SF & F Mega-thread: I had to google 'spock pirate depilatory'

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > SF & F Mega-thread: I had to google 'spock pirate depilatory'

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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Mister Kingdom posted:

I just started the Culture series. I'm about a quarter of the way into Consider Phlebas and so far, so good.

How does the rest of the saga compare?

Phlebas is arguably the worst one, by some standards. It�s certainly the biggest outlier, tonally.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2019 01:57

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 00:21

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Cardiac posted:

This is probably the best review of the book so far, so I guess it goes into the list.

Also, started reading Too like the lightning and authors who think that it is a innovative idea to write in a Jane Austen 17-18th style should be shoot imo.

2Like 2Lightning isn�t written anything like Austen. Aubrey/Maturin is written like Austen. Austen is, among other traits, extremely funny.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 20:08

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Julian May owns.

Cythereal posted:

One particular little bugbear I have with Through Fiery Trials and Safehold in general: Weber keeps bringing up the possibility of characters being something other than straight in these books, but only right before affirming that everyone present is heterosexual.

This pops up a couple times in the Honorverse, frustratingly. Right in the first book Honor's like 'not like I like girls or anything' so Weber is completely aware gay people exist, but his one word-of-God gay character (a background admiral) never mentions being gay in the books, Honor's wife is paralyzed and despite expressing attraction can't do anything about it, the 75% woman Mormon Planet has 'bisexuality built into the social matrix' but it never appears onscreen, and nobody from the Planet of Liberated Sexual Mores ever mentions queerness in more than an abstract 'oh yeah we have that' way either.

I half expected him to turn a bunch of his Solarian League punching bag characters into New York Gay Stereotypes, which would at, at least, have been hilarious. I think they're all Globalist UN Stereotypes instead.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Oct 13, 2019

# ¿ Oct 13, 2019 18:35

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

What are the best/most horrifying submarine books. Any kind, from contemporary/thriller to hard SF.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2019 01:01

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Larry Parrish posted:

anyway the concentration camp thing is whatever. if you need your sci fi author to be vocally anti-concentration camp you pretty much cant read any sci fi published in the last 20 years. theres very little leftist media out there in general, and in sci fi especially the best you can get outside of aforementioned soviet era novels is like, stuff by liberals that think big companies are bad.

Have you read any sci fi published in the last 20 years? I can think of 20 writers off the top of my head who are vocally anti-concentration camp and most of them would be common sights in bookstores these days.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2019 04:41

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It�s good but I�ve been leery of rereading it because iirc it contains a seemingly obligatory never-remarked-upon sexual assault by the protagonist. That doesn�t make it Forever Attainted In All Eyes, just makes me uneager to go back.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2019 20:11

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Kesper North posted:

This is my periodic reminder to the thread that Steven Brust was kicked out of the 4th Street writers workshop for stalking and sexually harassing female writers. gently caress that guy.

Yeah, I didn't know if this had made the rounds yet, but he had to be pretty decisively ejected for his conduct. Whether or not that alters your reading (it does mine) it's worth knowing he's a sex pest.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2019 23:50

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Apparatchik Magnet posted:

Luminous Dead is very much a chick book, for both good and ill. Not my kind of thing.

I don't think there's any such thing.

e:

Apparatchik Magnet posted:

Like a chick flick, it's of interest largely to women and assumes a certain psychological viewpoint. Yes, the emotional stuff was the biggest turn off. I was flabbergasted by the motivations of the mastermind and appalled by the reactions of the protagonist. I couldn't even imagine a "normal" person (which I belatedly realized meant male viewpoint) behaving in such a fashion, but could just about stretch my imagination to cover some of my more vapid girlfriends doing that.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2019 22:48

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Lmao bad people being in books doesn�t make the books bad. Christ.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2019 23:46

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

But clearly an over emotional woman author must think her characters are good people who only act reasonably. After all, books are only about people behaving reasonably.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2019 23:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Authors must approve of all their character�s behavior because people can only write things they think are Correct. Beep boop.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2019 23:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

My worst and most inane tweet ever goes viral :negative:

# ¿ Oct 30, 2019 14:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Cythereal posted:

The next book I've started from my trip down the sci-fi/fantasy shelves at my library is interesting so far: Sea of Rust. It's a post-apocalyptic story with the twist that it's told from the perspective of the victorious robots. The AIs won the apocalyptic war with humanity. Humans are extinct. So... what happens now?

A really good short film about exactly this

# ¿ Oct 31, 2019 17:34

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Those are all good books. Eon is a perfectly good standalone and also the first book in its series so it doesn't matter.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2019 22:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I think knowing how fast you read is roughly on the same level as knowing your IQ

# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 22:12

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

You hayt to prophecy it.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2019 21:18

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Everything you need to understand Ninefox is given to you right on the page. There aren�t any mysteries or puzzle boxes to solve, you won�t need to deduce calendrical mechanics to understand some big decision. It�ll tell you what you need to know. If something confuses you, ignore it and keep going.

People have power where their calendar is observed. The hexarchate�s calendar is called the High Calendar. Heretics who don�t obey the high calendar are a threat. Cheris is a Kel, they have formation instinct, it means you basically have no free will when given orders. The other five factions have their own gimmicks.

Like there�s no deeper mystery to �how is Jedao attached to Cheris as her shadow.� That�s it, he�s her shadow now. What�s a threshold winnower? It�s a weapon that winnows you if you�re near a threshold and if they use it they�ll explain. Everyone I talk to who finds Ninefox confusing seems to think they�re supposed to be figuring out the whole world but really it�s giving you what you need. You don�t have to decode secret messages.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2019 23:14

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

nessin posted:

I'd need to re-read the opening sequence to double-check but I didn't get any of that. I don't remember her borderline rebelling, just personal grumbling with internal thoughts like anyone would expect of a soldier and I don't remember any troops actually disobeying beyond expressing whether they should be there or not in the moment. And her superiors made the call to pull them back before the mission was done with basically just a couple lines of dialogue back and forth with Cheris. And if some were going to be executed (also not clear) then their reaction is so outside the normal expected responses that just throwing out there and expecting the reader to understand or empathize is insane. Intellectually I can imagine how your statement of events can be reached with some help of outside statements by the author or some extensive discussion with others who know the author's style but trying to reach that interpretation by just reading the book is mind boggling to me.

The difference between the way you expect people to react and the way they actually react is how you learn the way their society and psychology differs from yours.

quantumfoam posted:

If you're not feeling Ninefox Gambit, there's no shame in dropping it.
Cheris gets sidelined fast as a main character, which sucked because I found her way more interesting than the mary-sue space ghost.
Personally only kept reading Ninefox Gambit for the world-universe building details (space moths, weird calendar stuff, etc).

Forum ate my post but �Mary Sue� is a meaningless criticism, as empty as �show don�t tell� or �forced diversity.� This is not to say its wrong to dislike Jedao as a piece of craft, but Mary Sue is not a useful symbol for whatever you want to communicate.

e: Let�s not forget the necessary �goons overhype books it is simply mediocre� post we will soon receive

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Nov 19, 2019

# ¿ Nov 19, 2019 06:01

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah the guy who famously went insane, killed his own crew, spent a zillion years locked in sensory deprivation and ultimately don�t read this if you haven�t finished Ninefox died at the hands of his own captors without accomplishing his plan really fits that description. I mean that facetiously, he doesn�t fit at all.

The term has no meaning. It was originally supposed to indicate an authorial self-insert but now it�s been debased into some kind of vaguely litRPG shibboleth for �this character does not fit an arbitrary notion of systemic balance imposed on the story by readers who believe a character�s successes and failures should obey a normal distribution.� When Achilles is a Mary Sue it�s just a useless word. Choose something specific, like, �This character appears to face no consequences for actions� or �this character constantly receives praise in a way that does not feel diegetic to the setting� or �this character seems to be acting out an authorial wish fulfillment fantasy.� Christ why am I awake

# ¿ Nov 19, 2019 08:12

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

Basically, yea.

Mary/Gary Stu is exactly what you said. Perfection in a character that is completely unrealistic to the story.

Noted literary failures and reprehensible Mary Sues: Achilles, Sherlock Holmes, Jesus of Nazareth

# ¿ Nov 19, 2019 16:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Midgetskydiver posted:

Achilles is not a Mary sue. He's a cruel, arrogant, petulant rear end in a top hat that's nearly invincible in battle. He's terrible at everything except fighting.

Yes, this is the point. He�s �obnoxiously perfect at everything,� invincible, wins every fight, people come beg him for help even when he�s being a child, the most special, best at racing, kings need to grovel for his approval. People would blithely call him a Mary Sue because the term is hopelessly nonspecific, a thoughtless Television Trope, a replacement for real thought.

Even the original Mary Sues, authorial inserts in fan fiction, all had dramatic tragic flaws, usually so the canon characters could pity, mourn, or reaffirm them.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2019 18:59

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

sebmojo posted:

Its shorthand for a kind of bad writing, and it's easily falsifiable by pointing out flaws: holmes is arrogant, short tempered and a cocaine addict, for e.g.

I mean you suggested replacing it with a brief summary of exactly what it means. Or you could just use the term.

Apparatchik below does a better job than I ever will of demonstrating why the term�s become useless; I don�t think I have anything else interesting to say on the topic.

Don�t be tvtropes. Say what you mean; don�t rely on vague maybe-unshared signifiers.

Apparatchik Magnet posted:

The previous crying about the internet dude bro Force Awakens complaints faces the problem that their use of the term was perfectly apt, as we didn't see (and still haven't seen) any explanation for why Rey is so instantly much better at this stuff than the novice jedi we've previously seen. If the other movies didn't exist we could just assume that instant supercompetency is a feature of some particularly gifted jedi way out on the right end of the bell curve. But we instead had context that makes that hard to swallow.

You hate to see it.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2019 19:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

A dereyl, so to speak.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2019 20:04

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Full Fathom Five was painful and difficult to write so I�m not surprised some of that comes through in the reading.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2019 01:08

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Clark Nova posted:

What I remember most about Provenance is that I'm pretty sure I caught her accidentally misgendering characters two or three times

I�ve definitely done that despite rounds of beta readers and professional copy edits. Stupid brains.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2019 20:32

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Larry Parrish posted:

i read two necromancers, a bureaucrat, and an elf which was good and probably better than that

I'm having trouble figuring which one is the cook, which one is the thief, which one is his wife, and which one she's loving.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2019 00:20

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

That�s a really cool setting. I wonder how to elevator pitch it effectively. �The world is overrun by monstrous bioweapons and the only way to fight them is to pilot AI-designed squid mechs so monstrous and alien that they devour their own pilots. Protagonist blah blah has only once chance for forgiveness for XYZ, and it�s to become a pilot.�

# ¿ Dec 1, 2019 20:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Ms. Chanandler Bong posted:

I'm into Alastair Reynolds hard kind of extreme sci-fi, like house of suns, pushing ice, revelation space etc. Apart from Peter Hamilton can someone recommend me a similar author and good starting point?

Go read Blindsight.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2019 13:45

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Ah poo poo.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2019 03:27

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It's true, not all views about how to classify humanity deserve respect. gently caress off

# ¿ Dec 20, 2019 19:29

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I guess it's worth articulating, for anyone in the bleachers who's wondering why everyone yelled at the reddit guy, that 'biological sex is real' isn't the problem. Yes, there's a physical sex, and most people do fall in the XX or XY karyotopes. There are developmental consequences of these karyotopes which generally but not exclusively sort into two big heaps, 'male' and 'female'. Those wacky social justice warriors aren't denying this.

What people are rightly angry about is the use of this fact as a dogwhistle to justify hurting or outright killing trans people. It's very important to anti-trans rhetoric that everything be reduced to biological sex: that there be absolutely no way to decide whether you're a man or a woman except your karyotope. (This doesn�t work, since karyotope doesn�t translate cleanly to phenotype, but terfs are normative: they want to protect a core definition from all the edge cases, so they don�t care). If terfs don't have that reductionism to fall back on, they have to admit they just hate trans people. This means terfs will dodge any suggestion that your gender can be determined by anything but an XX or XY karyotope - despite mountains of empirical evidence to the contrary.

Being transgender, identifying as a gender different from your birth sex, is also a biological fact (and, hell, even if it was socially or environmentally determined, who cares? we go to enormous lengths to protect social constructs like marriage or banks; we see them as vital to society and individual freedom). Morgan went to bat for Rowling, who was going to bat for someone who believed trans people should, in essence, be erased: forcibly treated as if they were cis, with no regard to their own wiring or individual will, or to the clinical outcomes this treatment produces (suicide). Both research and basic ethics can tell you this is a terrible idea that harms and kills trans people.

The medically and ethically correct response to someone saying 'I am this gender' is to support their determination, just as the medically and ethically correct response to someone saying 'I am attracted to these (consenting adult) people' is to say 'go for it.' Any appeal to :biotruths:

, to the notion that 'there are only two sexes and all else is delusion', is a dodge. It is a way to hide from the fact that trans people clearly do exist and clearly do benefit from transitioning.

Of course, even if there were only one trans person in the world, the first in history, it's easy to make a purely ethical argument that their identity should be recognized. But that's another post.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Dec 20, 2019

# ¿ Dec 20, 2019 20:40

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Cardiac posted:

When I meant style, I didn�t mean the second person viewpoint but rather the story. Unless leckie for some reason writes everything in second person?
Jemisin, who i have read, is a good comparison to The raven tower, due to similarities in how they setup their stories.

Also, batuta, your description (on the physical book) of the Raven Tower saying it was a mix of Le Guin and Sanderson is perhaps not the best description.

Yeah but it makes nerds want to buy it

# ¿ Dec 21, 2019 18:45

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Cardiac posted:

I am guessing due to the Sanderson comparison and not Le Guin.

Fool!

# ¿ Dec 22, 2019 04:09

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

�I don�t pay attention to gender/race� readers surrender their choice to those upstream who choose which books to publicize and talk about, and, inevitably, end up with shelves full of white men. The prototypic default is a powerful force.

The stats on �race blind� hiring are even more depressing of course.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2019 22:25

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Cherryh is really loving good but all the Cherryh I�ve read is stuff people say not to start with. Cyteen maybe?

I�m still curious whether the military/technological side of new BSG was at all inspired by her.

e: she�s also queer if you�re looking to read more queer authors

# ¿ Dec 25, 2019 06:32

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

JK Rowling

# ¿ Dec 25, 2019 07:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Maybe finished final copy edits on Baru 3 today (don�t do the stupid title joke thread!!) :toot:

# ¿ Dec 27, 2019 22:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The Color of His Jumpsuit

# ¿ Dec 28, 2019 00:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

(it�s orange)

# ¿ Dec 28, 2019 00:07

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 00:21

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

All of this has happened before.

Hey I should read Cosmicomics! It sounds really cool.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2020 01:24

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > SF & F Mega-thread: I had to google 'spock pirate depilatory'

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