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GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

It’s Adam Roberts being very Adam Roberts so it’s got great imagination, a lot of playful genre awareness, some bad French puns, and gives the sense that the author got kinda bored with it towards the end. It’s decent.

Fantastic illustrations though, considerably creepier than the novella itself.

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GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
Yang being the focus is poo poo, particularly when there’s plenty of others who were way more involved in going after Fall, but that line from the press about overstating harm is really hosed up. Goes beyond ‘don’t gang up on one of our authors, something something healing’ into ‘the whole Fall thing wasn’t that bad, you’re exaggerating’. They didn’t need to say that.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

mllaneza posted:

This is an excellent novel by the way. Lavinia is namedropped in the Homeric/Virgilian epic, but is never present as a character. LeGuin uses her as a main character to tell much the same story. It's a true epic and has a great mix of day to day life in the period and the sweeping scope of great events that changed the course of history. It's not :eGuin's usual style, but she's more than up to it. Highly recommended.

Yeah Lavinia is incredible. It’s for sure not her usual style but if anyone liked what she was doing in Tehanu or the later Earthsea books, this is to a large degree that only even better executed. I think it might quietly be her best book or at the very least a late career masterpiece.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
I’d second these feelings on Murderbot. They’re fine, good light fun, but not on the level of even Wells’s own Raksura books.

Not read the novel though, so maybe it all hits different at that length.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

MockingQuantum posted:

I can't think of a single instance of a writer returning to a character or setting or series after 10+ years away from it and actually producing something worth reading, or that adds anything to the existing body of work. I'm sure there's an exception or two that prove the rule though.

LeGuin would be a gold star exception. Came back to Earthsea after nearly twenty years with an attitude of thoughtful self-critique and reframed the whole thing with the later books, for the better.

In general though I’d agree.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

Sarern posted:

I finished it a few days ago after seeing someone else talk about it in TBB. It was fantastic: excellent prose, cool stories, interesting world. I need to find out if any of the author's other books have been translated to English.

Kalpa Imperial is great and Trafalgar might be even better. Just this middle aged Argentinian raconteur who may or may not have a spaceship telling stories about being a travelling salesman over coffee. Really charming stuff.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

StrixNebulosa posted:

I'd class it similarly to Mary Gentle's Ash so far, but definitely less grimdark/conspiracy-y. But that same mixture of history/not. I'm also feeling like the ER Eddison trilogy "Zimiamvia", what with the huge amount of footnotes and the almost historical feel to it despite being Not Real.

This sounds dope, that was one of my favourite things about Ash.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
God’s Demon owns, Barlowe is an incredible artist and pretty good writer who clearly loves his Milton. There’s a nice contrast between hell as seen by the infernal aristocracy - refined, political, not even all that cenobite-y - and as seen by the labouring underclass of souls - oppressive, brutal, a place where you are literally turned into living building material once you’re not considered useful labour.

Could also try The Descent by Jeff Long. It’s mostly underground monster horror but it’s god a fun sideline in “what if the image of Satan was an exaggeration of a real guy but also he’s still alive in the depths of the earth”, done in a kind of airport thriller style. It’s got a weird energy, a lot of grotesquerie, and just swings for the fences.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
If we’re covering comics as well, then Evan Dahm’s The Harrowing of Hell is excellent. Kind of a fantastical Christian anarchist-inflected take on the gospel of Mark, Dahm runs with that whole Rome/imperialism/domination/the State/prison set of images for Satan, hell and demons. In a sense it’s not new ground but visually it works wonders even on the use of colours alone. I like how the circlet of oak leaves comes off like horns.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

anilEhilated posted:

Based on the Amazon blurb, this could be either really great or completely terrible. Anyone else read that?

It’s alright. It’s a prose translation and a loose/abridged one at that - if you’ve listened to Dolan at all or read his journalism, you’ll know what to expect - but there’s worse versions of those out there and he doesn’t go easy on the ultraviolence. Dolan leans heavily into the whole ‘mob family‘ portrayal of the gods’ brutal family dynamics, though mercifully he doesn’t go as far as e.g. Marian Headley’s Beowulf in that regard.

I’d still pick something like Fagles’ verse translation over it but for something short and easily readable it’s not bad.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

Stuporstar posted:

I just started reading Browulf, and find myself enjoying the hell outta it despite some of the most eyerolling memey word choices for some poo poo

I’d totally be up for more poo poo like this, if it’s actually poetic about it

Ah, those eyerolling moments turned me off it entirely, felt like a bad SNL bit riffing on Hamilton. It's a shame as Headley's a good writer and I liked The Mere Wife, good hosed up stuff.

Dolan isn't poetic tbh. Generously it's pretty stripped down, some of which is him and some of which is Homer. There's that thing about the main qualities of Homer being his 'rapidity, plainness, directness, nobility' and, well, Dolan gets the first three.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
It’s a bizarre article. Sanderson and his crowd do come off as deeply weird but the writer comes off as not sure how to engage with any of it and just falling back on a sloppy nervous snarkiness.

It’s also weird because there’s so much more critical stuff you could write about Sanderson and his work. The Wonderbread nature of the style, the relationship to video games, the conscious MCU-ish approach to easter eggs and such, the attempts to franchise it out to other writers, the huge kickstarter and odd publishing setup, the aggressively culty fanbase of redditors, the whole tension between Sanderson making the occasional gesture of support for LGBT folks vs donating millions to the LDS. And this author just visits Utah and does a twitchy anthropological reading.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

General Battuta posted:

weird elf horror

This is actually more compelling in a grotesque way than the stuff you see brought up sometimes about how it’s the deepest exploration of nihilism ever, you guys. Still not in a rush to read it but dope.

Re: Throne of Bones (which owns), I got similar vibes from parts of Jeff Vandermeer’s Cities of Saints and Madmen, especially the first story. Similar 19th century-feeling setting, grotesquerie, grubby black humour, etc.

Also Blood Meridian, maybe, though it’s less… gleeful.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

MockingQuantum posted:

On the subject of Susanna Clarke, how is The Ladies of Grace Adieu?

It’s good! The title story is the best, clever and fun and plays off some of the ideas in her first book. If you liked how Lady Pole and Stephen Black were as important as Strange & Norell, if not more so, then you’ll like this.

She’s got a few different styles in the other stories, one with 18th c. spellings (decent story though she doesn’t sell it as well as her regency stuff) and one set in the same universe, I guess, as Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. That one’s a lot of fun, same whimsical fairy tale style with a bit of extra stuffiness from the Duke of Wellington.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

BurningBeard posted:

So what sci-fi or fantasy books have exceptionally good/interesting treatments of religious faith?

Breath of the Sun by Isaac Fellman is good. Maybe more about the lines between faith and community, when that community is sort of a minority ethno-religious group, and what it is to be pushed to the edge of that community. Much more Orthodox or even Hasidic Jewish-inflected than the usual run of big Christian theology questions sci fi or fantasy but as well written a treatment of faith as I’ve come across.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

General Battuta posted:

Ash A Secret History (AASH?) is fantastic though very grim though not ridiculously grim.

It kind of frontloads the grimness. Some horrible and bluntly conveyed child abuse/sexual assault stuff in the first page or two, and then nothing anywhere near as bad for the remaining thousand (!) pages. It’s weird, like Gentle was trying to weed readers out or something.

Re: Armed in Her Fashion, I dunno. I think the claims of snarkiness are a bit overstated, it’s certainly not, you know, Whedonesque or anything. Might not be as bleak throughout or reach the heights of intensity but a lot of it is quite similar in tone to the middle sections of Between Two Fires: the statues, the hallucinatory castle.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

anilEhilated posted:

Ash is a fantastic book but I really wish it wouldn't spend so much time on the siege when the second plot kicks into overdrive. A lot of those parts could be cut with little loss, in my opinion.

Definitely. Great book, could probably cut 20% or more without having any serious impact. It’s structured as a single book but you’re really mainlining the equivalent of a trilogy.

And yeah, haven’t come across much which does that slow-burn unnerving appearance of an alt-history scenario as well as it does. I think for quite a while it’s all normal except for the occasional casual reference to Jesus being crucified on a tree (a cross, a tree, fine), which then turns into mentions of ‘green Christ’, and then it snowballs from there.

The big villains are a cool concept and it’s a bit surprising no one else has tried a similar idea, or not that I’ve come across.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

Kestral posted:

If I wanted to read the Mabinogion and whatever the definitive collection of Irish mythology is, whose translations into English should I be looking at?

Lady Gregory’s collection is effectively the definitive collection of Irish mythology and is freely available online through the likes of Gutenberg. The recent print editions by New Island are very nice but as HA said, not cheap depending on where you’re getting them.

That said, she was writing at a particular time and in a particular context so while these are the versions of the story most 20th c. discussion of the myths refers to, they’re a bit sanitised. No discussion of Cu Chulain literally squeezing the poo poo out of a guy in a bear hug (though this guy recovered and was one of the very few to face him and live) or of how one of the notable attributes of the Dagda, the chief god, being his short tunic and huge hairy rear end.

Moreover her style is… it’s weird. It’s extremely flowery Victorian, which can come off as attractively stiff and arch sometimes in a Jack Vance way, but also trying for a certain kind of Irish voice. Sometimes that works, sometimes it strays into an elaborate stage Irishness. She was (upper class Protestant ascendency) Irish herself but it came from trying to write in the voice of the pure noble-hearted romantic rural Gael, or whatever. The kind of approach Synge and O’Brien parodied later.

The best approach would be to try out one of the free online versions and see if her style works for you. Otherwise, you might find Over Nine Waves better, by Marie Heaney, wife of Seamus and a notable editor in her own right. It was consciously trying to be an update to Gregory as a ‘go to’ collection and it’s a lot more readable imo, if a bit stripped down.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

Kestral posted:

Are there go-to texts for getting the least-sanitized versions possible? I dearly love the parts of mythology and folklore that are just bizarre to modern sensibilities, and part of my interest in Irish mythology in particular is that from what little I know of it, it seems chock-full of that stuff! I'd love to get as much of the Old Weirdness as possible. Does Over Nine Waves fit with that, or should I be looking elsewhere?

Eh, kind of? It doesn’t completely gloss over it but it’s sort of matter of fact. Completely get what you mean about that weirdness though. You might like ‘Ireland’s Immortals’, it’s more of a study of the history of how Irish mythology has been thought of and interpreted over the centuries, and touches on the weirdness.

You might also like Ciaran Carson’s penguin classics translation of the Táin, keeps in all the black humour and ultraviolence. Also there’s a bit where the footnotes discuss the homoerotic qualities of the relationship between friends/bedmates/deadly rivals Cu Chulainn and Ferdia. Cu Chulainn’s famous spear is the Gae Bolg and the translator muses on how, in the context, perhaps it could be considered more of a “Gay Bulge”, if u will

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

zoux posted:

I'm reading Anno Dracula which is basically League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of gothic horror characters, it's cool when one of the protags ends up in a room with Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist, Moriarty and Col. Morel from Sherlock Holmes, Griffin from the invisible man and Fu Manchu from Racism. The premise is that Dracula won, put Van Helsing and J. Harker's head on a pike in front of buckingham palace and married the widower Queen Victoria and rules the UK as Prince Consort. Seems cool! Apparently Dracula isn't actually in it much so it's more about the way the society works when half the people decide to become vampires (also vampires are a bit weaker than we're accustomed to and easier to kill) and the framing is an ancient vampire and an alienist teaming up to track down "the Silver Knife" who is Jack the Ripper but he only kills vampire Whitechapel ladies.

It’s fun alright. I remember some stuff about Dracula lounging around the throne room with his enormous dick just flopping about.

Didn’t read the other books but there was a short story in the same setting about Francis Ford Coppola filming his Dracula, now based on the events of Anno-Dracula, but in this world it’s basically his Apocalypse Now, with disastrous set problems and Brando playing the titular character. I think Newman discovered the same thing as Alan Moore, that there’s a kind of addictive fun just shoving all these fictional characters into your setting, like Game Master Anthony

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

WarpDogs posted:

Just finished The Night Land: A Story Retold, which is exactly what it sounds like: it is the 1912 version of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, only updated with modern writing conventions. I read the first few chapters of the original and can vouch that the story is nearly identical in both structure and tone

I found the original absolutely inscrutable, even in audiobook form, so I'm glad this "remake" exists

What’s the remake’s style like? Is it very plain or interesting in its own right or…?

I’m in the same boat, found the imagery of the original compelling but the language weird and ungainly and self consciously archaic, even compared to his other works. But then that archaism was probably part of the effect Hodgson was going for so I’m wondering if you’d lose something with it being dropped.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

WarpDogs posted:

Here's an excerpt, which I think captures what the rest of the book is like:



and then here's one during a small horror scene:



This works pretty well for me, thanks!

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

shrike82 posted:

just finished adrian tchaikovsky's city of last chances and was pleasantly surprised by his take on "fantasy". i've always seen him as a hard SF guy
the book reminded me of perdido street station in many ways

would anyone have books reccos on baroque urban fantasies in the vein of the two abovementioned books?

KJ Bishop’s The Etched City is a good one. Also Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen, though the tone swings back and forth between the stories that make it up.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
One of the nice things about the Terror show was how they turned that Evil Gay into one of the more compelling characters while still having him be a horrible little man

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

Megazver posted:

I hate to say this but (please don't ban me) amid all the bullshit, whining and bigotry the Puppies had a point about Scalzi getting awards mostly because of his social media and industry clout, not because his recent books are actually good.

This is pretty fair really. The Puppies didn’t win because they were all truly poo poo authors… but Scalzi’s never been great. I’m pretty ok saying that he is where he is more because of his place in the early 00s blogging space and stance as a fixture in the SF writers community than because of any real chops as a writer. And in fairness to him, it’s not like he hides any of this, he’s pretty open about the need to churn stuff out and being guided by commercial realities.

Not just on his recent books either, I mean Redshirts won both the Hugo and the Locus and it’s just… not even actively terrible but just a tossed off Star Trek parody. Like a middling Futurama episode with a snarky Whedonesque meta element.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
I get why Old Man's War was popular in the early 00s, as a mildly liberal response to Heinlein with a lot of quipping, but the scale of the positive response was weird. Like you already had prominent works like Armor or The Forever War doing stuff in that milsf space for decades, and Scalzi's offering didn't feel so much in dialogue with them as doing what they did in a rougher, more adventure story way.

Tbh I think that may be a product of, well, SFF's occasionally short memory of itself? Or maybe a better way to put it would be the relatively short lifespan of most books in the consciousness of the readership (which is always going to have tons of people coming into it afresh, that eternal september thing). The other example that comes to mind is how everyone was raving about Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice in 2013, for how it played with gender and pronouns. It certainly did that well and interestingly (though I thought the portrayal of soft imperialism via constant tea ceremonies was actually cooler) but it was sold and discussed as the big unprecedented thing.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

Qwertycoatl posted:

I was disappointed in goblin emperor because I went into it expecting court intrigue but everyone had his best interests at heart except the people who openly hated him

Same, everyone’s so nice to him and trying their best. There’s some lovely stuff about dealing with trauma and accepting things - that prayer he comes back to is nice - but it means it falls down with the revolutionary anti-monarchy villains. The book seems to get that they have a point but then it’s like they can only be portrayed as dumb and soooo crazy

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

MockingQuantum posted:

I'm realizing I read very little that came out in 2022 but a friend of mine that reads everything says he thinks the biggest crimes of omission in the nominees are Spear Cuts Through Water and All the Horses of Iceland. I have Spear Cuts etc and have heard I should try to go into it blind, but anybody read All the Horses of Iceland and have opinions on it?

It’s very nice. There’s not a huge amount going on in terms of plot but Tolmie does a good job mimicking the stark, matter of fact style of the Icelandic sagas. Makes for a nice voice from the protagonist, he’s this blunt Viking merchant - not a Badass Warrior or anything in that vein - who is neither particularly surprised or phased by any of the fantastical stuff that occurs.

RE: Hugotalk, that’s a very weak novel list, though perhaps unsurprisingly.

The novellas too are a disappointment. Continues the trend of only Tordotcom novellas being acknowledged to any real degree. They put them out in quantity, they market well, they’ve contributed significantly to the form becoming a going concern again but still, sad to see a single publisher dominate so much:

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
Just finished the second book of goon favourite Graydon Saunders’ Commonweal series, A Succession of Bad Days.

Definitely niche in its appeal though what I enjoyed more than the weirdly hard sci-fi approach taken to a military fantasy setting with socialist/egalitarian themes - which is all cool - was the language. Opaque, awkward, difficult, all pretty reasonable I think but in fairness Saunders seems to be stretching his legs with it, even compared to the terseness of the first book. It’s like this is the opposite, lots of interesting stream of consciousness stuff, elisions, emic descriptions of characters’ emotions as seen by the awkward, fatalistic, mildly curious narrator.

Maybe sometimes hard to tell the difference between repeated odd quirks and genuine stylistic experimentation? I think it’s conscious and cool, just maybe not sustained over c.500 pages, like it sometimes comes off as a tic even if it’s deliberate. Occasionally blurs the lines between character voices too, unfortunately.

Overall though I like it. Prob not the first person to say this on SA but it’s fun to have something that could be so staid and conventional - self-published military fantasy with detailed magic stuff - actually work out as pretty weird in its themes and style.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

thotsky posted:

All of the Discworld novels make fun of "one thing". The early ones just choose Conan and contemporary fantasy rather than, like, hooliganism or computers or whatever.

Yeah, he shifts from outright parodies of sword & sorcery novels or rock biopics to broader satires about war or revolutions or the media, and is better for it.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

FPyat posted:

https://www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/2007/07/the-new-weird-a.html

I found myself going back to the forum conversation back in 2003 where Alastair Reynolds, M John Harrison, Jeff VanderMeer, and a bunch of others got into the thick of it figuring out just what this New Weird thing was, and whether their own work defined it. Feels odd to have so many big names in a forum together, visible to the public. Quite the meeting of the minds. I wonder how much brainstorming like that has been going on recently that I'm not privy to.

It’s a really fascinating discussion. There was a good article that looks at it, contextualises it in the publishing scene of the day, the British SF boom and so forth: http://www.bigecho.org/nothing-beside-remains

What I found most interesting was

(i) how central Harrison was as an inspiration and, I guess, theorist to at least the British arm of the New Weird, despite being pretty down on it. He’s also not necessarily thought of as part of that scene in the same way as your Mievilles and Vandermeers.

and

(ii) how loving catty they all are. It’s Real Posters Posting at each other. I’ve had my ups and downs with Vandermeer, disagree with some of what he’s getting across here, but you can see where some of his later snippiness about British authors comes from.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

Good post. I liked a lot of McCalmont's stuff. He was often pretty acerbic but the quality was there.

Agreed about that whole blogging scene. You're probably right that ultimately the numbers game meant its influence was going to fade (or was illusory to begin with) but I'd also put that decline to the increased intertwining of marketing, reviews and similar that accompanied twitter becoming the 'main' space, which brought with it, or maybe just foregrounded, a different and more 'positive' critical culture. Could also be a British vs American critic thing too, you can look at the reaction to the Clarke awards 'Shadow Jury' in 2017/18; a lot deeper and more outright critical than many other critics and that seemed to get a lot of "if you can't say anything nice..." pushback.

But yeah, just on numbers, in retrospect I guess it was unlikely that capital N New capital W Weird was ever going to be a tidal wave.

Lex Talionis posted:

But I guess it worked out because I got to deploy my Comic Book Guy-style knowledge of the genre and felt like a valuable friend since I recommended him a book (Senlin Ascends) and he loved it. It never occurred to me to mention "New Weird" to him or even use it myself to think about recommendations, though looking back I did come up with Steph Swainston as one of the suggestions.

That's cool! Tbh it's the obvious comparison but Senlin Ascends reminded me of Gormenghast, so obviously well before Mieville, Swainston and co. Feels like it takes the pressure off a little when you don't have to situate it in a larger genre history but also don't have to just fall back on a broad "it's fantasy but not knights and dragons".

Marshal Radisic posted:

As it happens, there was a recent piece by Moreau Vazh which caused a stir by looking at the recent attempts to make "cozy horror" a thing and drawing similar conclusions McCalmont did. I don't think his argument entirely holds up for the decades between the emergence of the New Wave and the turn of the millennium, but his discussion of the evolution of genre culture from the year 2000 to the present complements and expands McCalmont's argument.

Agreed on the patchiness of some of his timeline but it's a good article. His pointing out of the defensiveness and wagon-circling behaviours of at least a bit of the Very Online SFF Authorship in the years after the whole puppies thing is spot on.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
That is as perfect a match between IP and author as you’re likely to get. Loves his amputations.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:

I really need to check that series out.

On a semi-related note, I’m re-reading The Scar right now (because lol OceanGate) and god drat Mieville’s descriptions of the dark depths of the ocean are properly terrifying. Anyone got some refs for other books that explore the deep sea?

Starfish has already been recommended and I second the heads up about darkness, it makes Blindsight seem like a cheerful romp.

I quite liked Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea. More weird/horror than SF, very much in the Annihilation vein, and maaaybe it would have been better as a short story or novella but it’s good. Sort of 50:50 between the undersea stuff and the ‘collapsing relationship of someone who came back from below the sea’.

Also Caitlin R. Kiernan has written a few stories about creepy ocean stuff. ‘Our Houses Under The Sea’ is great and tbh kind of does at least some of what Armfield was going for better and in half the space. It’s in their Very Best Of collection. (boy howdy I wish they hadn’t gone off the reactionary deep end in the last, like two years)

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

StrixNebulosa posted:

Can you elaborate on what’s up with Kiernan? I love their writing but haven’t looked them up in a while.

They started talking about ‘woketards’ and the importance of ‘expunging marxist-Leninist doctrine/indoctrination from the US educational system by any means necessary’. That and retweeting stuff by the head of Britain First, a self-declared fascist party. Examples here but tbh it’s also glaring if you look at their livejournal for the last while: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1666159533872349184.html

It’s really poo poo, I love their writing too, probably my favourite author working in the Lovecraft-adjacent space so it’s really disappointing. And for it to come from someone who’s been the target of transphobia for decades… Yeah. They’re a palaeontologist and it seems to have started with stuff about ‘attacks on science by SJWs’ and descended in a predictable manner.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
Yeah it’s a bummer. One of those ones where I don’t think there is/was really any indication in the writing. But still.

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

HaitianDivorce posted:

Ministry for the Future is probably overly optimistic, but I don't think it comes from a liberal faith in our governing institutions. Instead it always feels like it comes from a humanistic sense that we can do better than this, we can make a better world, even if our governing institutions stand in the way of that right now.

I've not read it but this sounds in line with some of his other work. I recall some centrist/liberal pearl clutching around the time of Ministry for the Future's release because the good guys are doing eco-terrorism!

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

TOOT BOOT posted:

I personally think even pre-9/11 Simmons is extremely overrated. I actually went so far as to delete his books from my Kindle library because I couldn't imagine myself ever wanting to revisit them.

I think you could see the brainworms there already, for decades before. Song of Kali is super loving racist about India and that was written in the 80s.

And yeah, I liked Hyperion but the second one was a step down and then all the Hyper Evil Catholic stuff in the 3rd book but without the camp you get in 40k or 2000AD… Actually I think there’s something in how hysterical or fevered he was in imagining his future church that carries through to his later xenophobias.

EDIT: not to say that contempt for the Catholic church is the same as racism or homophobia, it’s just the way Simmons writes about it seems to come from a place of real fevered disgust, like he’s so mad that he’s about to break his pen. And that seems to characterise a bunch of his work, sometimes in the form of screeds, sometimes just in the emotion behind the screed leaking through.

GhastlyBizness fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Jul 29, 2023

GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus

Awkward Davies posted:

Sure, but if someone said “hey, you should watch Babylon 5. George W Bush loves it” wouldn’t that influence the way you saw the show?

It might but it probably shouldn't. Musk and Bezos both love the Culture books but Banks wouldn't have pissed on them if they were on fire.

I get what you you mean, if it's Obama saying this is an Important Book, but like, ideas formed about the Culture books based on Musk and Bezos enjoying them would be pretty far off. Or Bush and Babylon 5.

GhastlyBizness fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Jul 29, 2023

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GhastlyBizness
Sep 10, 2016

seashells by the sea shorpheus
Space Marine owns. All the weird poo poo that makes it so gonzo and hosed up are exactly what seems to make it unpalatable to a lot of modern 40k readers. It’s too homoerotic, it’s too scatalogical, it’s too campy, the characters aren’t heroic/grimdark enough, it’s not a good lore reference, it’s not canon.

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