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I'd echo Hieronymous in saying that the best genre writing by far is found in the mystery field, especially the hardboiled and noir areas. Raymond Chandler is wonderful to read. I'm particuarly fond of John D MacDonald; been thinking about doing an effort post on him, though I'm dissuaded by the idea that maybe three or four people here have read him and that I think most people in this thread want to read about fantasy writers it seems.
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Mar 16, 2019 18:49
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All right, let’s give this a spin. I don’t have a linguistics or literature background, so any analysis I make will be deficient in those areas; I can only apologize. At the same time, I am a historian and so I will tend to be interested in those aspects: hence the lengthy bio and publishing background bits here to start. I'm choosing to put this here because I'm aiming at some reflection on the post, rather than a more general chat and such I'd expect in the (solid) detective thread. John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) was a businessman and Second World War vet who decided once he turned 30 to devote his life to writing. There’s a common idea regarding artists that your first products are going to be garbage, whether that’s painting or music or writing or whatever. MacDonald held to that: after his discharge from the army, he spent four months trying to become a writer by producing short stories non-stop, generating some 800,000 words and losing 20 pounds while typing 14 hours a day, seven days a week. He just basically sat at his typewriter and hammered out piece of poo poo after piece of poo poo. And it was all rejected. Those were the dying days of the pulps (the actual pulps, not the mangled way the term is used today to mean “bad writing”), but even then it was a genre-writer’s paradise. Consider the genre field today. If you’re writing fantasy, the big magazines are Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. If you’re writing science fiction, you can submit to the above, plus Asimov’s and Analog and Lightspeed, plus Interzone and Apex. For mystery, there’s really only two: Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock. For weird tales and more niche stuff like sword and sorcery, it’s all small-press stuff, with Weird Tales itself in limbo since 2014. In the late 40s, when MacDonald was trying to get off the ground, there were dozens of titles one could submit to. There were pulps for every possible niche: air war, jungle stories, romance, nurse romance, ranching, westerns, sports, and 20 different flavours of detective and science fiction. MacDonald tried it all, and if a story didn’t sell to one place, he just sent it on to the next most-prestigious magazine dealing in that genre, until he’d crossed them all off and knew the story was truly hopeless (later in his life, after he’d become a success, he took all this early material out in the back yard and burned it). After four months or so he began getting hits. He enjoyed the most success in the detective genre, and soon became a regular contributor to Dime Detective, one of the biggest magazines in the field, which had a nice mix of solid writing and churned-out garbage. Eventually you could find him at the very top in Ellery Queen and Black Mask. The pulps died in the early 50s, never really recovering from the wartime paper shortages that curtailed their profitability and distribution numbers, but also because the newly invented mass-market softcover pocket book essentially took over its niche. For 25 cents you could get a trim 150ish-page novel of all-original material at pretty much any store in America—all-new stories (previously the softcover was solely the domain of reprints of successful hardcovers, so this was truly unusual for the time and many publishers thought it was a crazy plan doomed to failure). It completely transformed the publishing industry, and MacDonald was in on the ground floor, being scooped up by Fawcett’s Gold Medal line, which would go on to produce some of the most notable detective and noir books of the 50s and 60s. If you want a feel for how Gold Medal marketed their line, check out this: https://www.pinterest.ca/injunbookworm/gold-medalfawcett-gold-medal-books/ MacDonald’s background fueled a lot of his work. He did his service not on the front lines but as an administrator, and not in any of the usual theatres but in the most overlooked one of the war outside of Iceland: Burma. His experiences in Burma were a crutch for him for much of his early career, as the exotic east proved to be an easy way to stick out from a crowded pack and add some spice to his tales. Eventually one of his editors, Babette Rosmond, told him to “take off the pith helmet”, and he moved away from it. However, Burma was a major plot point in his first Travis McGee story, as we’ll see. With his WWII administrative work and his business background (his father was also a successful businessman), he often focused on the more mundane side of life compared to many action / adventure stories. Several of his novels involve capable managers getting caught up in industrial and/or international espionage, or more typical noirish plots involving femme fatales. Where a lot of writers would brush over the bits actually involving production or the nuts and bolts of how something operates, MacDonald could at times revel in these details. At the same time, this is only by comparison with other genre writers of the time: he’s still writing tight 150-pagers, and anyone expecting reams of Neal Stephenson or Tom Clancy-ish technowank is going to be disappointed. You can divide MacDonald’s work into three periods: pulp, non-series novels, and the McGee period (Travis McGee being his incredibly successful series character, who starred in 21 stories from 1964 until 1984; his non-series novels mostly dried up once he started on McGee). Even before the pulps died he was moving into novels. He was a 9-5 writer, treating it as a full-time occupation. Between that and the fact that genre novels in these days were much, much shorter, he managed an astonishing output. Between 1950 to 1964, when the first in his Travis McGee series was printed, he wrote 38 standalone novels. His first novels can be rough, with the very first one being a weak hardboiled effort and his fourth a bad James Cain knockoff that MacDonald refused to allow to be reprinted. At the same time, he’d already had some 300 short story publications before he started on novels, so he was a practiced writer even at the start.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:29
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 I thought to start with the first McGee, but I changed my mind and went for a younger work, one of his pre-McGee standalones. Published in 1960, The End of the Night was MacDonald’s 32nd novel, and broadly falls into that subgenre that might be called the teen hysteria novel. Growing out of things such as the publication of 1947’s The Amboy Dukes, the release of 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause and The Blackboard Jungle, and of course the real-life 1954 Brooklyn Thrill Killers and 1958 spree killings by 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate (later also one of the inspirations for Natural Born Killers and Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska), there was this sense that postwar teens had somehow become animalist hedonists falling into drugs and jazz and nihilism. I’ve read a few works along these lines, and a lot of them tend to be hollow, not surprisingly (I remember being disappointed by the legendary Leigh Brackett’s effort, The Tiger Among Us).        The End of the Night is 192 pages, fairly typical for MacDonald and the time, the popular fiction book-size bloat of the mid-70s not having hit yet. It employs one of his favourite techniques of his early novels, the use of multiple character perspectives. We open with a letter introducing us to the main characters of the novel, while at the same time leaving us no doubt as to their fates: they're being led to their executions. It also reveals how they end up mentally and emotionally, which makes for an interesting contrast when the main narrative takes over and we get to watch these characters perform (some of) the deeds that will lead to their executions, what the media winds up dubbing “The Wolf Pack Murders”. As the book is just starting, of course we have no idea who any of these people are. quote:Shires was scared sick they wouldn’t get the woman here on time, but it was timed right, and they brought her in through that little back death-house gate where the stiffs go out. I guess all those guys behind the glass were thinking about all the sexy pictures that got printed of the Koslov woman, and if they were, they had a hell of a disappointment. She put on maybe twenty pounds, and she had her hair in braids, and she’d got religion. She walked in steady, her hands together in front of her, her lips moving every minute, following right along with the Father who was with her, looking down toward the floor. She had on a white dress like a confirmation dress, I swear, but real plain. She didn’t even flick an eye at the throne until she come to the step up onto the little platform, and then she stepped up and turned and sat down, not missing a word. She crossed herself before we strapped her arms, and she kept right on with the praying. She was shaved good under those braids, and the plates went on neat and tight. The only thing was just before the hood went on, it was like she saw all those guys behind the glass there watching her for the first time. She said a few words, not loud, but loud enough for Bongo and me to hear them, and I can tell you, Eddie boy, I can’t put them in no letter going through the U. S. Mails. She picked up the praying when the hood went on, and we stepped back, and all I have to say to you is that it was a good one. You know how bad even the good ones are. The first time was enough, and when they were running her out on the cart, I looked over and saw our audience had shrunk some, which is always to be expected, and there were a few bottles out, and some of them didn’t look like they’d last much longer. From there we switch to a frame narrative, as though written by some historian/biographer coolly looking back on the case and explaining the setup. It focuses on the defense attorney, Riker Owen, explaining his performance and character: quote:Owen had not only his comforting record of success, but also a persuasive plausibility that lessened, to some small and necessary extent, their horrid fear. They could not know that they had retained not a savior, not a hero, but an assiduously processed imitation, the hollow result of boyhood dreams distorted by the biographies of Fallon, Rogers, Darrow and other greats. This frame in turn sets up a narrative from the attorney himself, a memoranda that lays out his appraisal of those he was to defend. It’s an interesting authorial choice, so rapidly switching from jailhouse guard hick to detached but cutting historical assessment to ponderous legal analysis mixed with on-high reflection on Owen’s charges in the space of twelve pages. MacDonald is flexible with his prose style, able to effectively capture these shifts in diction and attitude. I like the lawyer’s narrative. It’s ponderous as the character at times, but effectively so rather than just plain old bad writing, capturing his mindset while at the same time serving as another vehicle for MacDonald’s dives into character study, something he deeply enjoyed and which would be a trademark of his writing: quote:I have experienced a partial failure of communication with Kirby’s parents. I understand why this must be, as I have seen it before. Everyone who works with criminals in any capacity is familiar with this phenomenon. It is, I suspect, a classification error. All their lives, they have been conscious of a great gulf between the mass of decent folk and that sick, savage, dangerous minority known as criminals. Thus they cannot comprehend that their son, their decent young heir, has leaped the unbridgeable gulf. They believe such a feat impossible, and thus the accusation of society must be an error. A boyish prank has been misunderstood. People have lied about him. Or he has fallen under the temporary influence of evil companions. In terms of the four accused, we have: quote:I do not know if I can put the precise flavor of the presence and personality of Robert Hernandez down on paper. He is almost a caricature of the brutishness in man. Cartoonists give him a spiked club and draw him as the god of war. He is about five ten, and weighs maybe two hundred and thirty pounds. He is excessively hirsute, thick and heavy in every dimension, with a meager shelving brow, deep-set eyes, a battered face. It is a shocking thing to realize he is not quite twenty-one years old. This atavistic brute-type character is a recurring one in MacDonald’s stories. The same type shows up in the first McGee novel, The Deep Blue Good-By. You also see him as the main antagonist in The Executioners, MacDonald’s most successful novel, which would be filmed in 1962 (with Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck) and again in 1991 (by Scorsese, with Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte), both times titled Cape Fear. Hernandez has an Of Mice and Men-type relationship with the next accused, Sander Golden: quote:Sander Golden is twenty-seven, but he looks much younger. He is five foot eight, with sharp sallow features, mousy, thinning hair, bright eyes of an intense blue behind bulky, loose-fitting spectacles which are mended, on the left bow, with a soiled winding of adhesive tape. He gives a deceptive impression of physical fragility, but there is a wiry, electrical tirelessness about him. He is a darting man, endlessly in motion, hopelessly talkative. He can apparently sustain a condition of manic frenzy indefinitely. I hasten to add that this frenzy is pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-philosophical rather than personal and emotional. Golden is the closest to your clichéd teen villain of the time, the hopped up, freaked out beatnik killer. Neither killer we’ve seen so far is a teen, though Hernandez would have just been at the time of the crime (the same as Charles Starkweather), and we’re told Golden looks “much younger”. The novel hits all the cues for teen terror, but shies away from actually making them outright highschoolers. This is fairly common in films in this subgenre (James Dean was 24 when he made Rebel Without a Cause), but I suspect that’s as much wanting a more mature actor that’s able to summon a decent emotional range on command than anything else. The initial setup, comprised of a variety of found documents, leads you to think that MacDonald is interested in rooting this in a purely realistic perspective, but from there the novel bounces around, unconcerned about how it gets its information. The next chapter is a simple third-person omniscient. The one after that is a diary entry from another of the four accused, Kirby Stassen. And so on. If Hernandez is the brute who loves violence and Golden the sadist masking his desires underneath a pseudointellectual framework, Kirby Stassen is the classic “what’s it all about, anyways” archetype, that person who realizes that the rat race he is being groomed for is ultimately hollow, but at the same time has nothing of meaning to replace it with. His jailhouse diary reminiscences give us the majority of the insight we get into the foursome’s mentality and actions: he’s by far the most important of them and the one the book focuses on the most. Stassen is hanging out with his roommate Pete on campus and looking out the window at a random girl when the realization hits: quote:And exactly at that moment is when it happened. For the first time in a long gray time there was a little queasy wiggle of excitement way down there on the floor of my soul. What the hell was keeping me there? What was the Christ name good of coasting through to a degree, which I could manage to do, and then signing up for that Executive Training Program the old man had all lined up for me? After this realization, Stassen leaves college four months from the end of his degree and drifts aimlessly, a period we eventually learn about and which leads to him meeting his other three fellow Wolf Pack killers. This is one of my favourite parts of the book, and has nothing to do with the main plot per se, though it's instrumental in shaping his character. Stassen is intelligent enough to reflect on what brought him here, unlike the others, though some answers elude him (even then, it's interesting to watch him grasp for them). His attorney, Owen, takes some time to analyze him as well, but of greater interest to me is the part where Owen brings in the analysis of “the youth today”. It’s a particularly common aspect of these books, where the adults wring their hands and wonder what has gone wrong. Here MacDonald frames it as a matter of study rather than well-meaning adults trying to rap with the kids or what have you, though it's still ultimately feeling around in the dark. quote:Some of this, of course, may be no more than the usual lack of contact between generations. It sometimes seems to me that the Great Depression marked the beginning of a special change in our culture. All young people born during or after those years seem to act toward the rest of us with a great deal more tolerant disrespect than can be accounted for merely by the difference in ages. New standards of behavior have infected the world. The divergence seems to be growing more acute rather than diminishing. There’s further reflection at the end of the chapter that is particularly intriguing. It’s a reoccurring element in arguments about "kids these days"' to bring up that fake Plato quote about how the youth of “today” are all terrible, but it is interesting to see how far back certain, more specific, elements carry: quote:In the beginning I had hoped to be able to put the Stassen boy on the stand. But the prosecutor would shred him. He wouldn’t upset Kirby. I don’t think he could dent that poise. But he would make Kirby expose himself, in his own words, as a monster. I’m not sure how much of the above is MacDonald and how much is Owen; sometimes MacDonald uses his characters as mouthpieces, other times not. Certainly the part about the pursuit of pleasure is pure MacDonald: it’s one of his major themes (for all that his books are free with sex, there’s definite Puritan overtones there, and MacDonald has nothing but contempt for what he refers to as “the Playboy Bunny set”; sex in his mind should be warm and freely given, but “should mean something”). But the “we teach our kids to act out and that there’s no morality” is such a common thing today that it’s fascinating to see it play out in 1960. I’d love to know how far back this exact line of argument goes; Dr. Spock’s 1946 book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is doubtless relevant, but the obsession with not spoiling your kids with too much affection runs to the early part of the 20th century at least. Infant Care pamphlets distributed by the U.S. government in the 1920s warned against “excessive” affection by parents for their children; experts recommended kissing children only on the forehead and limiting hugs or other displays of affection. But Spock usually gets the blame for opening the floodgates of permissiveness. Of course, in between all this analysis and introspection and character work, a plot is unfolding. Young Helen Wister, nubile 23-year-old bride to-be, has a stalker. She attempts to reason with him, but has underestimated his irrationality, and he kidnaps her. Before we reach Owen’s analysis of Stassen, we see her dive from her kidnapper's car into the bush and be knocked unconscious by the fall. MacDonald interweaves the bits of reflection with plot. It makes certain parts of the analysis serve as effective cliffhanger elements pushing the plot forward. For example, at the end of his Stassen reflection chapter, the lawyer Owen writes: quote:One can imagine that Helen Wister made a somewhat similar error when she fell into the hands of this dangerous foursome. As an intelligent and perceptive young woman, she must have seen how great was her danger from Koslov, Hernandez and Golden. In this extremity of her terror she would have turned, quite naturally, to Kirby Stassen, sensing a kinship, hoping for protection. To her he would be the only reassuring factor in a nightmare situation, a boy like the boys she had dated. Much of what he's referring to is unclear to a reader: we have not yet seen how the characters Kemp and Crown pass by, or how Wister and the Wolf Pack meet, and we only have a vague idea of what the four have specifically done to earn a collective death penalty, though there’s been reference to the murder of one man. Helen Wister’s fate teases us throughout the book. It should be said that MacDonald’s own track record doesn't help us here. Most of his stories end relatively happily, though some, such as the Cainish Weep for Me, the bleak environmental novel Flash of Green, and the business and ultimately personal corruption of Key to the Suite all end on miserable notes. So one can’t appeal to authorial formula at this point and assume you'll know how it will all come out. The next chapter is told by Dallas Kemp, Wister’s fiancé. It reveals that Crown, Wister’s kidnapper, has been killed. Again we don’t know how; MacDonald avoids telling it linearly. But eventually it becomes clear that the Wolf Pack stumble on Crown, who has stopped to recover Wister after her dive from the car. The four kill him and run off with Wister. From here the tone of the novel is set. There’s other elements—in particular, a large portion of Stassen’s look back at how he became what he became is reflecting on a fascinating interlude when he became entangled with a dissolute New York producer and his cold, hedonist wife, travelling to Mexico with them as the driver in a miserable three-way relationship that reminded me in part of Henry Kuttner’s Man Drowning—but I don’t want to recap the whole novel. It suffices to say that MacDonald I think effectively mixes the interludes, plot progression, and character studies in the form of Owens’ recurring memoranda and personal reflection by people such as Dallas Kemp, Wister’s father, and others in such a way as to never overdo any of them, and to keep you interested in the whole. It’s non-linear, without ever really feeling fragmented or jumbled, with the possible exception of the rapid shifts of the very beginning. In terms of how he handles the violence, MacDonald doesn’t really linger on it. It’s not that he’s squeamish. I think it’s more that he knows that this isn’t what the book is really about. We see the death of a character named Becher, who's mentioned earlier in the book, but the main murder(s), “the Nashville thing” is lightly passed over: there’s no Natural Born Killers lovingly filmed massacres here. For instance, this is the most we learn about it, as told to us by Stassen: quote:I am not going to write the Nashville episode into this record. The newspaper did enough chop-licking over it. It was a sick, dirty business, pointless, cruel and bloody. This is, I suspect, as close as I can come to apology. I cannot say that the business of Horace Becher had any particular grace or style. But it had a flavor of some kind that the Nashville affair did not. The Nashville affair was symptomatic of sickness and desperation. I took part in it directly. From then on Sandy dropped the “college man” routine. He brought it up one more time after that, during the Helen Wister thing, but that was all. In Nashville I won my dirty spurs. It’s more a reflection on the nature of the four who committed the crime, rather than a killing to fill the pages with violence. As for a more formal critical analysis of the book, as I said at the start I don’t feel I’m equipped to handle that in any particularly educated fashion. I’m not attempting to be a BotL; I know what I like, and this book is one of those things. I’ve tried instead to give you a sense of what it’s like and what it’s trying to do, of the prose and construction and whatnot, and let you decide for yourself if you think it’s worth bothering with, either as an interesting historical artifact or a perfectly valid work of fiction on its own. It’s long out of print, but Gold Medal produced enormous print runs, so that a hard copy is still easy to track down 60 years later. Alternatively, it’s available on Kindle for just a few dollars. I want to close with a passage I quite like, where Stassen reflects on his upcoming execution: quote:I am very aware of another thing—and I suppose this is a very ordinary thing for all those condemned—and that is a kind of yearning for the things I will never do, a yearning with overtones of nostalgia. It is as though I can remember what it is like to be old and watch moonlight, and to hold children on my lap, and kiss the wife I have never met. It is a sadness in me. I want to apologize to her—I want to explain it to the children. I’m sorry. I’m never coming down the track of time to you. I was stopped along the way. I hope this was of some interest. Xotl fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jun 15, 2021 |
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Mar 17, 2019 01:32
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uberkeyzer posted:Xotl, that was great. Thank you! Thanks, glad you liked it.  I hope it prompts people to check out an author I greatly respect and perhaps sparks some discussion.If we're talking "best", I don't think The Executioners is it, although I should really point out that I'm in the vast minority there: most fans of his consider it one of his best, if not his outright best, so I don't think you're likely to go wrong even if I'm meh on it. It certainly has a lot of common MacDonald themes: the non-action hero lead stumbling into a situation he's not equipped for, the atavistic antagonist, the ruminations on modern American society. If you want to see him at what I think is his finest, I'd pick 1952's The Damned, which is another multiple-perspective narrative. It's about a diverse cast of characters who wind up stuck at a broken-down ferry crossing at the Mexico border (MacDonald, who spent some years in Mexico, would feature the country a lot in his stories). You've got a mix of innocents and criminals and hard-luck cases becoming jammed up at this crossing, and I think he handles it beautifully. Also strong is The Only Girl in the Game, and I'm rather fond of All These Condemned. Lastly, I think The End of the Night is not just interesting to talk about but a fine novel. 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. Xotl fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Mar 17, 2019 |
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Mar 17, 2019 04:57
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Karia posted:Everything is just drawn out and out and out to fill up page space. Oddly, I'd appreciate a little more detail on just how Sanderson manages to waste so many pages. What goes into 300 pages of fluff; what does that fluff look like? Is he a rampant worldbuilder, a repressed dressmaker like Robert Jordan was, someone who likes endless pages of pointless conversation, something else? I'm getting the sense that a lot of it is worldbuilding, but is it literally all storing up future plot seeds? Xotl fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 01:12
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I recently read an essay by Ursula Le Guin complaining about the modernist tone in fantasy writing. IIRC it was from the late 70s, but I can't be sure. Does anyone have a link or know where I can find it? She regularly wrote essays, so a general search hasn't met with any luck. Thanks.
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May 28, 2019 07:25
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wizzardstaff posted:Was it from this collection? Turns out it was. It's "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie": I found it complete in a Google Books search. Thanks!
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May 28, 2019 17:59
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Yeah, I like seeing stuff on genres besides SF and fantasy. Looking forward to what you come up with.
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Aug 5, 2019 18:32
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nankeen posted:can anybody give me a single concrete example of botl's creeping/stalking/harassment crimes that's not "he was mean to the action figure goon in two different threads" He was accused of offsite (discord?) harrassment, and denied it, but regardless there's nothing to see on the forums no matter who you believe.
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Aug 6, 2019 06:15
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There's like two lines in the whole eleventy jillion-word series about current Earth, and that's one of them. Of all the things to care about in this trainwreck of a series, an obsession with current-day linkages is not one of them. 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. But the overall complaint about the gender issues is spot-on. Everyone, regardless of age, acts like a baffled teenager when it comes to the unfathomable mystery that is the other sex. It's like a horrific medievalesque mashup of Home Improvement and Degrassi Jr. High. my bony fealty posted:hey now I'm glad I never spent any of my time reading a single word of Wheel of Time!. how does it sustain itself over 4 million words? the plot seems too straightforward for that. Sideplots. Clothing descriptions. Sideplots to the sideplots, with more clothing descriptions.
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Nov 19, 2019 20:33
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wizzardstaff posted:I will say though that I was amused by the repeated internal complaints from each of the three main teenage boy characters that they, personally, were poo poo at talking to girls and the other two were so smooth at it. Yeah, I chuckled at that too, even as it reinforced the idea that this was some sort of awful teen drama. A related recurring issue that only angered me more as the series went on was the complete refusal of anyone to actually talk to anyone regarding interpersonal problems. It (again) reminded me of bad gender comedy and the like, idiotic and even petty issues that could have been sorted out in no time had only someone taken the time to actually bring up the issue. I know this is an issue in real life often enough that I couldn't entirely hold it against the characters (though there didn't seem to be a capable one in the pack in this regard), but it really just added to the general frustration. I started the series in high school when doorstopper fantasy was perfect for me. By the end I just wanted to see how it was going to end, how Sanderson was going to pull this mess of divergent plot points together without making a total garbage fire, and the moment I finished the last page I packed up all but two autographed volumes and took the mountain of hardcovers to the local used book store.
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Nov 19, 2019 20:56
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Antivehicular posted: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. It's been a long time since I've read the chapter where they show you the breaching of the Dark One's prison, but both genders of magic users seem to have equal authority and power at that time, from what the narrative shows us of the past: there's no divide like you're painting. The whole thing is painted as a science experiment by a pair of researchers attempting to get past the inefficiencies of having two separate sources of power that can't always be combined, not a swipe at "the system".
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Nov 19, 2019 22:12
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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.
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Nov 19, 2019 23:32
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Antivehicular posted: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. It's the story's central premise, for better or worse: it's literally called "The Wheel of Time". The series starts with it, and ends with it. It comes up again and again, and two of the three central characters eventually come to be shaped around it (Rand--the Dragon Reborn--most of all, later Mat with his host of reincarnation memories). It's clumsy, like most things in the series, but it's not just set dressing: you'd have to rewrite large portions of the series if you wanted to take it out. Xotl fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 00:48
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Antivehicular posted:"Women have equal power to men because they have ~soft power~, i.e. they convince their husbands and male family members to do what they want" is also a hoary ancient sexist trope. "Soft power" that is entirely at the mercy of other people to actually act and make decisions is not power, and it emphasizes the idea that women are only organs of the patriarchal marriage/family unit, not independent human beings. It's a bit different here because, as a fantasy novel, it's the way things "actually" work. I.e. it's not a bad TV sitcom thing made by guys to feel like poor put-upon husbands and excuse the fact that they run things without input from women, but the way the WoT world actually operates: we see it again and again, across its cultures, because that's the way Jordan believed the real world functions. I saw him at a talk once where he said that people who believed this wasn't reality were just deluding themselves, so naturally his world duplicated this, only minus the "actually has little to no effect" part. While "women seek to get the power of Satan to equal themselves out" isn't accurate, I'm looking into these again after years and the "men are stronger than women" bit is completely right. I'd also forgotten about the "men handle fire and earth and women air and water" setup as well. Also, the man-hating Red Ajah that magically castrates men was full of lesbians, IIRC. Also also, apparently the official support materials went completely DragonBall Z-over-9000 after Jordan died: https://www.tor.com/2015/10/27/the-wheel-of-time-companion-strength-chart-of-major-channelers/ Now you can measure how the strongest woman is .52 less power than Rand, and there's a helpful formula now to chart saidin channeller life expectancy: f(x) = -0.000369429x^3 + 0.0989288x^2 – 14.5901x + 814.491 Xotl fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Nov 20, 2019 |
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Nov 20, 2019 04:22
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Antivehicular posted:Plenty of people argue that this is how the real world works, or should work if women would just stay in their lane. They are rear end in a top hat misogynists, and writing a fantasy world where it actually does work doesn't make it not an rear end in a top hat misogynist idea. No one said it wasn't such an idea, just that women in the world had more power than what people thought if you were using real-world analogues. It's bad fantasy for a reason.
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Nov 20, 2019 04:49
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Lex Neville posted:genuine question: how common is it for a genre fiction narrative to be fully contained within, say, 80k words? This was the absolute standard prior to the mid-70s. Page count bloat began around then; prior to this, genre novels were typically in the 55-70K range. I have lots from this period at 125-180 pages, and of course self-contained--no trilogies. I'm not sure what started the bloat; I'm sure there's been studies done or a blog out there somewhere that tells the tale. Xotl fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Nov 21, 2019 |
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Nov 21, 2019 02:28
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Horizon Burning posted:Luckily, given that the author of that most well-known story has turned out to be a total diva convinced that his janky first-draft is a masterpiece to the extent that he can mock editors on his subreddit, and the sequel to it has been extremely poorly-received by everyone except his most devout fans, the enthusiasm may be cooling. I'm curious, but not familiar with what you're talking about : can you give some links?
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Nov 22, 2019 02:23
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I'm curious to know how many of those are post-Hunger Games creations; I'd assume that it's just a case of bandwagoning on Katniss.
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Dec 16, 2019 15:07
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Ellison was a big fan of the "speculative fiction" badge, in part because he had a rabid hatred of the term "sci-fi", which inevitably came with science fiction, but also in part because by the 60s there were lots of stories being written that weren't fantasy but certainly weren't science fiction as people traditionally knew it, stories that involved little or no actual science. It's hard to look at something like Jeffty is Five or a lot of what New Worlds was publishing or whatever and unambiguously say "that's sci-fi". I'm not sure whether sci-fi expanded its horizons to encompass what was called speculative fiction, or SF writers (outside the short story venues, where the most creative stuff still gets published) shrank theirs to make a wider term unnecessary. Maybe a bit of both. In either case, it's sort of lost its impetus and original meaning.
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Jan 10, 2020 01:10
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anilEhilated posted:You don't even need look that far. Take Ray Bradbury - I sincerely doubt there's a jot of "science" in his entire body of work. And yet he's considered one of the most influential sci-fi writers. That's a good point. I'm not as familiar with sci-fi history: I never liked old SF as I do detective and weird pulps, so I wonder what the reaction of readers was back in the day when Bradbury's stories started appearing. The letter columns and fanzines would have certainly covered this.
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Jan 10, 2020 20:37
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nankeen posted:engage me you cowards A lot of people today will agree with you. Myself, I don't see the point in ideologically vetting your reads ahead of time, with the possible exception of wanting to avoid buying anything in a way that benefits someone who is still alive and you think is a bad person. Why does it matter if random dead guy was a racist or some kind of criminal? Needing authors you'll read to be good people is a position without justification; expecting long-dead authors to fit 21st century morality is anachronistic. I'm not throwing out Patricia Highsmith because she seems to have been a horrible person to everyone she ever interacted with, or RE Howard because he had lousy views on race, or Wanda Wasilewska because she was a tankie that was fine with the Katyn massacre and worked to hide it. Why should I?
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Jan 11, 2020 05:59
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And in any case, the original post was talking about getting "upset about the social politics of genre authors", not claiming that an author's beliefs don't inform their work or that knowing about the author isn't relevant for a deeper study of their work.
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Jan 13, 2020 16:42
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I feel like not associating with the fruits of fascism is a value in itself, but I'm clearly not gonna get an understanding of what that's like until I try. Fascism isn't the Dark Side: you can't be corrupted by it through brief contact or whatever. If your underlying personal ideology is so spotty that you're going to switch to advocating for an ethnostate the moment you finish something by Knut Hamsun, that's on you. Terrible people can and often do produce great art, and an avoidance of anyone you consider terrible because you think it endorses or otherwise spreads their ideology or supports them personally is a common belief now, but one so obviously hollow (especially since so many of these people are dead, and that piracy of works is so easy now that you can readily do it without financially supporting the living) that I don't know how it's spread so far these past few years. You can read the Father Brown mysteries without endorsing anti-Semitism. You can read Lovecraft without embarking on questionable pet naming practises. You can read Commentaries on the Gallic War without picking up a desire to enslave the French. Xotl fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 16:16
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pile of brown posted:It means the same thing as choosing to buy free range eggs at the farmers market instead of mass farmed eggs because you are self aware of your consumption. You're describing purchasing a product, thus contributing to the success of that product. That's only true of a troublesome book if you buy it new, rather than acquiring it second hand, out of copyright, or via piracy, and assuming that the author is alive. Your scenario is also a case of one thing at the expense of the other in a tightly limited set, but with books you're not directly excluding one or two more virtuous rivals by buying The Diaries of Lord Evilton: literature is too large a world for that. Your analogy doesn't work because reading isn't necessarily a physically consumptive choice, and definitely isn't a binary one. Sure, you've only got so much time in the day and all that, but that's an argument to read good books over bad, not books about goodness or by the virtuous over books about badness or by the wicked (however you're defining those things). Xotl fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Feb 3, 2020 |
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Feb 3, 2020 09:32
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