The Genres Ablaze: Critical Looks at Sci-fi and Fantasy

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Genres Ablaze: Critical Looks at Sci-fi and Fantasy

Metis of the Chat Thread: Aug 1, 2014

nankeen posted:

my dog says the vacuum cleaner is a dragon

When is your dog's debut novel coming out?

# ¿ May 20, 2019 09:34

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 05:58

Metis of the Chat Thread: Aug 1, 2014

Speaking of rape in fantasy novels, has anyone read the latest Philip Pullman book in the new His Dark Materials trilogy?

# ¿ Nov 1, 2019 06:22

Metis of the Chat Thread: Aug 1, 2014

ok, I've done some research (went on goodreads and searched "horse" in the reviews) and here's what I've found:

1 star review posted:

This is something that actually happens in this book. Kihrin and Janel are having a conversation about something completely different, and Janel just completely out of nowhere starts explaining what transgender means to him. Completely unprovoked, she steps completely away from the story, and starts lecturing the readers about what it means to be transgender. Using, of all the stupid things in this world, horse analogies.
...
For the love of god, can you stop talking about horses for two goddamn sentences? Please?

(that person went on to rant about the Last Jedi for some godforsaken reason)

Not Rated posted:

The Ruin of Kings was one of the best books of the years. But this sequel was so disappointing. I stopped at page 80, primarily because of the incessant horse discussions/parallels and relegation of Kihrin to a minor character listening to someone else's story.

4 star review posted:

The horsey metaphors/references grated on me a bit, though

I am still unenlightened about what exactly the horse gender roles are.

edit: hang on, I think I've found something

quote:

Another Aspect of All the Name of Things I loved and found fascinating is how Jorat see gender. The see themselves as Stallions and mares, and gender doesnt impact, as it depends on the person. Stallions protect and mare look after. Also that they can change gender after serving Galava for a year. They are rewarded is the ability to chose the gender than matches thier soul.

A new egalitarian gender binary, where one is assigned the responsibilities and powers of leadership, and the other submits, nurtures and 'looks after'. But people choose these roles! Truly revolutionary!

Metis of the Chat Thread fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Dec 7, 2019

# ¿ Dec 7, 2019 04:15

Metis of the Chat Thread: Aug 1, 2014

It's still weirdly essentialist. A person's genitalia are still explicitly either female or male in this concept of gender.

Additionally, using "trap" in the context of sex is dangerous territory to tread.

Do you have a hard copy of this or an ebook? Because I'd like a count of the number of times 'horse,' 'stallion,' 'mare,' and so on are used.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2019 09:08

Metis of the Chat Thread: Aug 1, 2014

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Hard copy, and no I'm not that insane.

lol yeah no I wouldn't ask that of you

Antivehicular posted:

Wow. To be honest, "leaders are men and nurturers are women" feels as uncomfortably gender essentialist to me as "penis-havers are men and vagina-havers are women" -- it's conflating gender identity with stereotypical gender role, instead of with reproductive phenotype, and similarly ignores that there's a world of variation in between the two poles presented -- but it's also just conveyed in the clumsiest loving way possible. The politics are lovely but the writing is shittier.

it reminds me of one of those ya dystopian books that came out in the wake of Hunger Games that had some alternate universe concept of black people oppressing white people, except the book still wrote all the black characters with awful racist stereotypes about black people being animalistic and wild. cannot remember what it was called, but white people were "pearls" and black people were "coals"

# ¿ Dec 23, 2019 09:53

Metis of the Chat Thread: Aug 1, 2014

quote:

Let's talk about the dismal state of scifi/fantasy novels:

1) There are basically five kinds of scifi/fantasy novels:

a) teenagers with magical powers fighting vampires in Brooklyn;

b) teenagers surviving a post-nuclear wasteland;

c) a moody boy/girl growing to become warrior/magician/king;

d) everyone fighting World War II again, in outer space; and

e) "Hard" scifi, with 200 pages of description of how to drive a moon buggy.

For the most part, there are only five kinds of scifi, because people only can write what they've already read. So what you end up reading are bad imitations of bad imitations of bad imitations, and so on.

Scifi writers think that for main characters to be "attractive", they have to be polite, virtuous, and always feel guilty for their actions. As a result, protagonists tend to be boring virtue whores.

Scifi writers think "world building" means to write ten pages about the history of an Inn or a barn, or to spend pages talking about where an officer's boots were made or where the tea he was drinking was harvested.

Scifi writers think that the more action, the better, and so spend pages and pages describing battles in words, which is about as compelling as listening to a football game on the radio.

Scifi writers think "character development" means that the character survives to the end of the story.

Scifi writers write dialogue without any thought as to what they've written is compelling, meaningful, entertaining, or dramatic. Dialogue can be an art form, like Game of Thrones, but for most scifi writers it's little more than the equivalent of overhearing a random phone conversation about small-talk to make the story somehow feel "real."

Scifi writers give books meaningless one or two word titles like "Hard Impact" or "Final Conflict" to create a feeling rather than explain what their book is about; and their book covers are literally dark and filled with random explosions, or populated with tiny stick figures in shadow that look like mannequins; and their book descriptions are equally unavailing, most of which could be written from a toolbox of 30 buzz words.

Scifi writers think that women and minority characters can't have flaws or be villains, which means all of them must be extremely perfect and boring.

Scifi writers also like to chop up books into smaller books with NUMBERS in their titles, to milk every last dollar out of your teats.

Scifi writers think it highly inappropriate to write love scenes; why have a scene where two characters express emotions towards each other, when you could simply say "They kissed and turned the lights off" and skip to the next chapter, as "respectable" writers do?

And then there is me.

My books break ALL the rules. They are not all about the same subject and in fact are usually about very different topics. They are mostly dialogue, very long, and very fast paced and very easy reads. My characters are human and sometime sleep with each other which is a problem for some people. They are also not politically correct which is a problem for even more people. I have a lot of five star reviews and one star reviews, but the one star reviews are the most interesting. Read them and see how readers not simply dislike my books, but actually get enraged by them. For me, that's a victory. If I can move someone emotionally enough to get them angry, I'm doing more than 99% of all other books.

I was partially inspired by Game of Thrones to write as I do now, and I have to think that if my writing inspires even one person, if I nudge even one writer away from the mediocrity of "acceptable" scifi and fantasy novels, it will all be worth it.

My next books in 2020 will be "When Villains Win" and "Journey to the World of Dreams"

# ¿ Feb 11, 2020 08:37

Metis of the Chat Thread: Aug 1, 2014

Milkfred E. Moore posted:

My guess for this one is that someone at MacMillan went 'hey, this Lindsay Ellis girl has written a novel, and she has x amount of followers, if even y% of them purchase it, we can turn a profit with very little work.' Giving it a solid line edit, much less a developmental edit, would escalate their costs.

Yeah that's almost 100% it. I'm glad to see your thoughts on it, I was curious and read the amazon preview but found it pretty dull. Good to know that first impression was right.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2020 04:43

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 05:58

Metis of the Chat Thread: Aug 1, 2014

I keep confusing Rage of Dragons with the Dragon Republic, another recent, popular fantasy book that I assume is very bad. Did someone in this thread review the Poppy War, or am I misremembering? I have many issues with that book that I find really hard to put into words. If no one has, I might take a second look at it, even though that would mean rereading it.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2020 13:13

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Genres Ablaze: Critical Looks at Sci-fi and Fantasy