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precision posted:ah right. I tend to lump all pre-90s sci fi into one big pile, and forget that the guys in the 50s were even worse If you think it was bad in the 50s, check out some stuff from the generation before that. Ah, this reminds me of a gloriously wonderful moment from an old Edmond Hamilton story. "The Star-Stealers". This thing was written in the late 1920s, Hamilton was one of the foundational space opera writers. We didn't know about how stars work by nuclear fusion yet. So it's a hundred thousand years in the future and humanity has colonized the entire solar system, have an advanced culture with very little recognizable from our time, and is part of a wider galactic civilization with many many aliens; we contribute starships to the common space patrol, to keep peace and justice across the galaxy. So there's an extragalactic threat with tentacle monsters that try to steal the Sun because their own sun has gone out. Now the story follows a human-crewed ship, and one of the few named (and surviving) characters is a young female flight officer... amazingly, for something written in the 1920s, she's described as being exactly as tough and competent as the men, and I don't think the author even wastes a word on describing her appearance (not that he spent much on any of the characters, each of them was just there to do a job in the story). But. However. At the very end, once the tentacle monsters are defeated and the survivors get to go home for a victory parade and some well-deserved R&R... she heads straight to a beauty parlor, as is ever the unchanging way of her sex. I died laughing.
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Mar 29, 2022 11:22
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Cornwind Evil posted:
4b) Really. You are not Nabokov. Don't. n+1) Don't be a loving Nazi either.
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Mar 29, 2022 11:23
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Random Stranger posted:Gene Wolf is an author who every time I read something by him I wonder why I don't read more of his books. One of a handful of authors who, when I read them, make me feel simultaneously very smart and also very dumb. (Others in that category include Borges and Eco. None really belong in this thread.)
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Mar 30, 2022 19:17
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I'll admit to having enjoyed the first few Dragonlance books, when I was like 15 or so. Belgariad, same. Probably wouldn't push either series on my own kids, there's better stuff easily available now.
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Mar 30, 2022 23:15
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ExecuDork posted:A pulp sci-fi formerly-two-volumes-now-one-900-page-monster probably written in the late 70's or early 80's by some author I can't remember. The whole thing is set a couple of centuries in the future. In book 1, the protagonists gradually learn that a large number of Nazi scientists and politicians escaped from Germany at the end of WWII and launched into space, and established a colony somewhere. I can't remember exactly where, but among Jupiter's moons is the leading contender in my memory. In book 2, the descendants of said space-Nazis return to Earth and try to invade and Take Over The World! The Space-Nazi strategy is basically a Deathstar, but instead of detonating Alderaan they're going to land the fucker in the Atlantic ocean and unleash many, many Stormtroopers. You know, as is the obvious strategy in these kinds of things. Oooh, this sounds familiar. Except the way I remember it, it wasn't Earth but some colony planet (mainly colonized by Finnish people?) and I think the Space Nazis weren't OG Nazis but some kind of neo-Nazi revival movement. I kind of want to say early Kevin J Anderson, but that could be wrong and he's shat out so many books it's hard to find a complete list even on the Internet.
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Apr 1, 2022 20:17
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ExecuDork posted:Entirely possible! Yeah, I did finish those books and I think you made the right move. Way implausible misery porn/villain power fantasy. (There's a fourth book too, which is basically a Terminator riff, where a heavily genetically engineered Draka from the further future gets zapped into our present-day (as of the 1990s) reality.) Stirling was a guilty pleasure of mine for a while, he can string words together and tell a pretty good story, but his authorial tics and personal (and rather ugly) convictions tend to show through (sometimes just a little too much, sometimes entirely too much). The least-bad thing he wrote is IMHO the "Island in the Sea of Time" trilogy, which has the late 20th century island of Nantucket transported back in time to the Bronze Age and deals with poo poo from that point on. Survival first, then civilization-building... one thing he did do right was to portray the Bronze Age native humans as being just as smart and adaptable as modern humans. Also must confess to rather enjoying the way the main conflict in that gets resolved, when the main evil bad guy from our time, trying to build an evil industrial empire in Europe, makes the mistake of underestimating the cleverness and ruthlessness of this one Achaean petty king who happened to be the real-world inspiration for Odysseus. That got him and all of his nearest collaborators very very dead.
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Apr 4, 2022 10:35
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