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I think the biggest barrier to the culture series getting a film adaptation is that the portrayal of (mostly) utopian anarchism is utterly foreign to TV and cinema. Only thing less likely to get an adaptation is The Dispossed
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Sep 14, 2020 18:32
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Are there any good, pulpy sci fi books which aren't like super racist or something. noir will do as well
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Sep 16, 2020 17:47
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Corla Plankun posted:Company Town by Ashby fits this description I think and I liked it Archduke Frantz Fanon posted:I liked A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe, which is a mystery and one of the main characters is a has a lovely office in a rundown city! Thanks will try these, they look good
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Sep 17, 2020 08:12
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haveblue posted:didn't protestantism only happen because henry viii wanted to divorce his wife it was already a thing, he made his own flavour to get a divorce but I don't think he got on with the various continental protestants
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Sep 21, 2020 21:33
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There's a great line in one of the wolf hall books which is something like "Whether Catherine of Aragon lost her virginity to her first husband, or her second, will forever remain a mystery"
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Sep 21, 2020 21:34
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my stepdads beer posted:i looked this up and it's an anne leckie. did anyone here like ancillary justice because I thought it was super boring with a gender gimmick to make people think it was brilliant writing. also everyone's names were super confusing I thought it was great, at it's best when it was focusing on stuff other than the gender themes, where it could get a bit fourth wall breaking (not that they were bad, just that it was most eye-opening when it wasn't in your face). I loved all the stuff about the main characters identity. Sequels were very meh.
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Oct 1, 2020 12:57
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Achmed Jones posted:this reminds me- is Ursula leguin actually good at writing? like on the spectrum of [heinlein, Asimov, mieville, banks-jemisin, bradbury*], where does she fall? She's extremely good, although I think for the most part the Earthsea books as a whole are her most polished works. She has been very influential as well, multiple other books contain "Ansibles" and the first part of Ancillary Justice is one big homage to her. She consistently does this thing where she juxtaposes strange and alien things to the everyday - the opening paras of the left hand of darkness are a good example.
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Oct 18, 2020 07:50
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indigi posted:Octavia Butler goes in that gap I think I read one of her books the other day and it was both pretty well written (for sci fi) and had an awful lot of weird sex stuff (not that the ideas weren't interesting - ideas about power and consent were obviously very important to her)
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Oct 18, 2020 07:51
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:this is some straight up legal calculus poo poo, "let's try it and if it works we'll essentially argue it as precedent for a 'use it or lose it' style approach where the burden is on the writer to enforce the contract not us to respect it, and if they don't, we claim they've abandoned the work" It seems pretty bad but will be immensely funny if there have actually just been 0 sales
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Nov 19, 2020 12:07
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I met Craig Charles as a kid once backstage at robot wars. He obviously didn't want to be there (neither did I, I was like 11 and wanted to see the robots)
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Nov 21, 2020 11:32
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Schadenboner posted:Re-listening to A Memory Called Empire (Martine, 2019) a couple thoughts: I thought it was ok. It felt really weird that there were like 10 people and 2 city blocks in the whole universe though
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Nov 25, 2020 20:41
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-level terrifying to me and I can't understand how it's so blithely popular in the genre.
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AnimeIsTrash posted:Moore, Ennis, Gaiman, and co were the best and worst thing to happen to comics in the 90s. The Sandman is the only comic I've managed to read more than a couple of pages of. I actually enjoyed the art and the weird comic book dialogue wasn't quite as off-putting as normal
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Nov 28, 2020 09:05
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I still don't understand how they select words to bold in comics though
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Nov 28, 2020 09:05
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Sagebrush posted:one of george lucas' dumbest decisions of all time was to make "the clone wars" be a proxy war fought between the jedi-supported clones and sith-supported robots instead of the far more straightforward jedi vs. army of clones story we all assumed it was before 2002. I actually think that could have been an interesting decision - the "good" clone armies become the "evil" empire as the season progresses, and are revealed to be forces of occupation and oppression which sprung from good intentions.
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Jan 2, 2021 14:21
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rjmccall posted:imo: against a dark background, inversions, matter, player of games, surface detail, and the algebraist, probably in that order. i also really like feersum endjinn but that’s to a peculiar taste My favourite thing about banks is that he really engages with the idea that other beings could be radically different in all sorts of ways from us, not just humans with green skin and extra wrinkles. Not all the time, but much more than other writers. Solaris is a great book for the same reason
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Jan 6, 2021 10:51
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That was surface detail, I agree it was a bit excessive, although the concept was interesting and troubling. I do think that it's worthwhile exploring the idea that other forms of being might seem unimaginably cruel compared to us, or see us as being so. Banks also looks at this in some other book where the aliens are predators I think.
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Jan 7, 2021 13:01
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indigi posted:does anyone listen to any science or science news podcasts, especially physics/astronomy/cosmology based? anything good out there? nothing focusing on the pandemic if possible I would also like recs here, also for biology/climate/ecology, also excluding radiolab. So far I've found: - In Our Time has some science episodes. Sometimes these focus more on the history of science but they are always good. This is the only one I actually enjoy listening to physics topics on, way less bs and more knowledgeable guests than most places. - For ecology and biology Outside / In is interesting and fun. Recently they've take a pretty hard turn towards social issues, which they are perfectly good on (the series on Canadian hydro is great), but if you're looking for more nature focussed stuff start with their older episodes. - Costing the Earth, occasional BBC climate change podcast. Pretty good with some interesting topics and it doesn't suffer too badly from BBC brain. - Dirtbag Diaries had an occasional series called endangered spaces which I enjoyed. - RSPB podcast and Just the Zoo of us are both pretty bad but I struggle for content elsewhere - Vox did a good series on meat farming on future perfect, and the Ezra Klein show climate episodes are also good, although both are quite political (in a good way). I used to be pretty big on carbon tax and dividend, ala people's policy project, but this convinced me that while in a perfect world that would be good it's too late and industrial policy is the way forward
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Jan 10, 2021 10:08
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I've just started watching the TV adaption of A Perfect Spy and one of the actors is called "McAnally" lol (the book is incredibly good)
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Jan 22, 2021 08:54
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Kenny Logins posted:netflix lets you slow it down a bit which can be helpful for learning too. by coincidence i got a recco from a family member for "call my agent" in the original parisian french Call my agent is pretty good, I've been enjoying it (also using it to improve my French!)
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Feb 23, 2021 19:07
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Casual Encountess posted:lupin on netflix was good for that I found the tone on Lupin a bit weird, it tools some getting used to. It would jump between kinda serious, and insanely dumb constantly
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Feb 23, 2021 21:40
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Casual Encountess posted:i can understand that. its funny for me because i grew up watching the lupin anime whereas my partner grew up reading the original original books so its kind of a unique intersection of taste for us I didn't realize there was an anime, it makes a lot more sense now...
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Feb 23, 2021 22:03
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indigi posted:I'm reading Ministry for the Future. it starts out with a heat wave in India in 2024 that kills 20 million people. pretty bleak so far! I quite liked that book, there's a lot of interesting stuff in it, and some great lines. The bit where some ecoterrorists kidnap everyone at Davos and make them watch educational films about the climate crisis and the attendee is like "we weren't stupid, we already knew all this" made me chuckle pretty hard. I also think that he's a bit optimistic about the problem - a lot of the solutions in the book are fairly technocratic or about bending international capital to our will. I feel like the actual material changes in people's lives necessary to fight the climate crisis are enourmously unpopular though and are the real obstacle, even if they seem trivial compared to the magnitude of the crisis! distortion park fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Mar 2, 2021 |
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Mar 2, 2021 08:27
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I really don't get the hype about three body problem. The premise is interesting enough and the first book is ok at times, but so much of the plot is insanely dumb and feels very calvinball
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Mar 11, 2021 07:52
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The clearly defined factions and cheese wire ship trap were one thing, but "super powerful sub atomic particle sized drone which can control people's minds" took it to another level
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Mar 11, 2021 08:05
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Achmed Jones posted:y'all are really spoiling poo poo for three body problem, it's kind of a dick move There's like one interesting reveal and the rest are super groan worthy, mostly done by thinly disguised exposition dumps
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Mar 11, 2021 08:07
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NoneMoreNegative posted:Stars are stars, they are ultimately predictable - Apes, you take your eyestalks off them for a millenium or two while you make a coffee and they are knocking on every sphere in the galactic arm wanting you to join their Federation with ideas about 'sharing'. Yeah no, anything makes a Hello World signal that you notice, you make sure they never leave their system with extreme prejudice just in case. I think this kind of assumes that alien life is at least a little bit similar to us. Thinking about something like Solaris - whose to say their form or motivations are even understandable by us?
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Mar 11, 2021 08:41
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mediaphage posted:yes no poo poo otoh (what we consider) intelligent life has definitely evolved once, and it would be super weird if that was the only case. Most things in the universe appear in vast numbers, so I'd kind of expect life too as well. Of course, there's always a biggest black hole, most stable orbit, but it would seem weird if intelligent life was a singular event.
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Mar 12, 2021 19:38
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Improbable Lobster posted:time and distance mean that even if life is super duper ultra common we're probably just too far away from anything to meaningfully interact with it Imagine just detecting it though. What would that do to society? Are there any short stories about us detecting something like the arecibo message. I feel like it has the potential to be super frustrating as well as cool.
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Mar 12, 2021 19:47
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Carthag Tuek posted:no, sadly this is completely unexplored in fiction I was asking for examples of that specific thing, not suggesting it doesn't exist
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Mar 12, 2021 21:55
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mystes posted:I may be misunderstanding what you're saying, but it seems like subtitles are almost always separate translations from dubs for whatever reason (and it also seems like they're usually worse because people who like subtitles have bad opinions or something). Properly done subtitles take account of timing and available space when considering the translation - dubs have different requirements, so result in different translations. IDK why they're normally bad, I suppose studios cheap out since none of their executives are going to see them normally.
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Mar 29, 2021 18:54
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Whole article is very good. I'm surprised it doesn't discuss Surface Detail, that seems like the book which addresses the topic most bluntly.
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Mar 30, 2021 20:04
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"Skywalker" is both a cool name which also sounds like it's from a slightly racist novel about Native Americans
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Apr 12, 2021 16:24
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In the most recent "You're Wrong About" podcast ep they have some really awful quotes from just 20 years ago. Bill O'Reilly said "These are callow, foolish women who deserve to be slapped around", they have some other media dude just being insanely mean about them being fat for whole paragraphs, it's crazy. Also somehow the band called "The Dixie Chicks" were the least racist people in country music.
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May 4, 2021 14:57
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https://twitter.com/JackTindale/status/1400770143559553027?s=19 God I loved that film
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Jun 5, 2021 11:27
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Casual Encountess posted:also i just finished the fortune trilogy by rachel bach and i enjoyed way more than a lot of the other newer scifi i read. lots of representation but not cranked to 11 and not nearly as quippy so it felt nice. Thanks, will check this out
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Jul 2, 2021 07:40
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we read The Inheritors which was impossible. I actually enjoyed the crucible and stuff, it's pretty snappy even on the page. I went to a production as an adult and it was really great irl
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Jul 23, 2021 09:02
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Sweevo posted:you guys actually got to read real books? my school was all lovely 80s paperbacks about "issues". we had to read dozens of the things, but the only ones i remember were one about a homeless boy with some stolen money (also he's dyslexic but it's only mentioned maybe twice in passing when the plot needs it), and one about an indian family in the uk and the entire thing is just repeatedly hitting you over the head with the teenage daughter's angst at having to decide between the modern western life her friends have and the repressed subservient one her parents expect it's true most fiction doesn't try and tackle the issues that you encounter in modern life
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Jul 23, 2021 18:40
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lament.cfg posted:the only thing i remember appreciating in high school english was Raymond Carver's Cathedral, and that put me onto Carver, who's my favorite author to this day Carver's great, wish we had read him at school. I took a look at the english gcse list and there's some good stuff there, although the modern prose list is all over the place. lol at The History Boys being an option. https://schoolreadinglist.co.uk/tag/gcse/
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Jul 23, 2021 18:48
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Trabisnikof posted:also in the usa almost anything that deals with modern issues gets banned by the school board because either it describes something bad or describes something bad as bad depending on which part of the country it is. i think the most "controversial" we stuff i read in the uk was some steinbeck. Which was actually a really good choice because it's very approachable and readable, but is absolutely full of things to discuss.
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Jul 23, 2021 18:57
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Shaggar posted:the worst things i remember having to read in school were silas marner and excerpts from walden. both were litterrally unreadable trash i also did not enjoy silas marner.should have left that for when students were older
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Jul 23, 2021 18:58
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