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

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FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Finished Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. Like the book it's a prequel to, the book is rather long yet feels like it had a shorter, simpler plot when I recall it in my head. The aliens didn't capture my imagination like the other book's Tines did, just superficially too much like 1950s Americans. And yes, I am aware of the metatextual angle that explains it.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2020 20:55

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 21:32

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

BurgerQuest posted:

I need more space opera... good or bad?

I've read my way through everything Peter F Hamilton, Alistair Reynolds, Neal Asher, Iain M Banks, Beck Chambers, Peter Watts, James S.A. Corey etc have written, in the last year or two.

Any recommendations for other works with some scale and half-compelling characters? Perhaps a few truly alien species?

Vernor Vinge and David Brin are the other Hugo-winning go-tos. Cherryh and Bujold don't do aliens in their space opera settings, I believe.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2020 18:02

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

freebooter posted:

What was the deal with Simmons again? He became a Trump supporter or something? Or was it more alt-right than that?

He wrote a singularly absurd story about a time traveller who goes back several decades to... snidely explain at a guy that Islam will devastate the world and he's a chump for not supporting the Iraq War and Israel hard enough. A Christmas Carol but Ebenezer is haunted by the ghost of hardliner neocons.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2020 06:52

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

gvibes posted:

Finished the two Alistair Reynolds Revenger books. Very solid. I probably hadn't read a book of his since House of Suns ~ ten years ago, which seems to have been an oversight.

I believe the third book was published about a month ago.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2020 20:35

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

pradmer posted:

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett - $1.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W9399S/
Is his first book even worth getting?

TCoM is Pratchett at his zaniest and least serious. I rather like it, and it also happens that this book and the book after it covers in most detail the whole 'giant turtle' part of the setting.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2020 01:13

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

pradmer posted:

Revelation Space (Inhibitor #1) by Alistair Reynolds - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0819W19WD/

I don't think I've read anything that makes space feel so vast and empty as this. Even the other books in the setting dial back on it, like it was a fluke of Reynolds' inexperience.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2020 05:53

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Finished reading Titus Groan. Author has a truly remarkable eye for the little details that pop out, and dialogue that matches each character with absolute precision. The question of whether to categorize it as fantasy is a bit puzzling, it almost feels like it should be counted as magic realism despite the lack of supernatural elements.

Speaking of big castles, has anyone gotten a chance to read Susanna Clarke's new Piranesi?

FPyat fucked around with this message at 12:38 on Sep 8, 2020

# ¿ Sep 8, 2020 12:36

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

quantumfoam posted:

A new SFL Archives readthrough summary is up, no idea anymore how long it will take before finishing off SFL Archives Vol 11 or how many more readthrough update posts will be required.

Sorry, but where is this blog of yours?

# ¿ Sep 18, 2020 04:19

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

quantumfoam posted:

-Someone tries to critique and tear down how the fog of war & situational awareness affected real life battles like Waterloo 1815, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and General Sherman's 1864 March to the Sea. Only by the 3rd paragraph it's clear that Avalon Hill wargaming rulesets and ONLY Avalon Hill wargaming rulesets are being used for the critiques of these IRL battles. It is hilarious to read, especially when other SFLers respond back.

Oh god, you have to show this to the milhist thread.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2020 09:07

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Almost midway through Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. I'm enjoying seeing all these science fiction ideas written at such an early time, I don't know of an earlier story of rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse. The authors opinions on Jews were very eye-rolling to put it lightly, so it's good that the book escaped from having any connection to current society at the point I'm reading. He also makes lynching black people a hallowed religious rite worldwide, pretty WTF.

FPyat fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Jan 6, 2021

# ¿ Jan 6, 2021 16:01

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Partway through 2010 by Arthur C. Clarke, I'm noticing that it shares elements (primarily the doomed Chinese expedition) with Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds. I wonder if there was an intentional tribute.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 11:18

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Llamadeus posted:

I've definitely seen it repeated before, but it's far from being an overwhelming consensus.

The last three are also often considered to be weaker from what I've seen. (Okay this is actually probably just confirmation bias on my part)

I think they all had more engaging action-adventure plotlines than the earlier books. Surface Detail in particular I enjoyed because of the number of viewpoints.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2021 02:51

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Has anyone read The Rig by Roger Levy? I was entranced by the cover in the shop but didn't buy it.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2021 03:02

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

I've read eight out of nine stories in Exhalation, Ted Chiang's second story collection. I'm coming out of these stories a lot more impressed than I was with Stories of Your Life, which had well-constructed stories that felt a bit lifeless in the final accounting.

# ¿ Apr 5, 2021 16:56

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

I finished Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. It had some nifty ideas, and it's cool that he had an Asian woman captaining a ship all the way back in 1966, but in the end didn't live up to the same standard held by other Nebula winners. I do intend to go back to the author in the future, though.

(I did like how it did its language exploration more than I did Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang)

# ¿ May 1, 2021 16:24

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

The next Revelation Space book, Inhibitor Phase, has been delayed to October 12, 2021. Really disappointed.

# ¿ May 10, 2021 13:48

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

I started The Ministry for the Future, and was weirded out when I searched the book for 'nuclear' and found that the book basically does not mention nuclear power. Pro or anti, it should at least be discussed, surely?

# ¿ May 23, 2021 12:24

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Has anyone read The Golden Age by John C. Wright, The Last Legends of Earth by A.A. Attanasio, or the Neverness books by David Zindell? All have lots of enthusiastic and negative reviews, which makes it really uncertain whether I should give them a chance. People throw out Gene Wolfe comparisons a lot, which could either be a good or a bad thing.

FPyat fucked around with this message at 09:50 on May 25, 2021

# ¿ May 25, 2021 09:17

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Just read Light by M. John Harrison. A bit like The Fifth Head of Cerberus in being three novellas with connections to each other, although there's more of a through-line. Like Fifth Head, it suffered from me liking one story (the spaceship adventure) more than the other two. Found it hard to read for some reason, though I can't identify anything wrong with the writing, but the whole book ended on a triumphant note. Don't know if I'll pick up the sequels.

(A user review describes it as "a Gigeresque indigestible fusion of Robert Rankin with JG Ballard")

FPyat fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Jun 12, 2021

# ¿ Jun 12, 2021 14:33

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Maybe I shouldn't be too curious but, what are David Brin's shittiest political opinions?

# ¿ Jun 23, 2021 02:26

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

minema posted:

Hmm, is it grimdark? I bought it ages ago and want a good escapism book to read

It's definitely as violent as you'd expect from period warfare - it's just light-hearted about it.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2021 03:32

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Marshal Radisic posted:

I used to hang out on an alternate history forum in the mid-2000s, and Turtledove and S.M. Stirling were just about the only authors anyone ever talked about in the media subforum. From what I remember, it feels the whole appeal of Turtledove's stories was in sifting out the minutiae, arguing about it, and using it as the base for one's own creative projects. The novels were overlong, often repetitive, and generally not that good, but for fans they were always more appealing as a minutiae delivery system rather than as narratives in their own right.

Occasionally Turtledove could hit on an interesting concept. That "Timeline 191" sequence takes the stock alternate history of the Confederacy winning the ACW and just lets the consequences play out over the next eighty years as North and South fight again and again and both are drawn into the European alliance systems that cause the world wars. The execution isn't great and too often falls back on blatantly copying actual history (I suspect part of the reason Turtledove ended the sequence after that world's version of WW2 was because the political situation would be so radically different that there's no way you could copy the events of the Cold War and have anyone believe them), but the premise is sound.

Stirling was later banned from alternatehistory.com for saying (I recall) that he would kill all Muslim males if given the option to do so.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2021 03:18

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

freebooter posted:

I've been sick recently so have been comfort re-reading nostalgic favourites, and I also re-read Philip Reeve's Railhead trilogy - Railhead, Black Light Express and Station Zero - for the first time since it came out a few years ago. It's a really fun planet-hopping YA sci-fi trilogy about a thief who gets embroiled in a major heist in a galaxy where interstellar travel is done on sentient trains that go through teleportation gates. Highly recommended.

Have you read the Mortal Engines books?

# ¿ Jul 28, 2021 01:55

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

I see "cultivation story" and I think "doesn't Anna Karenina have a lot of cultivation?"

# ¿ Aug 11, 2021 03:24

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Anyone read Thunderer by Felix Gilman? I rather liked the other book of his that I've read.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2021 13:08

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

I've tried and failed to read New York 2140 twice. I probably should give it another chance, though, because I hear it has an attempt to write a realistic anti-capitalist revolution outside the typical Marxist ideas.

FPyat fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Aug 21, 2021

# ¿ Aug 21, 2021 11:20

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

What's J.G. Ballard's best novel?

# ¿ Aug 30, 2021 11:40

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

StrixNebulosa posted:

Foreigner Series

- Foreigner is a series set up in trios.

The concept is that a human colony ship got lost on its way to its destination, and through a string of events it drops colonists on an alien planet and they settle and make peace, then war with the natives, and we enter the story centuries later. The humans live on a humans-only continent and interact with the aliens through a diplomat-translator who lives with the aliens. His name is Bren, and he will be your pov character for the next 20+ books.

I recently had the displeasure of reading a Goodreads review of Foreigner that sniffily condemned Cherryh for, like too many female SF/F writers, having an outmoded and inept focus on the interior psychology of its characters, violating 'show, don't tell.' I checked the guy's other reviews, and yeah, he doesn't have the most enlightened views towards books that feature the experiences of GSM.

PawParole posted:

https://twitter.com/ToughSf/status/1435987718975197186

https://twitter.com/nyrath/status/1436010987086286853

if you know what the projectrho website is, thats the guy who made it

gently caress.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2021 03:04

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

The Futurological Congress has an incredible amount of puns and wordplay that only work in English for something originally written in Polish. I wonder what the translation process was like.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2021 16:07

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Thinking about Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson again. I believe that it would have been less contrived if the colonization attempt had been made unviable by the extremely unsuitable day/night cycle rather than a deadly disease.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2021 05:01

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

freebooter posted:

I also don't understand why a weird day night cycle would be an insurmountable obstacle. Humans survive in e.g. the Arctic just fine.

Good point. I think I was particularly intimidated by their long day because my body has a very negative reaction to changing sleep cycles.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2021 03:25

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Another Dirty Dish posted:

Finished Hummingbird Salamander and honestly I�d probably skip it if you�re on the fence. It�s basically a dystopian detective novel set in the near future, the narrator abandons her family and career for the thinnest sketch of a mystery, and the final reveal just isn�t big enough to justify the rest of it.

Made it through KSR�s Red Mars (third attempt I think?) - it gets better after they actually make it to Mars and start spreading out from the initial base. Funny how things like watching live TV seem so quaint now after just a few years of streaming/on demand services.
Any opinions on Blue/Green Mars?

Sax really comes into his own as a viewpoint character in Green Mars. I'm iffy on Blue Mars but it gives some semblance of emotional closure to the characters.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2021 14:31

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Kesper North posted:

Just finished Inhibitor Phase.

Pouring one out for the good but extremely naughty ship Nostalgia for Infinity

Captain Brannigan's full backstory is Revelation Space's biggest potential prequel novel.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2021 05:35

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

General Battuta posted:

I had an occasion to Comment On Progression Fantasy recently and basically my beef with it is that we live in a world where the high modernist program of "let's map and quantify how everything works then use that causal map to figure out how to value human labor + optimize human society" has turned catastrophic, because (predictably) our schema of what to value turned out to be wildly wrong, and gaming the system turned out to be much more successful than playing fair.

I've been holding off on reading Seeing Like a State for far too long... want to learn more about the Soviet famines before I delve into it.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2021 12:27

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

General Battuta posted:

There's a very minor detail in the Hannu Rajaniemi novels about Mielikki activating 'combat autism', a kind of altered cognitive state for fighting. I always wondered what autistic people might think of this. I'm not fishing for condemnation or validation, I would just be interested to hear.

Kind of like Focus in A Deepness in the Sky. Vinge never used the "A" word, but it's pretty clearly on his mind. I have autism and I rather liked how he ended the plotline with one of the Focused characters.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2021 15:41

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

A Carly Rae Jihad posted:

Too Like the Lightning posits a world in which everyone�s concerns, motivations, and conflicts can be understood through the lens of some offshoot of continental enlightenment philosophy. It�s the sort of book only a Byzantine historian and classicist could/would write.

I could never imagine Harry Turtledove writing such books.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2021 16:05

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Kalman posted:

So I finished Perhaps the Stars tonight and I�m incredibly impressed with how well Palmer brought the story to a close. Yes, it�s definitely written by a prof with serious interest in Renaissance literature and all that, but after (what I felt was a somewhat weak) Will to Battle I wasn�t convinced she had an end in mind. She definitely did, and it�s satisfying closure and incredibly well written.

Is space colonization involved?

# ¿ Nov 27, 2021 14:34

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

How is Twoflower racist I didn't get the memo.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2021 16:10

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

All this talk of the implications of LitRPGs reminds me of the infamous post made by the author of Viriconium and Light.

M John Harrison posted:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader�s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn�t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn�t possible, & if it was the results wouldn�t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder�s victim, & makes us very afraid.

These observations will be of interest only to generic fantasy readers & writers. They do not form an integrated piece. They were written as notes, or emails to other writers, in separate attempts to clarify my position. They contain repetitions & restatements, & while there is some steady movement towards a set of conclusions, I�ve made no attempt to turn them into an article. The element of provocation has been left in.

Responses to the original posts, mostly negative & some more anxious than others, are numerous & can be found by Googling �M John Harrison +Worldbuilding� or anything similar.

When I use the term �writing�, here or in the original posts, I am not referring to prose, but to every aspect of the process.

When I make a distinction between writers & worldbuilders I am making a distinction not just between uses of a technique, but between suites of assumptions about language, representation & the construction of �the� world as well as �a� world.

When I use the term �worldbuilding fiction� I refer to immersive fiction, in any medium, in which an attempt is made to rationalise the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it �logical in its own terms�, so that it becomes less an act of imagination than the literalisation of one. Representational techniques are used to validate the invention, with the idea of providing a secondary creation for the reader to �inhabit�; but also, in a sense, as an excuse or alibi for the act of making things up, as if to legitimise an otherwise questionable activity. This kind of worldbuilding actually undercuts the best and most exciting aspects of fantastic fiction, subordinating the uncontrolled, the intuitive & the authentically imaginative to the explicable; and replacing psychological, poetic & emotional logic with the rationality of the fake.

I am aware that something describable as worldbuilding goes on in the representational genres, and in even the most minimal of �mundane� fictions; the strength of my position depends on that awareness. I see no technical distinction between the worldbuilding of the representational writer�the travel writer or memoirist�& the worldbuilding of the fantasist. I have a certain amount of experience with both; & a fair amount of experience of sailing back & forth across the line between them. I agree to some extent with Aldous Huxley�s description of fantasy as �foreign travel of the imagination�. The distinction I would make between the two kinds of worldbuilding is in a sense Baudrillardian. But though I see fantasy worldbuilding as parasitic on its quotidian cousin, I also see it as not much more than a matter of the kidnapping & abuse of some techniques which don�t, recently, have much dignity even in their proper place. It�s no big deal until you get behind it to the ideology. After that it becomes important but not in the context of writing fantasy fiction, see below, Notes 3.

Notes 1: Being & Simulating

Some of it is a matter of aesthetics. I think Katherine Mansfield could �build a world� in thirty words & a couple of viewpoint changes, & that Chekhov could cram more into four thousand words than Dickens got into three hundred thousand.

But much of it is a matter of ideology. The whole idea of worldbuilding is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It�s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world�s a watch & God�s the watchmaker. It reveals the bad old underpinnings of the humanist stance. It centralises the author, who hands down her mechanical toy to a complaisant audience (which rarely thinks to ask itself if language can deliver on any of the representational promises it is assumed to make), as a little god. And it flatters everyone further into the illusions of anthropocentric demiurgy which have already brought the real world to the edge of ecological disaster.

My feeling is that the reader performs most of the act of writing. A book spends a very short time being written into existence; it spends the rest of its life being read into existence. That�s why I find in many current uses of the term �active reading� such a deeply ironic tautology. Reading was always �active�; the text itself always demanded the reader�s interaction if the fiction was to be brought forth. There was always a game being played, between writers and readers (for that matter between oral storytellers & listeners), who knew they were gaming a system, & who were delighted to engage each other on those terms.

Worldbuilding is the province of people who, like Tolkien, actually resist the idea it�s a game, and have installed their �secondary creation� concept as an aggressive defense of that position.

The worst mistake a contemporary f/sf writer can make is to withold or disrupt suspension of disbelief. The reader, it�s assumed, wants to receive the events in the text as seamless & the text as unperformed. The claim is that nobody is being �told a story� here, let alone being sold a pup. Instead, an impeccably immersive experience is playing in the cinema of the head. This experience is somehow unmediated, or needs to present itself as such: any vestige of performativeness in the text dilutes the experience by reminding the reader that the �world� on offer is a rhetorical construct. All writing is a shell game, a sham: but genre writing mustn�t ever look as if it is. This seems to me to ignore the genuine sleight-of-hand pleasures of conjuring in favour of a belief in magic, a kind of non-writing which claims to be rather than to simulate.

Notes 2: Bandwidth

I�m interested in how worldbuilders construct the real world. How do they describe the process of writing & reading about it, for instance ? Do they envisage writing as a kind of camera, which allows them to photograph London�or cheese�or a giraffe�& pass the picture to the reader, who then sees exactly what they saw ? For that matter, would they describe photography itself as an objectively representational process ? Perhaps they would, and perhaps that�s one of the main reasons why worldbuilding fantasy strikes one as so amazingly Victorian a form.

You cannot replicate the world in some symbols, only imply it or allude to it. Even if you could encode the world into language, the reader would not be able to decode with enough precision for the result to be anything but luck. (& think how long it would take!) Writing isn�t that kind of transaction. Communication isn�t that kind of transaction. It�s meant to go along with pointing and works best in such forms as, �Pass me that chair. No, the green one.�

Writing does something else. It not only invites but relies upon reader-participation. Writing and reading are complementary aspects of the same process; much of what appears to be the work of writing is in fact done by the reader in the act of reading. While the writer takes advantage of this, making implications & inviting the reader to do the rest, the worldbuilder�lonely & godlike & in control of (or attempting to be in control of) every piece of footage retrieved from her obsessive creation�induces dependency in the audience, then discovers in the subsequent delirious spiral of self-fulfilling prophecy an excuse to take even more responsibility out of their hands. God�s in her Heaven & all�s right with the �world�.

It�s control-freakery on a scale that reminds you instantly of the other kind of worldbuilding�the political kind. That�s why I am �very afraid� of worldbuilders. They tend to be quite managing, even in real life.

Notes 3: It�s All Down Here in Black & White

The transaction we talk about when we talk about reading goes on not between the writer & the reader but between the reader & the text. The writer (as opposed to the worldbuilder) plans for this inevitability, presenting a spread of more or less �possible� interpretations tied to the themes & meanings of the story, and allowing�or perhaps impishly not quite allowing�for the cultural library & types of interpretative tool any given reader might bring to the text. In this view, any reading, of any kind of fiction, is emergent from the interaction of more variables than can be defined or consciously managed by either writer or reader. There seems to me little point trying to deny that this happens whether, as the writer, you encourage it or not. Any other view of the writing/reading process is at best idealistic & at worst contains an appeal to telepathy (the idea that I can somehow pass my vision to you without mediation, the ultimate paradoxical utopia of the representational).

The writer�as opposed to the worldbuilder�must therefore rely on an audience which begins with the idea that reading is a game in itself. I don�t see this happening in worldbuilding fiction. When you read such obsessively-rationalised fiction you are not being invited to interpret, but to �see� and �share� a single world. As well as being based on a failure to understand the limitations of language as a communications tool (or indeed the limitations of a traditional idea of what communication can achieve), I think that kind of writing is patronising to the reader; and I�m surprised to find people talking about �actively reading� these texts when they seem to mean the very opposite of it. The issue is: do you receive�is it possible to receive�a fictional text as an operating manual ? Or do you understand instead that your relationship with the very idea of text is already fraught with the most gameable difficulties & undependabilities ? The latter seems to me to be the ludic point of reading: anything else rather resembles the�purely functional�act of following instructions on how to operate a vacuum cleaner.

Since a novel is not an object of the same order as a vacuum cleaner, and since the �world� a worldbuilder claims to build does not in fact exist in the way a vacuum cleaner exists, why would you want to try & operate it as if it was one ?

In fact you wouldn�t, unless you were already experiencing confusion about what is functional & what isn�t.

This aspect of the contemporary relationship between readers & fiction is complicated further by the fact that, prior to any act of reading, we already live in a fantasy world constructed by advertising, branding, news media, politics and the built or prosthetic environment (in EO Wilson�s sense). The act of narcissistic fantasy represented by the wor(l)d �L�Oreal� already exists well upstream of any written or performed act of fantasy. JK Rowling & JRR Tolkien have done well for themselves, but�be honest!�neither of them is anywhere near as successful at worldbuilding as the geniuses who devised �Coke�, or �The Catholic Church�. Along with the prosthetic environment itself, corporate ads & branding exercises are the truly great, truly successful fantasies of our day. As a result the world we live in is already a �secondary creation�. It is already invented. Epic fantasies, gaming & second lives don�t seem to me to be an alternative to this, much less an antidote: they seem to me to be a smallish contributory subset of it.

The piece that began all this, �What It Might Be Like To Live In Viriconium�, has been up at Fantastic Metropolis for at least five years, maybe longer. It was written in 1996, and originally published in a British print fanzine in 1997. The notes on which it was based were made as early as 1992. Since 1992, the feeling I had that this was an essentially political issue, & not really much to do with epic fantasy or Tolkien movies or gaming in themselves, has only grown. That�s what I meant when I said at the end of my �licensed settings� post that I wouldn�t write Viriconium again, or write an article like �What It Might Be Like To Live In Viriconium�.

As we emerge from the trailing edge of postmodernism we begin to see how many of its by-now-naturalised assumptions need challenging if it isn�t to become as much of a dead hand as the modernism it revised into existence to be its opposite. The originally vertiginous and politically exciting notion of relativism that underlies the idea of �worlds� is now only one of the day-to-day huckstering mechanisms of neoliberalism. My argument isn�t really with writers, readers or gamers, (or even with franchisers in either the new or old media); it is a political argument, made even more urgent as a heavily-mediatised world moves from the prosthetic to the virtual, allowing the massively managed and flattered contemporary self to ignore the steady destruction of the actual world on which it depends. This situation needs to change, and it will. At the moment, the fossilised remains of the postmodern paradigm (which encourages us to believe three stupid things before breakfast: firstly that we can change the real world into a fully prosthetic environment without loss or effort; secondly that there are no facts, only competing stories about the world; & thirdly that it�s possible to meaningfully write the words �a world� outside the domains of imagination or metaphor, a solecism which allows us to feel safely distant from the consequences of our actions) are in the way of that.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2021 20:06

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 21:32

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Kchama posted:

I was being nice and generous since that's just an even worse take.

His books have things like made up geography and sociopolitical systems and stuff, so he's not going so far as to say you literally shouldn't set your story in a world. I think what he's rejecting is the "world-building" as a deeper writing philosophy.

a foolish pianist posted:

When I think of good world building, I think Perdido Street Station, where all the world building stuff is directly in service of the story (even though there�s a lot of it!).

I remember there being frequent one-off things just there for fun that never had any specific importance in the same book, like the Ribs and the allusions to foreign nations, or the particular's of the city's political parties.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2021 02:23

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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