Flesnolk posted:

You can’t blame literally everything on “capitalism exists”.

Kefahuchi_son!!! posted:

So besides Roland Barthes what works should someone with no formal training in literature be looking at in order to develop some understanding about literature criticism?

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Oh yeah I find his analyses fascinating but unfortunatit's all framed in a doomed and foolish endeavor to materialize the ethereal

Sampatrick posted:

The first book is like notoriously worse than every other book in the series fwiw

The Ninth Layer posted:

The first book was originally a film script that was adapted into a novel and was written about ten years before the rest of the series.

Sampatrick posted:

Getting mad about capitalized nouns is honestly the dumbest poo poo. There's some reasonable things to critique, like the prose being poo poo, but getting mad about pronouns is just dumb.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

I may have walked into a death of the author fight accidentally in another forum and oh no I forget that there are people who still reject it

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

is always a true statement regardless of the content of the blank

Mel Mudkiper posted:

for?

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

The paw patrol is about the evils of private enterprise, yet the author complains the team is led by a police (government) dog.

Later the author complains that no one is a heroic government employee.

I don't even know.

Ccs posted:

If we’re talking economics of an industry it should be obvious why you can’t rely on a few geniuses producing the only works people want to buy. There’d be no bookstores or other outlets for distribution because the product would be so rare.

A human heart posted:

RA Lafferty and Stanislaw Lem are cool.

pseudanonymous posted:

Some of it is better. The hard sci-fi is more scientific, some of it written by actual scientists/ex scientists now for example. I think it's a bit less preachy too, a lot of older sci-fi I remember these scenes where characters basically philosophize at each other in a way that didn't do too much to further the plot or characters.

Thranguy posted:

Would Moby Dick still have been a great work of Melville had gotten fundamental aspects of the whaling experience dead wrong?

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

my bony fealty posted:

It's a TV show but

Kchama posted:

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

ENOUGH.

If I see more botl chat I lock this. This is not the jihad to free Botl thread, this is for criticism of fantasy and sci fi.

derp posted:

“I have known her longer, my smile said. True, you have been inside the circle of her arms, tasted her mouth, felt the warmth of her, and that is something I have never had. But there is a part of her that is only for me. You cannot touch it, no matter how hard you might try. And after she has left you I will still be here, making her laugh. My light shining in her. I will still be here long after she has forgotten your name.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

The Vosgian Beast posted:

I think the culture of the forums in general is overly prickly and terse but man, I hang out in other places and then I come back here and it's like woah

Apparatchik Magnet posted:

This wrong and backwards. Rand is the real deal, the rest are twisted legends vaguely based on him, confused with the names and deeds of his companions, and then subjected to the motivated artistic gloss of those in our era who are currently interpreting them.

Rand’s big, it’s the legends that got small.

Take the plunge! Okay! posted:

Genre books also tend to be idea poor, as in, the author has several ideas that they stretch out over hundreds of pages. That makes it even funnier because you observe the worthless little man squirm to come up with a few unoriginal ideas and beam with pride for having done so instead of, I don’t know, learning how to write?
If you take a good genre author like Lem, you will see he can produce a lot more ideas than the norm. I already wrote about Lem’s Fiasco in this thread as an example of this - he comes up with hundreds of original speculative ideas lesser authors would kill to be able to claim as their own, and dismisses them in the same paragraph as meaningless musings of people trying to avoid the inescapable reality of the universe’s lack of meaning. Lem, of course, is not the only good genre authors, but I wouldn’t say there were more than a handful, and I’ve read a lot of genre fiction.

AFancyQuestionMark posted:

WTF, Worm doesn't treat Nazi's as sympathetic and black people as subhuman at all. imo, someone who willingly reads tens of millions of words they consider to be absolute trash isn't really someone i would trust to provide a coherent opinion of the work or anything else really

chernobyl kinsman posted:

please do not try to own fantasy lit by even ironically comparing the holy gral and excalbur to "phat loot", we are not TVTropers


im earnestly begging you not to do this

PeterWeller posted:

Listen man, I wrote a MA thesis on Harry Potter,

PeterWeller posted:

I wrote that thesis at a conservative Catholic university where The Canon is still held dear, and an undergrad is lucky if they get to read something written in the last hundred years.

PeterWeller posted:

I wasn't suggesting it was subversive, just pointing out that I wrote it at a school that wasn't basing any of its English curriculum on market forces.

Gravitas Shortfall posted:

weird to hear "in-depth analysis of genre fiction is bad" in this, the in-depth analysis of genre fiction thread

quote:

coerced coupling with

quote:

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

quote:

loving was how babies were made

quote:

The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too

Wallet posted:

You know this is speculative fiction, right? You seem to think that the only way for an author to explore something is to precisely reproduce it. Like The Left Hand of Darkness can't be saying anything meaningful about gender because them weird aliens can get pregnant and get other people pregnant. What a bunch of nonsense!

Wallet posted:

You have to look past the oily sheen of genre if you want to actually engage with it.

Wallet posted:

Essun's journey, particularly with The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate, I read as a cogent reimagining of North American antebellum† slave narratives‡, engaging with the body of postmodern neo-slave narratives (some people call them liberatory narratives) from within the context of speculative fiction¶. The sex scenes after Essun has initially escaped bondage might seem like some weird wank fantasy aside (it involves some MMF threesomes) but Essun reclaiming her sexuality is an important part of her (at least attempting) to deal with her trauma, and I would argue that it's pretty salient to what the novels are doing. The idea that Essun has sexual agency at all is important, even while she's still suffering trauma§, in contrast to women like Harriet Jacobs who had to attempt to communicate that they had been sexually assaulted while societal standards precluded them from directly mentioning sex.

nankeen posted:

nowadays this thread is like an army that's lost its joan of arc

Disco Pope posted:

I’m finding the sci-fi/speculative fiction distinction discussion interesting and I’m a little surprised that the consensus seems to be that they’re basically synonymous.

I would say that if I’m discussing books with people, and if they’ve even heard of the term, I’ll get more recommendations along the Atwood/Ballard/Vonnegut/Ling Ma route than the Tolkien, Asimov, Gibson kind of route.

I typically thought about it as scientific vs philosophical or social speculation, but that doesn’t feel like a satisfying distinction.

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

Name one thing I can't blame on capitalism.

Runcible Cat posted:

Pat Murphy's There and Back Again is The Hobbit, but rewritten as SF; the protagonist lives in a hollowed-out asteroid before going on a treasure hunt with a gang of clones and a dodgy cyborg adventurer. That's a terrible definition of fantasy.