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Took me a helluva time to catch up with the thread, so I'm belatedly joining in on Spider Robinson. Robinson was huge in SF in the 70s to 80s and wrote some quite decent stuff (the novella of Stardance, later turned into a less impressive full-length book). But then there was Callahan's Crosstime Salon, a sprawling collection of stories and books. I figure it emerged writing from a lot of quick stories for magazines, where he could regularly write any sort of story and just set it at this one bar. Featuring: * Everyone in the series is traumatized, a survivor with a dark past, who has overcome it. The narrator always reminds the reader that he's at the bar because he changed his own car brakes to save money, resulting in his wife dying in a fiery accident. Fans on Usenet would regularly joke about how pain and suffering will only make you stronger. * Aliens invade earth (multiple times) and are stopped by the decency and cleverness of the bar customers. I recall one lot of aliens stopping to comment how cool and empathetic everyone there is. Another time a killer robot shows up and decides to abandon it's mission and just become another barfly. * The "youngster" (you get the idea that the main characters and Robinson himself are aging hippies) who was shooting up drugs but the love of the drinkers at the bar saves him and he's added to the cast. * Somewhere in there, Robinson wrote a book about Callahan's wife, who inevitably runs a brothel where the same sort of stories take place. And instead of drinking, it's sex that fixes everything. Even fans thought this was pushing things a little far. * In between all the tales of trauma, it periodically descended into dad jokes and pun-fests. What was it about all those old authors and puns?
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Sep 23, 2020 11:14
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:45 |
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Cobalt-60 posted:Eye of Argon is just another mediocre Conan ripoff; the only thing that makes it interesting is that (presumably because the author realized this and wanted to be Different), they ruthlessly plundered a thesaurus, then re-wrot every sentence to be as purple/stilted as possible. And failed. The author of EoA had been identified. I think he wrote it when he was 16? He was pretty defensive about the story. But you have to chuckle at lines like "a many fauceted scarlet emerald".
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Sep 23, 2020 21:20
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:Aren't a lot of those young adult trilogies fantasy? You know, the kind that get turned into fairly bland movies. A huge number. It seems to be the default career plan for any budding author: write a YA fantasy/ sci-fi trilogy. Can't fault them since, for a while, every studio was looking for the next Twilight or Harry Potter and 'it could be my turn' would be tempting ...
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Nov 1, 2020 17:02
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ExecuDork posted:Anyway, Anthony is a mess, and Spider Robinson lost his goddam mind when he switched from critiquing the work of others and started writing his own stories. Spider Robinson always seemed like an archetypal Californian dude from the 70s, who never really evolved past that point. A story might be set on Mars in 2150, but actually it feels like Redondo in 1973. He was perfectly aligned to the zeitgeist at one time but it's no longer that time. And so you get endless iterations on the Callahan's stories that read like they're 50 years old. And The Sparrow? Read like trauma porn to me.
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Mar 10, 2022 16:26
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Mad Hamish posted:Getting back to plain old bad fantasy, while I loved the Pern books when I was younger the later ones got really one-dimensional with villains who were just evil for the sake of evil, and the one book of her son's I tried to read was so egregiously awful I stopped something like two chapters in. Some other SF writer once wisely commented that the good guys in Pern are so unassailably impeachably good, that it leaves the villains with nowhere to go and no arguable motivation. So they end up just being evil.
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Mar 21, 2022 13:08
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Comstar posted:With the recent news (how the hell did this take 20+ years to come out?) that the author of the Empire of the Petal Throne was a complete Nazi supporter (including being editor of Nazi-Monthly-Magazine), if you go back through his works, are there any hints or things that stand out as "oh THAT explains it"? In a world of fantasy that was basically minor variations on Tolkien, Petal Throne / Tekumel was something very different and strange. In a way, it was a hindrance because the world was so weird and it's own thing. How Barker got from Urdu and converting to Islam to white supremacy is anyones guess. nonathlon fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Mar 21, 2022 |
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Mar 21, 2022 16:11
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Empty Sandwich posted:Ed Greenwood is the creator of the Forgotten Realms and Elminster is sort of his pet creation. Greenwood used to have a series in Dragon magazine where Elminster would show up to talk to him about stuff happening in the FR. that's all fine. Right. I have the impression that Elminster started as "just a guy" that could be used to narrate scenes or give an infodump, an NPC that showed up to drive the plot along. But powercreep ended up making him absurdly awesome until one of the D&D revamps knocked him down to being an enfeebled and deluded geriatric.
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Mar 30, 2022 13:04
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:45 |
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Comstar posted:I remember reading several Thieves' World anthologies back in the '80s. The ones I recall all involved a pretty generic fantasy city that was Fantasy-Beirut at the height of the civil war. And an ongoing joke that you could tell the mercenaries from everyone else because they were the ones sitting with their backs to the wall. Every time someone walked into a bar, this was the first comment. Thieve's World was an anthology series much like Wild Cards - hatched by a band of writers lead by a central figure, starting with some decent authors writing decent stories, but over time suffering bad power creep, and the series becoming dominated by a small set of hack authors. I recollect some of the original stories were done by award-wining authors. But I got tired of the books about 3-4 in, then some years later found something like volume 10 and read it, spending most of my time bewildered as to how they managed to get to the situation within from the stories I'd read.
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Apr 3, 2022 21:57
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