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Despite the...interesting...revelations about a poster from the last thread, there are plenty more elf and spaceship books to be subjected to a critical lens. We never did finish that review of The Way of Kings, for instance. In an effort to continue the literary discussions - and maybe find some elf and spaceship books with some actual literary value that don't make us sad - I'm opening up a new thread so we can continue mocking "terrible, nonconsensual things" and other literary clunkers. I'm gonna lay down some ground rules. Don't get mad about criticism This is a literature forum, discussion of literature is to be expected. We're going to be talking about prose and themes, not "worldbuilding", "magic systems", or any of the arbitrary criteria fantasy and sci-fi has created to excuse being in its own separate section of the bookstore. If you think we've treated a book unfairly, feel free to come in and point out some good prose - just don't expect us to take you seriously if you explain that the prose and characterization is bad but the worldbuilding is top notch. Don't touch the poop The last thread devolved into people invading the Brandon Sanderson thread to post literary masterpieces like "penis". Just don't. Yea, it's funny most of the discussion in that thread is surface level, or that Brandon Sanderson is supposedly writing this great saga about divinity while removing all mystery and wonder from any depiction of gods, but we really don't need to be in there. Take chats about users and banning to QCS You know why. Have fun! Somebody fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 15, 2019 02:35
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Awww. Would people prefer a Dune review or an essay on divinity in Sanderson?
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Mar 15, 2019 23:36
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The Gardenator posted:I liked the last thread for the most part. Can this thread have NWS images tagged properly, or do I have to keep certain users on ignore? How do I enforce this? It's a good idea and I approve.
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Mar 16, 2019 00:22
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:
The problem you run into with fantasy is that you run into a lot of unrelatable silliness.
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Mar 17, 2019 04:48
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Xotl posted:Thanks, glad you liked it. Keep posting! It's interesting stuff and I'm glad to see more people posting! I have a different book to review tomorrow as I need to drag Way of Kings out of my flooded house.
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Mar 17, 2019 05:09
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The Priory of the Orange Tree: Christian Allusions in the Hands of Gay Feminism The Priory of the Orange Tree is a recent novel by Samantha Shannon reinventing the medieval legend of St George and the Dragon from a feminist perspective. It takes place in an Elizabethan England analogue attempting to prepare for the awakening of "The Nameless One", an evil dragon of fire sealed away for a thousand years. Sound familiar? The quote that literally opens this book posted:And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his The problem the book runs into is that it seemingly wants to talk about Christianity, medieval chivalry, and its relationship to women without involving anything that resembles Christianity at all. Here, I'll spoil a big reveal. Shannon posted:"I had not seen Galian [the St George stand in] for many years. But when he heard of the plague and the Nameless One wreaking terror in Lasia, he sought me out again, pleading for my help. His dream, you see, was to unite the warring kings and princelings of Inys under one crown, and to rule a country according to the Six Virtues of Knighthood. To do that, he had to earn their respect with a great deed. He wanted to slay the Nameless One, and to do that, he would need my magic. Like a fool, I gave it him, for by this time I loved him not as a mother. I loved him as companions do. In return, he swore he would be mine alone. This version of the St George legend is that St George wanted power for himself, so he got his adoptive witch mother to give him a magic sword and went to fight Satan to rescue a princess. Instead of a noble knight, he was a cowardly poltroon who went down like a chump. The princess grabbed the sword, stabbed Satan, found the Biblical forbidden fruit and ate of it while fleeing into the desert. This turned her into a wizard and she and another queen used their wizard powers to cast Satan into the Abyss for a thousand years. Meanwhile Galian the Deceiver (St George) went back to Inys (England) and lied about how the dragon would be sealed while his family sat the throne. He then founded the "virtudom" religion founded on the six chivalric virtues...and there my confusion began. The medieval St George legend has the saint bring the (muzzled) dragon into the town and offer to kill it if the townsfolk convert. This makes sense. What doesn't make sense is these virtues being venerated outside a Christian context, because Jesus was incredibly important to a medieval knight. The body of Christian thought that went into tales like the Quest for the Grail is replaced with a shallow parody where the Deceiver and 6 knights (one for each virtue) welcome believers into heaven and proclaim themselves the only true faith, but does not attempt to grapple with the questions Christianity does. The religion has the trappings of Christianity such as "the sign of the sword" and calling itself Virtudom instead of Christendom, but it fails to be a meaningful critique of medieval culture and just comes off like this: /Update%2001/33-prologue47.jpg) The waters are further muddied by the Pope/Monarch family descended from the Deceiver all being women, raising the question of whether this intended to be a masculine power structure opposed by the True Faith of the Mother Goddess - the Witch Princess - or just another authority in a world run by women. At least one of the Six Knights is a woman I suspect there is a statement about how Christianity spread by appropriating pagan myths - as seen by the princesses being overwritten by the Deceiver - and is historically associated with control. Ignoring the multitude of pagan faiths used to control empires (Pharoah? What are you doing here?), the characters all seem fine using virtudom as a means of control to mobilize armies against Satan. Ultimately the book's themes are undermined by Shannon's desire to "worldbuild" out of a mixture of history and legend. The climactic battle echoes Sir Francis Drake defeating the Spanish armada, with the fleets of Elizabethan England, ancient China, shogunate Japan, and a bunch of friendly Asian dragons facing the Spanish fleet led by Satan, his dragons, and the "Draconic Army" made of various medieval monsters from when the dragons banged animals. This turns a conflict historically between Catholics and Protestants into a spiritual battle between the leader of the Catholic Church and literal Satan, who rather than deceiving the nations gets about 3 lines before a bunch of superpowered women stab him to death. All this said, I can't write the book off entirely. The dialogue is actually written in period-appropriate language and the word choices aren't anachronistic - something that sets the book miles above most contemporary fantasy. That said, the prose is merely competent, not great. Here's her description of The Nameless One, a legendary, Satanic evil: Shannon posted:She had heard stories of the beast. Every child had grown up hearing about the nightmare that had crawled out of the mountain to ravage the world. She had seen images of him, richly painted in gold-leaf and red lacquer, with blots of soot-ink where eyes ought to be. It's not nearly as awful as much of the dreck in these threads, but it's not great. Lacustrine treasure ships do not exist. I have no idea how big they are. I assume they are Chinese junks? It also falls into the trap of having no emotion. This is the ancient serpent sealed away for 1000 years, the beast whose rising heralds the end of days and you just dispassionately describe his appearance? Yeesh. I was going to do a bit on the absurdity of gay marriage being legal in a world run by feudalism that values the continuation of a pure bloodline, but it's really just a microcosm of how the novel tries to blend ancient and modern and results in a whole plausible by neither.
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Mar 17, 2019 20:04
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Fine by me. I really think the darkeyes/light eyes stuff is more of a racism deal, just with eyes instead of skin. I'll have more to say once you get to a certain part.
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Mar 17, 2019 23:19
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Karia posted:Not sure what you're referring to, but please share once we get there! I see a classism theme based on how much he plays up the "games of nobles with peasants caught in the middle" aspect for the war. The "go to war to gain renown so you can marry the noble girl" thing also strikes me as more of a class thing. But there's a lot I don't remember about this book. I saw it more as racial due to the hereditary biological trait of eye color, but your case for classism is fairly strong too. It's weird because I remember you can get promoted to Lighteyes so maybe I'm just wrong.
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Mar 18, 2019 04:26
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Karia posted:Supposedly darkeyes can actually become lighteyes if they win great feats in battle. But it hasn't happened in recent memory. Astonishingly, this hasn't happened to Kaladin according to the wiki. Since you broke out the wiki... on Kaladin swearing the first vow his eyes turn light. Its implied the lighteyes are the descendants of the Knights Radiant who have superpowers that are vaguely divine?
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Mar 18, 2019 05:25
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I had completely forgotten lighteyes wasn't hereditary from the Radiants.
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Mar 19, 2019 00:10
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I could still do that piece on how Sanderson religions don't actually provide answers and just hand out superpowers I guess.
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Apr 7, 2019 22:52
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Sanderson's Worldbuilding and the Great Lack of Answers Since ancient times people have turned to religion to answer important questions. How should we behave? What happens after death? What does existence mean? These are questions which get answered in tales of gods and miracles. Brandon Sanderson writes many tales of gods and miracles, yet none of the characters seek any answers from the gods. Divinity is solely important for handing out cool powers to whomever can meet the prerequisites. Disclaimer: I am missing most of my Sanderson books due to my housing situation, so this is mostly from memory. I will also sadly have to discuss the magic systems as these unfortunately pertain to our theme. Mistborn posted:"Tell me about another one, Saze," Kelsier said. "One with power." Some context is in order. The character speaking is Sazed, a scholar of religion trying to figure out what people believed before the evil Lord Ruler took over, declared himself God-king and pissed off all the protagonists. In any other novel this would be a search for meaning, but here it's an aside which almost reads as satire. It's completely absurd to end every sentence with "Praise the Ja", but we are told in the next paragraph that these people fought openly long after nations and armies were conquered for their right to praise the Ja. This is not helped by Sazed later claiming he believes in them all yet mix and matching prayers to suit the occasion. The other relationships between gods and men are part of "the Cosmere", and here's where things get obnoxious and tricky. There once was a god called Adonalsium. He got murdered and split into sixteen parts which can be stolen by mortals to make them gods. Now, looking at the wiki entry most of the info on Big A is from author signings so good luck getting any of this from the text. This ties back to the Mistborn trilogy because the characters are fighting over two of these shards, Ruin and Preservation - which grant identical powers but mess with your mind and blah blah blah blah. Now you might ask what role these shards play in the universe, I'll let the Brandon Sanderson wiki answer you. wiki posted:Adonalsium is a mysterious being or force in the cosmere from which all Investiture[magic powers] is derived. That's the first sentence of the Adonalsoum article, and generally it holds true throughout Mistborn. The powers the characters wield turn out to be from one of the two gods, they even eat Preservation's flesh for more power to oppose Ruin, and the ending of the trilogy is Sazed getting the power of both gods to reshape the planet. At no point so the characters grapple with the knowledge that gods are real. They're either power ups or the final boss. This also raises the question of a world where God is dead, yet this is never answered with respect to Adonalsium. It's a major issue in The Stormlight Archive and that's where we look next. The Way of Kings posted:"I wish I could do more," repeated the figure in gold. "You might be able to get him to choose a champion. He is bound by some rules. All of us are. A champion could work well for you, but it is not certain. And...without the Dawnshards...Well, I have done what I can. It is a terrible, terrible thing to leave you alone." This is the big plot twist after Dalinar has spent the entire book receiving visions to unite the land against the evil god Odium. This god, unlike Ruin and Preservation, has actual precepts to follow, but they only matter if you are receiving power. Kaladin, one of the protagonists, has an entire arc in Words of Radiance about losing power from violating the precepts, only to gain it back on saying the final line of the oath. There is a church of the Almighty, but it mostly exists to reinforce the weird racism analog and yell at atheists who can use the power of God. It is never presented as something worth believing in or even something characters would willingly follow. It's just there, sandwiched between pages on chasmfiends and other worldbuilding dreck. The worst part is that this could be an excellent premise if handled right. God is dead, and no one will judge you. What would this world look like? As it stands, put these books down and go read Cormack McCarthy's The Road instead. It's much better at examining this idea than this asasine power drivel. Postscript: Nerds and 'canon' A big problem with a lot of these fantasy franchises is the sheer amount of dumb bullshit you have to wade through outside the text. From JK Rowling's insistence that Dumbledore is gay (despite this being nowhere in the books) to Adonalsium's backstory being eagerly reported to the internet by people at book signings there is a bunch of important thematic information that cannot be derived from the books. Yet fans will insist that the authors' ramblings should be considered an integral part of the text in which they are not present, and it baffles me.
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Apr 8, 2019 02:19
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It's not big G God, it's the "honor" shard.
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Apr 8, 2019 02:45
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You can take Malazan if I don't get there first.
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Apr 8, 2019 16:14
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Pacho posted:I want to read that series, but here in latin america we only get genre books translated if there's a tv show or movie about them If you're talking about the Broken Earth, you're not missing much. It's an incredibly awkward attempt at anti racism that ends up just being a fantasy racist version of John Galt.
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Apr 8, 2019 23:44
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Is Broken Earth the one where the persecuted minority has the power to leech the energy out of everything around them with a thought? Because, yeah, bit of a metaphor collapse there. Yes. I dropped a review of it in the original thread.
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Apr 9, 2019 02:49
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Malazan has a ton of jerking it to various proper nouns and magic systems and prose that reminds me unpleasantly of Thomas Covenant. Much of it is dedicated to bluntly informing the reader How Intricate This Evil Plan is. gently caress, I'm gonna have to reread Deadhouse Gates for the thread aren't i?
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Apr 10, 2019 02:40
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The apostrophe Proper N'ouns are ridiculous to the point of self parody. Take this example from the dramatis personae of Deadhouse Gates: Icarium, a mixed-blood Jaghut wanderer Mappo, his Trell companion Iskaral Pust, a High Priest of Shadow Ryllandaras, the White Jackal, a D’ivers Messremb, a Soletaken Gryllen, a D’ivers Mogora, a D’ivers This is presented before any of the text of the story. Now, Soletaken and D'ivers are literally just shapeshifters but Erikson feels the need to slather on made up words with apostrophes. Yes, "divers" is old English for "many" (the shapeshifters being able to turn into a pack of wolves, for instance) but the apostrophe adds nothing. Half the "fun" of these books are figuring out what proper noun corresponds to what made up concept and keeping track of the piles of characters who are so numerous Erikson can't keep their genders straight. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
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Apr 10, 2019 20:11
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Soletaken is very much a culture neutral word like shapeshifter. The dark elf king from the moon and the human necromancers are both called Soletaken despite turning into a dragon and crows respectively. This isn't the Navajo skinwalkers where the skinwalkers are associated with cannibalism but the Japanese toads Ninjad are not.
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Apr 10, 2019 23:02
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chernobyl kinsman posted:gene wolfe has died and is now ablaze, in hell That is pretty bad taste.
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Apr 18, 2019 01:43
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Treffies posted:Yes gently caress. I'll have a review up this weekend.
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Apr 25, 2019 03:25
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I'm doing book two.
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Apr 26, 2019 21:33
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I'm about 30 percent of the way through (rereading) Deadhouse Gates, and it's bad, but not in a way that makes it entertaining to review. The best I can say it that it's banal and uninteresting as all the fantastical elements are described in dull modern prose.Erikson posted:“Hood’s breath, that’s a Soletaken!” The series attempts to retain the reader's interest by portraying a decaying empire facing rebellion and the schemes of gods, but it's entirely uninteresting and much of it is hidden under puzzle boxes with banal solutions. The word "warren" is used a lot in conjunction with mages, but it turns out to just be an alternate dimension where mages get power (much like Dungeons and Dragons). Thus "unveiling their warren" simply describes casting a spell, and that realization serves less to make the reader feel clever at figuring something out than to be annoyed with Erikson for wasting the reader's time on pointless genre masturbation. The fact that we are expected to distinguish the difference between the Elder Warren of Darkness, the Shadow Warren, and the Darkness Warren simply reinforces my desire to not read this book. Special attention goes to the naming scheme, where characters like Surly, Hood, and Shadowthrone coexist with T'lan I'mass with no self awareness whatsoever. While egregious, it is a symptom of a greater problem where Erikson refuses to use any kind of fantastical prose. This is how Erikson describes a scary demon. Erikson posted:The beast was a nightmare, close to nine feet tall, crouching on two thin hind limbs. A lone foreleg, long and multijointed, jutted down from its strangely bifurcated chest. From a hunched, angular shoulder blade, the demon’s sinuous neck rose to a flat, elongated head. Needle fangs ridged its jawline, which was swept back and naturally grinning like a dolphin’s. Head, neck and limbs were black, while its torso was a dun gray. A single, flat black eye regarded Kalam with appalling awareness. This is a biologist describing a specimen, not the horrific shadow monster in the service of a dark god we are meant to see it as. Similar banality abounds throughout the book - mortals can become gods, but this is simply presented as a power increase similar to ascending a throne. We know why - because this was something high level D&D characters could do, thus it is essential to the world of Malazan. More as patience permits.
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Apr 28, 2019 17:09
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Sampatrick posted:This isn't actually how magic works in D&D fwiw but it definitely is pretty boring. Depends on what sourcebook you're reading, but wizards are called out as tapping into the Elemental Plane of Fire for fireballs and so forth. This may have changed throughout the years. To your culture point, Emperor Kellenved starts as a guy with a fantasy name and then ascends to godhood under the name Shadowthrone. Empress Laseen used to be called Surly, unlike the other people in her assassin organization with names like "Cotillion" and "Kalam". It's not consistent at all.
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Apr 28, 2019 18:45
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Also Felisin.
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Apr 29, 2019 18:04
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pile of brown posted:Complaining that a character's nickname isn't linguistically consistent enough with character names from other nations and cultures is a pretty weak burn, even considering Burn has been sleeping for thousands of years The greater crime is that he's demonstrated he doesn't have to use the names of WoW NPCs, but does anyway.
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Apr 30, 2019 15:45
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If you wanna grab some quotes and defend Gene Wolfe go for it.
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May 6, 2019 04:06
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Guess I won't be writing that effort post on modern Donaldson.
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May 15, 2019 02:07
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Solitair posted:
Ish? I think his Great God's War is better than Covenant.
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May 15, 2019 13:22
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Yeah, Paw Patrol promotes fascism to toddlers, it’s hardly news 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.
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May 17, 2019 23:51
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The review has an entire section about how Chase is a symbol of state power and authority, then turns around and argues he's symbolic of PMCs.The review you claim I haven't read posted:Although Paw Patrol never shows any monetary transactions, it is not a huge leap to assume the team is paid for by the taxpayers of Adventure Bay. So a show without money is simultaneously about rapacious corporate abuse and the power of the state. Why is it invalid to see the dogs as government employees? The review spent the entire first section explaining that the police drone is evil because a Predator can kill people and spy on them for the government. I assume he similarly eschews watching the Food Network because the knives remind him of the 1,691 people in the US murdered by knives every year. The Thomas the Tank Engine one is both more plausible and more amusing, IMO.
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May 18, 2019 01:46
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Disillusionist posted:Alright thread, since the best part of the previous Bonfire were the reviews, I've decided to take a stab at one. I have a decent TBR pile of cheap ebooks I've logged on Kindle over the past few years and I'm sure some of them are awful. Pick one of the following and I'll read it and give my review: Do that one. Otherwise I can.
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Jun 3, 2019 01:46
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pseudanonymous posted:One thing about Dune and it's sequels that always struck me... I mean the prose is not great... but who reads fantasy... for prose. But the characters just ... sort of lecture each other. I mean... they're obviously talking to the reader... but it's just weird. There's a lot of intellectual masturbation in Dune about prescience and the Ubermensch. Maybe I should get off my rear end and write another review, but I've been busy lately, sorry goons. On an unrelated note my mother and I were coordinating Father's Day gifts and she got him The Ruin of Kings. I should have spoken up sooner. Apparently the Wall Street Journal gave it a good review? I'm not sure I read the same book as this guy.
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Jun 15, 2019 21:37
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Thranguy posted:Would Moby Dick still have been a great work of Melville had gotten fundamental aspects of the whaling experience dead wrong? As the whaling sections are Ishmael desperately trying to force some order and understanding on top of Ahab's mad quest to fight an unknowable God, them being wrong is even better for that purpose.
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Jul 4, 2019 20:49
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Children of Time - Spiders, spiders everywhere Children of Time is a novel about gods, spiders, and feminism. Specifically, it follows the adventures of one Doctor Avrana Kern who develops a god complex, creates a virus to give monkeys human-level intelligence and fucks it all up when terrorists blow up her space station and the virus gets into the local space spiders instead. I will be honest, I nearly closed the book on the first chapter reading poo poo like this: Adrian Tchaikovsky posted:Another group of people to thank, for she herself was no biotech specialist. She had seen the specs and the simulations, though, and expert systems had examined the theory and summarized it in terms that she, a mere polymath genius, could understand. Fortunately for me one of her crewmembers detonates her space station before I have to wallow in more narcissism and we get to the book's two main storylines - the evolution of space spiders, and the human colony ship trying to find a home after war devastated earth. Here are the spiders. Adrian Tchaikovsky" posted:She is Portia, and she is hunting. The spider sections are dominated entirely by that scourge of sci-fi, worldbuilding, to the point where all of the spiders are named Portia, Bianca, Fabian, and the occasional VIola. This brings us to the general advantage sci-fi can have over fantasy, and that's going out into the weeds to come up with intriguing ideas that don't bore the reader with banal idiocy such as coinage. The book is replete with the author's vision of what a society of intelligent spiders would look like in a world low on metals where things ignite more quickly - and the book ultimately succeeds or fails depending on whether you find that an interesting concept. Do you find pages describing how the spiders train ants to act as computers via chemicals fascinating, or empty mental masturbation? How about the spiders' male rights movement (this is a species where the females eat the males during sex)? Spider spacecraft made out of webbing? Adrian Tchaikovsky" posted:The Sky Nest is robust, able to survive the hectic and turbulent weather conditions extending all the way down to the surface of their world. It is still a great, almost weightless object, a cloud of silk and wood and hydrogen; a small crew of spiders and a handful of engines are the heaviest things about. Still it is not light enough. When fully inflated, the Star Nest will be a reasonable fraction of the Sky Nest's size, and carry a much smaller fraction of its weight: a truncated onboard colony to handle life-support, a radio, two crew, the payload. These are spiders building a spaceship, and we are merely treated to a dull description of what the spaceship is. There's no sense of wonder at the enormous undertaking, no sense of fear at going out into the unknown. Hell, this spaceship is going to fly up to meet God (the AI version of that narcissist from the prologue) and yet the prose is entirely dull realism. You may be forgiven for believing this prose is used to characterize the emotionless spiders, but the spiders show human emotion and suspiciously similar religious practices to the point of fighting holy wars. Adrian Tchaikovsky posted:Her suit inflates instantly, her internal air supply reacting to the thin atmosphere and expanding, mostly about her abdomen, mouth, eyes and joints: those parts which might suffer from a sudden loss of pressure. Portia has several advantages over a vertebrate right now: her open circulation is less vulnerable to frostbite and to gas bubbles caused by changes of pressure, and her exoskeleton retains fluids more readily than skin. This is the first description we get of Portia the spider going out to fix her spaceship, and the author chooses to give us an infodump on spider biology rather than, well, Portia. Was she expecting this to happen? How does she feel, so high up with no way to get home? The spiders aren't supposed to be unrelatable monsters - we spend too much time in spider society, with near-human spider characters, for that to be the case. The human characters fare little better. Aside from Avrana Kern, who uploads herself into an AI to try to set herself up as god of the Spider Planet, we have the crew of the Gilgamesh, an emergency colony ship launched from a postapocalyptic war. The human protagonist - here we actually keep some of the character continuity - is an old historian desperately attempting to get the ship to avoid the idiocy of the past humans and not destroy themselves, while people do things like try to set themselves up as gods via brain uploading, mutiny, and ultimately decide to invade Spider Planet because it's the only habitable planet around. There is a running theme of divinity throughout the novel. The war on Earth started because a lot of people thought humanity was going too far tampering with the genome and playing in God's domain, which isn't helped by Avrana Kern constantly talking about how she will become a god by making intelligent monkeys to seed the universe. She then plays God to the spiders for the first part of the book. The Gilgamesh's commander, Guyen tries to upload his brain to the ship's computer, turn himself into a god, and lead a great crusade to destroy the spiders and save humanity. The difference between the two is the spiders keep Kern around as more of a strangely honored advisor while the humans kill Guyen, but go through with his attack anyway. The book is savagely against Guyen, rightfully portraying him as an insane madman building himself up as a cult leader, but Kern is allowed to redeem herself by treating the spiders as equals. What's amusing about this is that Kern probably did the most to start the war that destroyed all humanity, yet her past actions are never called into question and she's allowed to be a major character in the sequel. The book grapples with divinity on a surface level - thou shalt not set thyself up as a false god - but as soon as the false gods are dead the ideas of God completely disappear from the narrative. The spiders are happy to accept that their god is false but to take the answers of "why are we here" as gospel, and the humans are completely devoid of non-Guyen spirituality despite living on the brink of extinction. The only interesting twist is that the spiders resolve the conflict by infecting the humans with the original virus the humans used to create them, bringing the humans and the spiders together in one harmonious society because they now see each other as friends. The ethics of this are of course not explored, because we have organic technology and spider biology to explain! We also have the running subplot of Spider Reverse Feminism, which I'm not sure is supposed to be satire or an attempt to tackle Real Social Issues. On one level it's funny that the spider ladies eat the spider men so the men organize a feminist movement to try to not get eaten. On the other hand it's played completely straight - there's no humor in the prose, and Fabian's rhetoric could be right out of Susan B Anthony and the suffragettes asking the men to please take them seriously, because they're good for more than just sex. Adrian Tchaikovsky posted:The improved mining architecture has been completed, Fabian drums out distractedly. You are aware that I myself may be killed any day? This extends into the second novel where one of the male spiders complains that he has to do double the work to keep up with female privilege. This is not to get into a gender debate, but are space spiders really a good allegory for relations between men and women? I get that the original species they're based off of is female dominated, but for a bunch of spiders in a spaceship to be arguing 21st century political issues about workplace equality. You want to write about feminism? Write about actual human women, not a species where the males dance to present sperm packets to the females then have to nope the gently caress out to not get eaten. You literally have a magic virus granting these spiders intelligence, there's no reason for them to be arguing about the Equal RIghts Amendment centuries after Earth's death. It's nuts, and the book doesn't have much insight beyond "patriarchy is bad". But I guess if you want the mental image of spiders with slingshots this is the book for you.
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Jul 5, 2019 20:25
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Look Homeward, Angel posted:He liked all weird fable and wild invention, in prose or verse, from The Golden rear end to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the chief prince of the moon and magic. But he liked the fabulous wherever he found it, and for whatever purpose. Edit: Removing problematic material. My apologies. TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Jul 21, 2019 |
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Jul 20, 2019 18:51
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Wulff. Missed that, but the sentiment of boredom holds. I can take it down if needed.
TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Jul 21, 2019 |
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Jul 21, 2019 03:55
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I don't mean to be a giant dick, but can we go back to writing reviews instead of discussing LitRPGs? They have no redeeming value. We know this. They cannot, nor will they ever, have redeeming value when you need to intersperse meaning with "and then I did over 9000 holy damage lolololol" with any kind of prose. Seriously, the fun of the old thread was applying literary techniques and writing reviews about nerds' favorite fiction. Otherwise I could see if the Dominic Flandry series still holds up as well as I thought it did.
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Jul 24, 2019 06:04
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You know Y'all can review some books instead of posting about LitRPGs
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Aug 5, 2019 04:14
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Antivehicular posted: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. YES
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Aug 5, 2019 19:40
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