:12
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:Am I to understand that unpasteurized breast milk would age more gracefully? MORE WORDS MAKE FUNNY ANALOGY FUNNIER!! it is law
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Jun 30, 2019 00:29
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I suppose there's an argument to be made that contemporary SF/F culture is (at least a little?) better at not celebrating and defending its sex-pest authors and their grody work, compared to the days of Asimov, Heinlein, MZB, et al., but... this doesn't really say much about the quality of the work.
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Jun 30, 2019 02:09
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"Uplifted spiders have complicated gender politics because the females still kill and eat the males after sex" is okay worldbuilding, albeit suggestive of a lot of questions. "This manifests as dumb obvious reskinning of the pay gap and other real-world feminist issues" is lazy as gently caress.
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Jul 5, 2019 22:51
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Would people be interested in my reading and reviewing lovely horror novels in this thread? It's the lowest-hanging fruit, and few to none of these things have been acclaimed (or, I suspect, read) by anyone, but I keep buying these terrible-looking, mostly self-published things at Half-Price and maybe they'll be worth a laugh.
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Aug 5, 2019 08:02
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goddammit, thread, I'm going to start reading a novel about ghouls It won the World Fantasy Award and looks like dogshit More later
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Aug 7, 2019 00:28
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Antivehicular posted:goddammit, thread, I'm going to start reading a novel about ghouls OKAY SO. Brief trip report on this, Brian McNaughton's Throne of Bones, which turned out to be a collection of short stories and central novella instead of a novel: I read several stories from this and I think it falls into the valley of "too bad for me to want to read more, not bad enough or bad in the right ways for full mocking." The ways it's bad are mostly the way that a lot of classic weird tales are bad: overwrought prose that often takes for-loving-ever to get anywhere, fairly typical pulp-fantasy worldbuilding about decadent crumbling cities with elaborate backstories, completely terrible naming that often reserves its biggest jokes for the sexual-object characters (female characters named "Vulnaveila Vogg" and "Queen Cunymphilia," a gay courtesan named "Syssylys"), and in general a lot of sexual "humor" and "shocking" material that might have actually been dark and shocking in 1989 but mostly just comes off as ugly, often mean-spirited juvenilia today. (The above-mentioned Syssylys is murdered by a necromancer with a poisoned dildo, then revived as a zombie fixated on staring at himself in a mirror and muttering how boring everything is. This... isn't actually funny.) Some of the stories aren't bad, but there's a grimy, unpleasant feeling about the sexual elements in particular that makes me just not want to loving read this poo poo anymore. So I won't! THE END, NO MORAL
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Aug 7, 2019 03:00
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Sham bam bamina! posted:We're just not going to talk about what this thing looks like, I guess? Oh, good catch -- yeah, it's a gaudy-rear end book. The cover design honestly made me assume it was a vanity-press thing, although the actual publisher seems to be a teeny horror-zine publisher from the mid-1990s, so not exactly a haven of sophisticated graphic design either way. A human heart posted:I mean that book is obviously stupid trash, why would you bother reading it to confirm? To provide dumb amusement for a dumb thread? Antivehicular fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Aug 7, 2019 |
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Aug 7, 2019 06:11
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Djeser posted:
I'm legitimately interested in your take on Death Comes As The End, because as someone who's read a lot of Christie but has only limited knowledge of Egyptian history, I find the dynamic kind of interesting. The characters and setup of that book are very stock Christie (the aging patriarch making Very Bad Decisions, the increasingly-resentful diligent but unfavored son, the reckless favored son, women in various complicated and marginalized positions), and obviously that's not great art, but it seems like making the characters so much like her modern British ones means she avoids a lot of exoticization and actually treats ancient Egypt as a cosmopolitan human civilization instead of Slaves 'n' Crocodiles Mystery Land. It's sort of a better book for being a more predictable book, if that makes any sense.
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Aug 10, 2019 04:35
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I was about to make a joke about "finally, fiction with errata," but I once ordered a dreadful self-published novel directly from the author, and it came with a little home-printed insert with his new revision of the first chapter, so nothing new under the sun, I guess
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Aug 15, 2019 09:19
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The samples of those passages posted hear honestly read like they're intended to be horrific, so I don't think this is a thinly-veiled authorial fetish thing. The impression I'm getting is that this is doing the "fantasy novel that establishes its dark and serious tone via a lot of sexual violence" convention about as well as it can be done, with obvious authorial skill, but that convention is just so goddamn tiresome. I can't imagine getting through a full novel of this poo poo, let alone a series. (Also the "real-world mythological monsters, except now they do their thing by raping!" stuff sounds dire.)
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Sep 9, 2019 05:56
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Honestly I really actually wanna know what trashy romance fans or lovely detective novel fans or crappy western fans like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books is an excellent romance-novel review blog -- fairly inside baseball, but you can probably catch on quickly enough.
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Oct 15, 2019 05:51
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I read that book as a kid, and the only thing I remember about it is that one of the female characters, who had the most powerful not-D&D PC, is raped into catatonia by bandits soon after they arrive and never recovers. Maybe she does in a later book, but I didn't keep reading, because why would I?
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Oct 30, 2019 21:06
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my bony fealty posted:male fantasy author: hmm, this woman in my story needs to experience adversity. better make it rape. "Amusingly," this is the second thread where I've posted about these novels, and both times I was immediately corrected about the timing of the incident but not the actual content, as if the clarification that it happens later in the novel than I remember possibly matters
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Oct 31, 2019 03:48
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:One moment Nynaeve was just standing there, with just time to gape at the tall man sweeping toward her; the next her shoes were dangling a foot off the ground and she was being quite thoroughly kissed. At first she kicked his shins and hammered him with her fists and made sounds of frantic, furious protest, but her kicks slowed and stopped, and then she was holding on to his shoulders and not protesting at all. THANKS, I HATE IT
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Nov 19, 2019 06:20
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Xotl posted:Also, "the act of making men and women equal is literally only achieved by the power of Satan" is out there because they were equal already: they both had separate sources but pretty much the same capability. It's going after what they think is a new power source that destroys this equality. This is a pretty common sexist trope, though: "women have their sphere of influence (the home), men have theirs (everything else), so they're already equal, and women wanting anything more will cause chaos and destruction." It could only be more on the nose if it were about the women stealing the men's magical power and the rise of uppity women!! who can wield Masculine Blastology or whatever.
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Nov 19, 2019 21:56
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Xotl posted:I dunno, I thought it was pretty clear: the books all start with that "The Wheel turns and ages come and go" monologue. The whole point is that these are all reincarnations of reincarnations and everything loops around and the same general people do the same general thing in the same great battle against evil before they all become myth and then are forgotten as the next batch comes about after the next apocalypse. It's not particularly original, but it's hardly incoherent. There will always be an Arthur, and he will always fail, and the Dark One will always come back, and the Creator is apparently a lazy idiot who likes suffering. Right, but why does that matter? How does it make the story any different than it'd be if this were all new and fresh, aside from increasing the fatalism and tedium of it all (since we know how this goes and that nothing really changes)? This is cliche, clumsy set dressing that sounds like it doesn't add up to anything.
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Nov 19, 2019 23:43
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fauna posted:i defeated robert jordan in a wizard battle Did you overwhelm him with your separate but totes equal woman magic, by which I mean your junk
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Nov 20, 2019 03:01
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