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[book]s: an ancient form of communication where humans used something called words
Fuzzy Cumulonimbus Cloud
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Books! Love em or hate em, they have words in them! You read the words. They generate mental constructs in your brain. We don't actually understand that part so well, but many experts agree, books are here to stay.
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PSN:Furlion
His later novels don’t quite hit the heights, but I’m looking forward to digging into the latest collection of previously uncollected short stories.
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The thing with this controversy is we don't know if it is China. It was the western authors on the WorldCon Committee who made these disqualifications. The leaked emails actually completely left the Chinese members of the committee out of the loop
Yeah it seems like the western members just disqualified people they thought might offend China without asking based on things they thought might offend china. Like one guy was disqualified because they mistakenly thought he visited Tibet when he had not, and apparently they banned RF Kuang because of the Poppy War Series, but they seemed to not know what the books were actually about? They seemed to think they were about Wu Zetain or something?
Removing Kuang for a book series which is otherwise inoffensive to CCP political thought is not really so unusual in that context.
Perhaps not, and it would seem there wasn’t particularly a lot of content in the Poppy Wars or Babel that would be any more critical to the CCP than that in Cixin Liu’s books (which contained pretty unflattering portrayals of Maoist era revolutionary China)..
But it seems like in this case the Chinese censors themselves weren’t even consulted and it was just western would-be censors trying to infer what might offend them just by guessing and using stereotypes.
PSN:Furlion
While dated I still really enjoy the original Conan stories they re-released a few years ago.
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You have to read them to know if they're any good.
Which is kind of a big investment to make on something that might not be very good.
Nose in a book, drinking ale --> sophisticated intellectual??
You have to eat it / play it / watch it to know if they're any good.
Which is kind of a big investment to make on something that might not be very good.
... oh, Im sorry, I actually finished reading my first book in 6 weeks today.
It was The Blacktongue Thief my Christopher Buehlman.
It's a story told from first person perspective about a rogue with a well hidden secret heart of gold, that is in serious debt and gets pushed into accompanying a badass woman with a magical shield and magical murder bird onto her quest to do spoilery things.
I liked humour, worldbuilding down to earth characters and overall feel that it is a story based on someones RPG campaign, as it is mostly made out of random problems that main heroes encounter and need to deal with.
I did not like some decisions by the author that are just... weird, like that there are serious lore reasons for why are there so many badass women in positions of power, and yet the narrator and main character is still a man, or the fact that
It is not deep, or complicated plot, but it was interesting enough for me to keep reading, so I think its something like 7+/10 book for me. I will read the next book from this series, but I did not enjoy myself enough to ever want to reread this one, I guess.
Books, amirite?
Once I'm done with this volume I'll probably need a palate cleanser of some kind. Maybe that Caravaggio biography the wife bought me a few Christmases ago.
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I hope Shelley is Red Sonja.
I love this thread in part because the “I didn’t like this because…” statements rarely makes sense to me but “I liked this because” almost always makes sense even if I don’t agree with it
People’s thought processes are very interesting and different to my own
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He's in traditional style you think?
Just constant internal retcons like "so long as you're wearing this they won't be able to track you" then two chapters later "Oh this other group of people can track you though because of this."
Straight up convenient amnesia where the person suddenly remembers something relevant to the plot.
Characters keeping secrets from each other for no discernable reason.
Just bleh. Bleh.
It is just a very odd book in the series.
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Rather mild spoilers within
Anyway. There's a different world where these books would be about a lady captain in the british aviation corps, and how she has to dress up as a man and girl power girl power, and it's also interesting to me that Novik didn't go this way (because instead it's a story of a proper british man unbuttoning and coming to feel love. for his dragon.)
I'm also really intrigued by this theme that's developing in which Temeraire, who is a lot smarter and less hidebound than Laurence, is really examining the position of dragons in British society and is like ok so I really see no reason why we shouldn't be able to earn money and be citizens instead of being kept like animals or slaves? A lot of attention is paid to reading and writing. Laurence reads to Temeraire, but when they go to China, they realize that the Chinese dragons will actually write with their claws in sandboxes, or scratch out poetry on big sheets of wood and such, and Temeraire is like, what the fuck, why do we think that just because we're so big we can't write? --and both of these issues are really seldom examined by books with dragons in. lfx was opining it's because often in fantasy dragons, although generally depicted as highly intelligent, are (if not just used as monsters) presented as the remnants of a culture in decline and used as a symbol representing ancient glory, rather than as an actual people with their own culture and aims. Dunno! But it's interesting.
And yeah the second book was probably 200 pages worth of sea journey and honestly I love that shit. Love a boat book. There's a storm; we're unloading and loading stuff onto the boat; there is a quarrel on the boat; our stores are running low; an unlucky event happens; we're climbing around different parts of the boat; someone is seasick. Always good. Lots of boat words that I can never be bothered to internalize but I like that they're there.
Also interesting, is that the second book is dedicated "In memory of Chawa Nowik, in hopes that someday I'll be ready to write her book" --and I feel like she must have been thinking of Spinning Silver, and maybe feeling that at this point in time she only knew how to write Master and Commander fanfiction and wasn't ready yet for this other in many ways more ambitious work. You can see her grow as a writer in the Temeraire books, too--just from a technical perspective, the first one has a number of noticeably jarring scene transitions, and the second book has very few, if any.
Despite that I still like it, the sound of the words is really cool. It reads great out loud. It's maybe too fanciful in its language though, it's too on the page or from the mouth. I wish it was more atmospheric or that its language went for the stomach instead of the brain. Anyways I think I'll get through it, I haven't read anything quite like it.
Can we point to a major scene or plot point in the book where societal morality hasn't evolved to the point where we, as a hypothetical informed but uninvolved bystander, wouldn't view the musketeers as the "bad guys"?