Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
The "What Are You Reading" Thread
Posts
I find it a bit too limiting in many cases to say that someone is a good or a bad writer. For Simmons, it's more like he has the capacity to write good books, but that doesn't mean that all his books are automatically good.
He's very ... inconsistent. He can writer some brilliant shit but it almost always seems to be mixed in with some bad writing too.
What, really? Who supposed that? The first two at least have some cute ideas; the 3rd is basically just mean.
Going to jump into The Alloy of Law next.
Heard mixed things, some that it just tries a bit too hard to cram in every nerdy reference it can and others that it's a genuine love letter to the culture.
Looking forward to getting into it though, after a couple of other things.
Then he's a good writer. Simmons has written some bad books, some good books and some genuinely excellent ones. Bad writers don't write good books, but good writers sometimes write bad ones.
this isn't uncommon with big books, especially genre fiction, which has to support the weight of an entire invented world as well as the people and events in it, i find.
I really, really like Stephenson, and I thought Reamde was a colossal shitshow.
I think it's that Simmons falls so in love with the references and thematic content of his books that sometimes he totally forgets that he needs to attach boring things like characters-who-aren't-just-thematic-devices and endings-to-the-plot. Which is probably why Hyperion is his best book - the format allows him to keep changing styles so he doesn't get bored with any particular plotline, and since the book's all about their journey, he doesn't have to worry about wrapping any of it up.
Actual Play: Mage: the Awakening - At the Edge of All Things
You're really not out of place. I loved every single book. all of them. we can have hugs over our apparently self-flagellation!
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
What do you guys think about those series?
I thought I was about to break your heart by telling you that I got a copy of that for a buck or two a few months back, but it was The Falling Torch that I picked up.
(A used bookstore downtown had a going-out-of-business sale back in November, and I picked up about sixty books, mostly Hugo and Nebula nominees or winners.)
the Pern books were good but got a bit samey and overly-romantic after a while. The earlier ones were much better, and I respect them for being one of the more influential 'this looks like fantasy but is actually SF' novels.
Darkover I know nothing about, though Marion Zimmer Bradley is very important to me for The Mists of Avalon.
They are two of the writers I think of as neglected. At the time they were first publishing, they were tremendously important, especially for pushing forward feminism in a genre which was extremely male-dominated and sexist. Nowadays few people ever talk about them. Mists of Avalon was unprecedented at the time - no-one had read anything like that. With internet hindsight, perhaps people can find something similar before it, but at the time, pre-internet genre-fans were gobsmacked.
Actually, there are quite a few like that.
Darkover is a bit of a hazy memory for me, as is Pern, but the latter is a bit more memorable. I have to say, it's one of those series that I powered through and loved in adolesence. The world was interesting, and unique (especially at the time). The characters held together well, and each new book was a page turner.
Many years later, they, er, haven't held up so well. The world is still well drawn, but the characters inside it have managed less well. A lot of actions are telegraphed well before they happen, the good guys are...well, Good Guys, and the bad guys are Baddies. A lot of the time, they're good because the author says so, and the bad guys are one short step away from cackling madly about their plans for world domination. There's a distinct lack of grey-area morality, which I suspect is more common in the genre now than it was in the 80's. Or maybe McCaffrey knew her audience.
On the other hand, the sci-fi aspects of the series are very well handled; while Dragonflight hasn't aged too well, and I very quickly got sick of Lessa and F'lar, Dragonsdawn, the origin story of Pern, remains a solid sci-fi/fantasy crossover novel, as do the short stories from that period. I think, at the time they were written, and for the audience they were pitched at, they did very well. I *suspect* that the same would be true if they were pitched at the same young-adult audience today - but if you grew up with them (as many of us did), you msy find they have not aged gracefully.
I think with Drood he pretty much nailed it. It's my favorite book of his and I think it had a great ending. Drood is one of his horror novels though.
This makes sense. My favorite book was The White Dragon, BTW, which would make a pretty good YA book today.
Currently in the middle of the third GoT book, have the first Lankhmar book, and a collection of Conan stories.
With Drood or The Terror, he could've lost a couple hundred pages and the books wouldn't be the weaker for it.
The whole Sharpe's Rifles TV series is a ridiculous amount of fun
I liked most of them, except the last one or two that came out right before he died. It's not so much that they were bad or anything, it's that I used to re-read the whole series each time for the previous ones (and I came onto it late so I had like 5 I could read in a row when I first started), but for that last one (or those last ones, not sure), I did not do that I and I was pretty lost. With the new bunch coming out, I've been buying the hardcovers but not reading them. Once it's 100% all done and out I will re-read the whole thing from start.
edit: ... didn't the forum used to combine into one congruent posts of one person??
I'd be interested to read Sharlett's other work, the book that he was working on when he got introduced to The Family.
But alas, money I do not have. I'll have to wait for my birthday or something.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
Took that back and moved on to Dauntless by Jack Campbell. I've been enjoying it so far. I also picked up Hammered by Elizabeth Bear. Inside it was a quip from Peter Watts' (easily my favourite author) to the effect of "I hate this woman. She makes the rest of us look like amateurs." So hopefully that'll be good too.
Guild Wars 2: Entriech.3507 | Scythe Gearsnap, Phlork, Irenic
Has it left a bad taste in your mouth?
Coz I live in Japan, I get very tired of the self-mythologising some people do here about history and bushi. I liked Book of the Five Rings for many reasons, one of which was that it showed that Miyamoto, the samurai of samurai, was clearly an unsentimental cold-blooded killer with no interest in honour. Does this come across in the book you're reading?
Rogue Moon is an excellent, nasty little book. I rate Budrys quite a bit, even though he kind of became a shill for Scientology later on in life. Michelmas and Who? aren't quite as good as Rogue Moon, but are solid reads.
My favourite comment about Michelmas comes from Gene Wolfe, who referred to an old adage that a sword is a fine thing, but a penknife is finer, because it is a secret sword. Michelmas is about a President, and although a President is a fine thing, Michelmas is finer because he is a secret President.
You probably wouldn't like Musashi, to be honest. It's kind of THE source for most of the Musashi legend, pretty much any movie or whatever that's been done since the 1920s is drawing off of that book. He does start out though as pretty much just a murdering asshole, the entire system of wandering around to dojos and basically trying to kill anyone with a good reputation. It really comes across that this's a society which's been in constant war and most of the samurai just have no goddamn idea what to do with themselves now that there's peace, so they go around murdering each other for honor. Unfortunately there's no translators notes, and it's hard to tell sometimes how much the author is pointing out that Shit Be Crazy, and how much is him legitimizing the craziness. Especially since the time he was writing the whole warrior honor thing was making a really nasty resurgence. It's a similar issue with his female characters - most of them only really have motivations in relation to the men in the story... But there's also some pretty great scenes where a Buddhist monk is lecturing about why women are evil, and the prim and proper Japanese lady totally calls him out on his bullshit.
I think it is because horror is more conceptual, or at least for me it works this way. Because with Lovecraft, you're not only getting past the purple prose, but also the racism, etc.
But it's his conceptual ideas for monsters that stick with you. What if there was this secret society...what if the backwoods hid more than just yokels...what if history hid more than we thought...etc.
It's why I'll forgive a poorer made horror film if it brings up truly frightening ideas. What is scary is more important to me than how well it is executed, if that makes sense. Something my brain can chew over when I'm sitting there alone at night, something I can extrapolate on, works for me.
A few spoiler-y comments
And while we came close to geriatric sex, we avoided it. Which is always a blessing
Now I'm on Drive by James Sallis. The novel that the film with the amazing soundtrack is very loosely based on. So far, so good. Interesting writing.