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-Blackadder- posted:...yup, as it turns out racism is in fact a subset of everything, nailed it.
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May 4, 2021 15:19
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Agents are GO! posted:That's actually, very concisely, what I was trying get at earlier.
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May 4, 2021 15:42
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lower decks rules and shows how being a worthless ladder climber can exist even in a society without want
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May 4, 2021 17:22
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Comstar posted:Has anyone discussed Peter F Hamilton? Pandora's star is written as that colonialism and capitalism are full of corruption and are bad, but then his other big novels and series are all how the galaxy level super rich are the only good guys/protagonists and the solution to the entire galaxy's problems are always "the hero casts WISH spell". Yea this is pretty accurate, his stuff feels like Game of Thrones, starts off with a whole bunch of big ideas and plot threads, then he loses interest, writes himself into a corner, and just kills off a bunch of characters to tie up loose ends and finishes the whole thing with a magic spell to fix everything. Also seems to really enjoy writing about slutty women getting their come-uppance. Slutty dudes totally cool though obviously, here's another 50 pages about my totally hot awesome quipping hero's zero-g sex cage and all the women who just can't get enough of VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 18:58 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 18:55
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VitalSigns posted:Yea this is pretty accurate, his stuff feels like Game of Thrones, starts off with a whole bunch of big ideas and plot threads, then he loses interest, writes himself into a corner, and just kills off a bunch of characters to tie up loose ends and finishes the whole thing with a magic spell to fix everything. But in judas unchained (?) novel there is a sexy porno lady turned tv journalist who is a major hero and comes out looking good in the end?
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May 24, 2021 23:57
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Haven't read that one, I only read the Night's Dawn trilogy and uhhh
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May 25, 2021 03:45
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Peter F. Hamilton is so close to being actually good that it's in some ways more tragic than if he just sucked straight out. The two structural problems are that his stories end with dumb Deus Ex Machinas, and that's he's too horny for (mostly) legal teenagers, but he writes pretty good plots and has some coherent ideas about future societies. The setting of the Night's Dawn books looks like a standard human interstellar empire, but it's simmer with ethnic tensions between planets of racist hats, corporate exploitation, some decently alien aliens, and the transhumanist Edenist minority. The whole thing is set to boil over into a messy war, when the stupid outside context problem of the dead returning breaks all the interesting parts of the setting and there's 1500 pages of Joshua Calvert hoping around saving the day from gay Satanists. That said, Mindstar Rising are sequels are decent second wave cyberpunk set in an England affected by climate change and recovering from a pseudo-Stalinist Leftist government, where a psychic detective gets involved in corporate intrigues, and which manages to still smell like the future nearly 30s year on. The short story collection A Second Chance at Eden is all the good parts of the Night's Dawn setting, without the cruft. And Fallen Dragon is the second best deconstruction of Starship Troopers after The Forever War.
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May 25, 2021 17:13
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Biffmotron posted:Peter F. Hamilton is so close to being actually good that it's in some ways more tragic than if he just sucked straight out. The two structural problems are that his stories end with dumb Deus Ex Machinas, and that's he's too horny for (mostly) legal teenagers, but he writes pretty good plots and has some coherent ideas about future societies. The setting of the Night's Dawn books looks like a standard human interstellar empire, but it's simmer with ethnic tensions between planets of racist hats, corporate exploitation, some decently alien aliens, and the transhumanist Edenist minority. The whole thing is set to boil over into a messy war, when the stupid outside context problem of the dead returning breaks all the interesting parts of the setting and there's 1500 pages of Joshua Calvert hoping around saving the day from gay Satanists. Yeah that's what I took away from it too. I slogged through the whole thing because the worldbuilding and plot hooks were so interesting that it had to eventually get good and nope. Telepathic living spaceships; nanotech implants; a scientist with a vendetta and her that's so powerful she's under house arrest with guards on orders to kill her if she even talks about how it works; a transhuman geneticist in hiding whose obsessive quest for immortality drove him to commit crimes so heinous everyone knows his name and wants him dead; the ruined planet of an ancient alien race wiped out by some unknown cataclysm! We're gonna get to all that stuff eventually right, and it's gonna be so cool yeah? Nope all shoved to the side so we can spend thousands of pages of "what if Al Capone had antimatter", "the dead are back, and they're horny...but our hero is [i]even hornier[i]", "oh poo poo I've written myself into a corner uhhhh Josh Calvert, sex god, becomes Actual God and waves a magic wand the end."
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May 26, 2021 20:10
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How are y'all talking about setting up a cool premise/world and then totally botching the landing and not talking about Dan Simmons? Olympos was basically a huge series of deus ex machina that made zero sense and in both sets of the Hyperion series the 2nd book entered a terminal nose dive after an awesome first one
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May 27, 2021 02:46
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Alctel posted:How are y'all talking about setting up a cool premise/world and then totally botching the landing and not talking about Dan Simmons? Olympos was basically a huge series of deus ex machina that made zero sense and in both sets of the Hyperion series the 2nd book entered a terminal nose dive after an awesome first one I was attending a Jesuit school when I read Endymion, and let me tell you, that greatly colored my reading of the story. It was kind of hilarious imagining my teachers on starships.
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May 27, 2021 02:52
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Shrecknet posted:into which they can log
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May 28, 2021 05:15
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In 1970 Richard Matheson wrote a short story called "Button, Button". It's been adapted for the screen several times over the years. In it a couple receives a box with a button on it. They're told that if they push the button they'll get a bunch of money, but someone they don't know will die (the hook in the original story is slightly different but w/e). This is presented as a knotty conundrum in which they wrestle with their consciences to see if greed or empathy will win out. In the original story the reward was US$50k. When it was adapted for the '80s reboot of The Twilight Zone the reward was bumped to US$200k, presumably to make it a more realistic temptation for the '80s. In 2009 it was made into the film The Box and the reward was increased to US$1M. I've been thinking about that story a lot lately, because it turns out that if the reward is "you are spared the marginal inconvenience of wearing a mask" a sizeable group of people will enthusiastically mash the gently caress out of that button and will act elaborately surprised if anyone questions their decision. Not really going anywhere with this. Just thinking about the shape of that payout curve.
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May 29, 2021 02:54
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah that's what I took away from it too. I slogged through the whole thing because the worldbuilding and plot hooks were so interesting that it had to eventually get good and nope. Oh yeah, I remember reading that. Al Capone showing up was just so surreal, also all that poo poo about the dead coming back to life. For a time, I was convinced the series would become fantasy or some poo poo, luckily no actual necromancers showed up. In the end, the experience was weirder then reading Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap Cycle, which was basically Donaldson's "Every Protagonist Must Have a Serious Mental Illness", but in space topping Donaldson's writing is not a good thing
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May 29, 2021 04:36
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SubG posted:Illustrated in the Deep Space 9 episode "In the Cards" in which an elaborate series of trades is needed to satisfy Sisko's desire for a rare baseball card, the trades arranged in such a way that everyone gets what they want except Leeta, a "dabo girl" working under contract for Quark. She is explicitly not a beneficiary of the Federation's post-scarcity utopia. At one point it is implied that "dabo girls" are expected to do sex work, and in any case the workplace is bad enough that it's a plot point and the workers eventually unionise. So they're not working for personal fulfillment or whatever. Anyway, she had something that was necessary for the sequence of trades and declined to give it up, so it was literally stolen from her. As in the "good guys" burgle it from her room. The end of the episode has some pablum narrated by Sisko about finding happiness in darkness. This is heard over a montage of everyone enjoying what they got out of the trades. In the middle of all of the images of the more privileged people enjoying what they got there's a brief image of Leeta, in apparent emotional distress and searching her room. The montage ends with Sisko, the guy in charge of the station and the one who sets the rules, embracing his son, presumably to warm everyone's hearts because that's what we're supposed to take away from it all. Sorry to drag this up from months ago, but did you seriously spend this many words (and more posts on it besides) to argue that the Federation Is Bad Aktchully because it failed to stop a pair of mischievous teens from stealing a teddy bear? A crime that it’s not clear that anyone actually noticed, as they could have lied to Bashir about how they got it, and all we see is Leeta not being able to find the bear. Finally, we’ve discovered the foetid black heart at the core of Star Trek.
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May 30, 2021 15:13
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I'd just started the Night's Dawn trilogy but after the posts above I'm thinking maybe I'll put it back down. I also recently read the Hyperion books, and woof did they just fall apart at the end. I can see why the first was a classic, the second was decent but already starting to show signs of crawling up its own rear end. The third was fun enough just from the ever changing scenery while rafting through different worlds. Although the level of heavy-handed contrivance required to get the characters in this super sci-fi future to fall back on a wooden raft as their best option for transportation was a bit hard to swallow. And then the 4th book just decided to throw out basically any interesting plot points or lingering questions to focus on the space hippy magic messiah and, just, ugh. Also the 'twist' at the end was visible from a million miles away and not at all satisfying. And I'm still pissed off that the book never cleared up what the damned Shrike actually was. Anyway, tangentially related to the thread subject, a good series is the Wayfarer books by Becky Chambers. Very enjoyable, character-driven stories. The level of politics involved in them is arguable, and maybe wanes as the series goes on. But there are queer characters and different family structures and alternative pronouns. Enough to piss off a conservative, which is good enough for me. Each book jumps to an almost entirely different set of characters, but they're all fun reads.
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May 30, 2021 18:18
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Comrade Fakename posted:Sorry to drag this up from months ago, but did you seriously spend this many words (and more posts on it besides) to argue that the Federation Is Bad Aktchully because it failed to stop a pair of mischievous teens from stealing a teddy bear? A crime that it’s not clear that anyone actually noticed, as they could have lied to Bashir about how they got it, and all we see is Leeta not being able to find the bear. I mean we already covered this ground back during the months-old conversation you're quoting and I don't think you're introducing any new points, except perhaps the baffling contention that we should give this all a pass because they might have not noticed (implicitly excluding Leeta from being a part of "anybody" who might notice). The argument being that if Starfleet officers are personally profiting from crime we can't regard this as a possible condemnation of Star Trek's model of economic idealism (which is what we were discussing)...because they didn't even notice? I mean even if we accept this it doesn't really help us because the show obviously did "notice" it, and it's presenting these things to us for a reason, to make an argument. So unless we're going to just fail to engage with the material we have to figure out what the show is trying to say, whether it makes sense, and whether it fits in with the other poo poo the show says, and so on. So even if the characters are oblivious to it all we still need to pay attention to this poo poo. And to make a point I made previously: if we encountered this situation in the real world...if you caught someone breaking into your house while you slept, would you just give it a pass if what they were stealing wasn't particularly expensive? If you were basically a dealer at a casino who was expected to do sex work on the side, and your employer was the uncle of the one stealing from you? And the reason they broke into your home and stole from you was ultimately so that the most senior local official could get a loving baseball card? I'd find that loving terrible in any other situation, so the fact that we're asked to write this off--because the "good guys" are the ones ripping off the more vulnerable person, because it's supposed to be funny, because it's supposed to be some heartwarming nonsense about "finding light in darkness" or whatever--that would be bad enough. Like if this was just the show throwing this poo poo at us entirely un-inflected it would still be pretty yikes. But if we're also supposed to accept that the guy at the top of all this is some uber-woke ally to the downtrodden who's an officer in this force of intergalactic nice guys...well, either we have to entirely disengage from what all of this is actually saying or, you know, actually come to terms with what it actually says. And the point that's been made over and over is that not just in this one instance (although it's a good illustration) but consistently we're expected to excuse (or just not think too hard about) the actual implications of the positions being advocated as "good"--both in the diegesis by the "good guys" (like Sisko and Picard) and by implication by the shows themselves.
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May 31, 2021 10:09
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sorry they're not as good as those frere jacques-sining nerds you love so much from the enterprise, but life is messy out here in the REAL universe
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May 31, 2021 15:12
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Didn't the teddy bear belong to Dr. Bashir from childhood, and Leeta just didn't give it back when they broke up? So they were reuniting the bear with his old friend.
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May 31, 2021 17:28
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you're right; we should assume that the bear is sentient
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Jun 1, 2021 02:25
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Rewatched a bit more of STTNG, and  in season 3, episode "the high ground", Dr Crusher literally tells one of the locals embroiled in a war that shes from "a more advanced culture." loving 
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Jun 1, 2021 02:50
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Greg12 posted:you're right; we should assume that the bear is sentient I see somebody's never read the Velveteen Rabbit.....
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Jun 1, 2021 15:40
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It was Julian's drat bear in the first place.
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Jun 1, 2021 19:10
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Do we have any prior evidence of him seeking recovery?
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Jun 1, 2021 19:28
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Bashir says, "Leeta borrowed him, said he was cute, but she never brought him back." Leeta never says anything because she literally has no lines in the episode. There's a cut between Nog and Jake asking about it, and the next scene is (Starfleet cadet) Nog breaking into Leeta's room and snatching the bear from her sleeping arms, doing this creepy thing where he blows in her ears to get her to stir so he can do it. Beyond being creepy and transgressive (in the real world) that's probably sexual assault (because of the Ferengi considering ears an erogenous zone). I really don't want to hear arguments about how sexual assault is not a big deal when someone from Starfleet does it.
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Jun 1, 2021 21:53
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Why couldn't O'Brien just use the transporter to take it?
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Jun 1, 2021 22:32
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SubG posted:Bashir says, "Leeta borrowed him, said he was cute, but she never brought him back." Leeta never says anything because she literally has no lines in the episode. There's a cut between Nog and Jake asking about it, and the next scene is (Starfleet cadet) Nog breaking into Leeta's room and snatching the bear from her sleeping arms, doing this creepy thing where he blows in her ears to get her to stir so he can do it. Beyond being creepy and transgressive (in the real world) that's probably sexual assault (because of the Ferengi considering ears an erogenous zone). e: ugh no never mind I was just mad. Forget it, that wasn't fair.
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Jun 1, 2021 22:48
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Agents are GO! posted:Why couldn't O'Brien just use the transporter to take it?
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Jun 1, 2021 22:50
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One of my pet peeves actually is that a lot of sci-fi that tries to Say Something About Prejudice or whatever usually totally bungle the metaphor by having groups that are in fact categorically different from, or more dangerous than, normal humans as stand ins for minorities/gay people/immigrants, whatever. Being afraid of gay people is baseless bigotry, being afraid of mutants that can read your mind or kill you with a glance seems kind of reasonable. Treating a guy from Honduras differently because he's an immigrant is deplorable prejudice, treating a literal alien from another planet differently less so. The solider episode of Black Mirror imo one of the few episodes that gets the metaphor right: Rather than trying to tell us that aliens or vampires or mutants are Just Like Us, the "enemy" are in fact normal people that the protagonist is made to see as inhuman monsters thanks to his implant. He is prevented from seeing their humanity due to the social structures he is embedded in, and his willingness to commit atrocities against them is a product of that. remembered this tweet from a while ago on the subject: https://twitter.com/flglmn/status/1108541154147090432 I think you could tell a really interesting story about politicians/activists arguing about how regulate aliens or mutants or some other group with clearly dangerous superpowers or whatever in a way that has to balance safety with their rights, but not-making it one sided, (with the pro-regulation side being clearly malicious, misguided, bigoted, etc) would gently caress up the "X as a metaphor for real life marginalized people" theme. Fill Baptismal fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 23:05
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SubG posted:Didn't want to risk a transporter malfunction. Trying to transport a small, inanimate object out of the arms of a sleeping person you'd run the risk of the slightest miscalculation causing irreparable harm to a Starfleet officer's property. Hey SubG, I've been curious, are you a former Trek fan who later came to the insights you've provided in this thread, or did you hatewatch all 626 hours and 31 minutes? I only ask because your knowledge of it is pretty extensive for somebody who doesn't like it. This isn't a sarcastic or "gotcha" question either, I'm just genuinely curious. 
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Jun 1, 2021 23:26
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Agents are GO! posted:Hey SubG, I've been curious, are you a former Trek fan who later came to the insights you've provided in this thread, or did you hatewatch all 626 hours and 31 minutes? I only ask because your knowledge of it is pretty extensive for somebody who doesn't like it. Going in I expected it all to be more or less like the original series: roughly equal parts middle-of-the-road allegorical science fiction (Aesop in space or whatever), pretty good genre entertainment (I still think "Balance of Terror" is a really solid example of 60 minute episodic television), and complete batshit off-the-wall silly poo poo (a dwarf riding Kirk like a horse in "Plato's Stepchildren", Kirk giving a dramatic reading of the Preamble to the US Constitution in "The Omega Glory"). My opinions remained the same after rewatching it. After that we watched the animated series, which neither of us had seen before. I'd almost decided to give it a pass, because it's "non-canon" or whatever, but I was surprised at how much it distills the "Star Trek-ness" of the original series down to its purest form. I've written more at length about the animated series elsewhere, but I won't get into it here--I'm just mentioning it to set the context: the original series was more or less as I recalled, and the first "new" series I watched was better than I was expecting it to be. But then I was just really not prepared for how weirdly evangelical and just...mean the first several seasons of TNG were. Like I'd heard a lot of discussion of the show before, but I'd never heard anyone describe just how relentless all of the xenophobia and so on were. I was also astonished by the number of technical flaws--just poo poo like the lighting on early TNG is just awful. And I won't bother enumerating all the problems I saw with it, but the thing that really got me was it was more or less completely different from what I'd expected. When I first started posting about this--being surprised about the weird smug evangelicalism, hosed up barely-concealed racism masquerading as progressivism, weird sex hangups, and that kind of thing, I got a lot of responses that that was just the first part of the series that was like that, it gets better later, TNG is bad but DS9 is really good, and so on...but that continued to really not be my experience. I made roughly a billion posts about my reactions contemporaneous with my watching of the show(s), and it's possible that that was part of what kept me going--watching an episode and working through an analysis of it just became a sort of daily routine that was its own thing, independent of just doing it to watch the show. If that makes sense. I think that's why I kept going, and it's definitely why I remember so many details of individual episodes. At the time it was just the original series through Enterprise (and I haven't watched any of the newer stuff). That was over 500 hours and it took around two and a half years.
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Jun 2, 2021 00:11
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this thread inspired be to buy the night's dawn series but i was not prepared for how... horny it is can someone please just write some non-horny science fiction
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Jun 2, 2021 00:12
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It's so much worse than even other horny sci-fi like Turtledove's, because Joshua Calvert is so obviously an author wishfulness self-insert Actually it's not even just that, iirc in the opening chapter's of Night's Dawn there's that barely legal nympho girl who serves no real purpose in the plot but Hamilton cannot shut the gently caress up about all the ways she's getting it. I think it's worse than Game of Thrones in that department and that's saying something.
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Jun 2, 2021 00:33
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VitalSigns posted:It's so much worse than even other horny sci-fi like Turtledove's, because Joshua Calvert is so obviously an author wishfulness self-insert Turtledove is a surprisingly good twitter follow
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Jun 2, 2021 11:16
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Harold Fjord posted:Do we have any prior evidence of him seeking recovery? And even if he had, since when is breaking into your ex's home and just taking poo poo while they're asleep the right way to handle it, or sending her boss's nephew to do it or whatever. She wasn't even a psycho violent ex or something that he was afraid to confront and left him no choice, their breakup was amicable and she was written as decent and kind and somewhat naive.
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Jun 2, 2021 11:59
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why..why are the dead so horny? 
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Jun 3, 2021 01:46
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Owlspiracy posted:why..why are the dead so horny? Rigor mortis.
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Jun 3, 2021 02:21
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Owlspiracy posted:why..why are the dead so horny? If we're talking about the Night's Dawn trilogy, it's because they've been trapped together for what feels like eternity, able to see the physical world, but unable to touch it or experience it in any other way than just observation. Thus, when they come back, they go absolutely nuts on idulging themselves.
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Jun 3, 2021 10:42
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Owlspiracy posted:why..why are the dead so horny? Lemniscate Blue posted:Rigor mortis. TLM3101 posted:If we're talking about the Night's Dawn trilogy, it's because they've been trapped together for what feels like eternity, able to see the physical world, but unable to touch it or experience it in any other way than just observation. Living life in the bone zone 
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Jun 3, 2021 14:10
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VitalSigns posted:And even if he had, since when is breaking into your ex's home and just taking poo poo while they're asleep the right way to handle it, or sending her boss's nephew to do it or whatever. Im just wondering why the boys didn't ask O'Brian if he could replicate a copy of the bear ones the boys had it so that both of them could have it. Plus O'Brian would have something he could poke fun at Bashir with.
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Jun 3, 2021 15:23
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Randalor posted:Im just wondering why the boys didn't ask O'Brian if he could replicate a copy of the bear ones the boys had it so that both of them could have it. Plus O'Brian would have something he could poke fun at Bashir with. Replicators can't make gold-pressed latinum, phasers, or unique quest items
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Jun 3, 2021 15:26
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