I read Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and I mostly enjoyed the other books of his that I've read, but oh my God I hate this. It isn't badly written, but it's basically the sci-fi fantasy of a 2005 Republican, except LGBT-inclusive. The galaxy is overwhelmingly hostile to human civilization (complete with literal baby-eating aliens!) so we need to have the big strong super soldiers, the protagonist has a crisis of conscience for slaughtering aliens so humans can colonize a planet for all of 3 pages, an anti-war character is briefly introduced so his naivety can get him humorously killed, etc. It doesn't even really engage with its premise because none of the characters (at least to me) actually sound like they're 75 years old. If you've heard about Scalzi (due to his Hugo wins/nominations and anti-reactionary commentary on his blog) and want to check him out, read anything else.
I'm reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and like it so far
I really enjoy it
I'm amazed how little PKD is in this thread
I mean, we've had a lot of book threads and the guy's been dead for over 35 years
It's not that weird that he hasn't popped up much in this particular incarnation of the thread
Not sure why that would matter, people talking about Shakespeare
Look, it just seemed a little odd, as I'm fairly sure that was literally the first mention in this thread of a very prolific sci-fi writer, but I've read a ton of PKD and I wasn't around for previous threads, so I've kept an eye out for any mention, but I guess y'all have exhausted that discussion judging by the agrees
Sorry for the stupid comment
Eh, it wasn't stupid but there are a bunch of classics that just don't get mentioned unless somebody here is actively rereading them. Like, searching this thread via google shows up only two mentions of Shakespeare stuff and that was because Straightzi was reading something with a facsimile play in it. I'm sure the majority of us have seen Shakespeare's stuff, I know I really like some of them, but unless it was recent I'm unlikely to mention it here.
He's on my list of classic authors I should read more of but Le Guinn's passing meant that my old book reading has been more focused on her stuff lately.
PKD was someone I read a lot of in my silver-age SF tween period, and enjoyed, but haven't revisited. Feel like I might have a whole new perspective now.
I read Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and I mostly enjoyed the other books of his that I've read, but oh my God I hate this. It isn't badly written, but it's basically the sci-fi fantasy of a 2005 Republican, except LGBT-inclusive. The galaxy is overwhelmingly hostile to human civilization (complete with literal baby-eating aliens!) so we need to have the big strong super soldiers, the protagonist has a crisis of conscience for slaughtering aliens so humans can colonize a planet for all of 3 pages, an anti-war character is briefly introduced so his naivety can get him humorously killed, etc. It doesn't even really engage with its premise because none of the characters (at least to me) actually sound like they're 75 years old. If you've heard about Scalzi (due to his Hugo wins/nominations and anti-reactionary commentary on his blog) and want to check him out, read anything else.
So the fun part about this is that Scalzi will freely admit that he was trying to write something in a genre that would be well received (it was his first published book) and milspec scifi was popular at the time. The later books in the series completely turn the narrative of the first book on its head and make it clear why all the pro-war sentiment is ass fuckin' backwards and whoops turns out humans were the aggressors.
Doesn't necessarily forgive the first book, but does make it a lot more palatable IMO. It's definitely his weakest work.
Ha! That's super interesting!
would be good if Neal Asher had come to the same conclusion at some point, instead of doubling down on his space-libertarianism
(I do like his books for the most part, but they're probably best in small doses. Also "what if the culture, but more badass?" seems like it kind of misses the point of the Culture.)
Ha! That's super interesting!
would be good if Neal Asher had come to the same conclusion at some point, instead of doubling down on his space-libertarianism
(I do like his books for the most part, but they're probably best in small doses. Also "what if the culture, but more badass?" seems like it kind of misses the point of the Culture.)
Kind of the whole point of the Culture is that being a rough tough "badass" is kind of juvenile and myopic, which I like, and also means that the moments where they push back are all the more impressive, see Mistake Not etc
If you want to discuss PKD by all means discuss PKD. Please don’t let us stop you. It was not a stupid comment.
It is generally my belief that Dick is always improved by people who adapt his work, and his obsession with drugs migrates between grating and sad. He came up with some great ideas, but was ultimately unable to build on them.
I fell into a pretty deep PKD hole a while back. I devoured most of the short stories and novels and eventually got around to the VALIS trilogy. I remember that as being a colossal slog. Did I miss out? Would I maybe get more out of it now, like 25 years later?
If you want to discuss PKD by all means discuss PKD. Please don’t let us stop you. It was not a stupid comment.
It is generally my belief that Dick is always improved by people who adapt his work, and his obsession with drugs migrates between grating and sad. He came up with some great ideas, but was ultimately unable to build on them.
I fell into a pretty deep PKD hole a while back. I devoured most of the short stories and novels and eventually got around to the VALIS trilogy. I remember that as being a colossal slog. Did I miss out? Would I maybe get more out of it now, like 25 years later?
I spent a summer on the farm listening to a huge selected works collection of his. The short stories were all pretty great, but I could not hang with VALIS.
Kind of the whole point of the Culture is that being a rough tough "badass" is kind of juvenile and myopic, which I like, and also means that the moments where they push back are all the more impressive, see Mistake Not etc
The epilogue to "Look to Windward" is also more notable because it is unusual in tone from the rest of how things have been presented about the Culture.
I read Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and I mostly enjoyed the other books of his that I've read, but oh my God I hate this. It isn't badly written, but it's basically the sci-fi fantasy of a 2005 Republican, except LGBT-inclusive. The galaxy is overwhelmingly hostile to human civilization (complete with literal baby-eating aliens!) so we need to have the big strong super soldiers, the protagonist has a crisis of conscience for slaughtering aliens so humans can colonize a planet for all of 3 pages, an anti-war character is briefly introduced so his naivety can get him humorously killed, etc. It doesn't even really engage with its premise because none of the characters (at least to me) actually sound like they're 75 years old. If you've heard about Scalzi (due to his Hugo wins/nominations and anti-reactionary commentary on his blog) and want to check him out, read anything else.
Its kinda feels like they went to write an old person, and arrived at an age neutral 2005 Republican that references a past wife and past frailty. Referenced ideas but not much of the voice.
I listened to it via audio book so there was less importance on the language of the elderly, as it was acted.
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
Finished Leviathan Wakes, immediately bought Caliban's War. Can't remember the last time I got through a book so quickly. Hooray for unemployment!
Realised the Harvard bookstore sale was on this weekend and I forgot, but it's on next weekend too so I'll head down there Saturday with some big bags. Then I boughtsome full price books anyway because I can't help myself.
Also finally got around to reading Signs Preceding the End of the World and holy crap is that an amazing book. I wish it hadn't ended but also it's exactly as long as it needs to be.
On a different note: Donald Hall has died, at 89 (He was a former poet laureate, for those who haven't heard of him).
This was not someone whose poetry I found comforting, or necessarily beautiful, but reading it almost always gave me a chill - even if it was the chill of inevitable death.
RIP you scary, incisive bugger.
My son, my executioner,
I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir
And whom my body warms.
Sweet death, small son, our instrument
Of immortality,
Your cries and hunger document
Our bodily decay.
We twenty-five and twenty-two
Who seemed to live forever
Observe enduring life in you
And start to die together.
Realised the Harvard bookstore sale was on this weekend and I forgot, but it's on next weekend too so I'll head down there Saturday with some big bags. Then I boughtsome full price books anyway because I can't help myself.
Also finally got around to reading Signs Preceding the End of the World and holy crap is that an amazing book. I wish it hadn't ended but also it's exactly as long as it needs to be.
It makes me so happy that most of this thread is reading Long Way to a Small Angry Planet because it's just such a delightful book.
I'm reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and like it so far
I'm just over halfway through (about to start Chapter 13) and man is this book great. I'd been unable to get into Blade Runner when I tried watching it (2x) but this has me hooked.
I do still find myself seeing/reading Deckard as Harrison Ford, though. I just got through the chapter that introduces the Android police station and the human (?) bounty hunter that helps him escape. I was not expecting Resch to register human to Deckard (who is, as yet, never wrong, but it still kind of weird to me).
I don't really enjoy the Isidore chapters as much, at least not yet. It was cool to see him take the phone call well even though both he and his boss expected disaster. But the whole subplot of "specials" and their treatment makes me uncomfortable. I'm sure that's by design but man.
Anyhow, I'll probably finish it up this weekend. Any recs on a follow up?
I finished the book tonight. I'm not sure I fully grasped everything that was going on at the end there, but overall I thought it was a good book.
I got me a shiny new kindle, which has kicked off a bit of a reading binge.
First I grabbed Annie on my Mind, a title I'd known of for a while but had never gotten around to actually reading (only 2 bucks on kindle!). Annie is, if not the first YA novel to deal with queer themes, certainly the first that actually provided positive representation and a non-tragic ending. It was released back in 1982, and honestly it's aged amazingly well all things considered, especially considering the author was already in her mid-40s when it was published. Like, the dialogue is definitely a bit more purple than you'd expect from any possible teenagers in 1980s New York, but it's kind of charming that way. It's a romance between Liza, a upper-middle class girl who goes to a kind of yuppie upper-class private school, and uptown girl Annie, whose parents are first-generation italian immigrants. The two girls meet at a museum, immediately hit it off, and begin a courtship that neither is quite willing to admit is indeed a courtship. The romance itself is not really going to give you any surprises, and neither girl is that complicated of a character. But it's really charming anyway, and it nails so many little details so well. And it goes a lot farther than I had expected, past the standard milquetoast "young love" plotlines which leave open the potential of them eventually going straight somday in the future. Instead as the girls become more honest with each other about their feelings and their attractions, they start pooling their resources, sharing LGBT zines and books that they buy in bookstores far away from their own neighborhoods. It really drives home just what a vacuum so many gay kids were growing up in before the internet, any little passing reference to an adult LGBT world is a treasure trove to them. Eventually the girls have to deal with being discovered, and whether they'll try to honestly come out to their families or deny everything. Even as I was reading it I couldn't help but think about what a huge resource this book must've been to a lot of gay kids in the '80s and '90s.
I was then GOING to read Dream of the Red Chamber, cuz I'm trying to finish all four chinese classics this year (I've already finished Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and it was legitimately fun). But I accidentally bought the like old ass 1890-something translation, and it is just unforgivably dense and awkward. So I returned that and I'll have to find a different translation. I've read excerpts from it before and those were perfectly readable, so I think it's just the translator over-compensating, to clue in xenophobic Englishmen that this is Fine Literature.
Then I read Emily Yoshida's positive writeup of the Cannes debut of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a movie adaptation of a novel of the same name, and then the first blurb I read about the novel compared it to Annie on my Mind, so I thought it'd be an interesting companion piece to read and bought the novel (9 bucks on kindle!). Miseducation isn't really a romance, it's more of a bildungsroman about the titular young lesbian Cameron Post, growing up in Miles City, Montana in the early 1990s. It's late enough that gay rights are now a topic of conversation, but too early for any major victories in that fight yet, especially not in middle-of-nowhere Montana. The novel is written by Emily Danforth who is, go figure, a lesbian who grew up in Miles City, Montana. There's definitely the strong sense of autobiographical elements to Cameron, especially the first half which really just, gay themes to the side, really kind of wonderfully captures the ebb and flow of life for teenagers out in a tiny town in Montana and how the hell they spend their time (spoiler: lots of alcohol and lots of weed).
So Cameron first kisses a girl when she's twelve, and a day later both of her parents die in a traffic accident. Understandably this leads to a bit of an emotional shutdown for young Cam, who for the next four or five years is mostly occupied in keeping herself emotionally withdrawn from dealing with her feelings of grief and survivors guilt. She rents VHS tapes in stacks, and when she's not watching movies she's running, or swimming, or smoking pot. As she gets older she starts to emotionally recover a bit, and eventually gains some friends, including Caley, a hot blond who works on a cattle ranch and is basically the hetero cover model of Future Farmers of America. Caley also has a boyfriend, as - at least technically - does Cameron. Nevertheless, their relationship becomes increasingly intense, until Caley eventually confesses what's been going on between the two of them. Cam gets sent off to a gay conversion camp out in the woods, run by an earnest and pathetically, transparently gay-in-denial Reverend.
The picture that Danforth draws of the camp is really interesting. It isn't outright abusive - it is, in fact, mostly just boring and milquetoast, a year-long christian summer camp, with all of the terrible music that that entails. But the fundamental message of the camp, combined with the tremendous pressure from their family and society outside of the camp, creates a psychologically destructive and untenable situation. The counselors genuinely believe they're helping the kids, but really just don't know wtf they're doing, and can't - or at least, are willfully blind to - the deep harm they're doing.
Anyway, that all makes it sound like just a series of tragedies, but it really is a wonderful novel, frequently very funny, with an interesting, unique perspective. One of the things I find really interesting about Miseducation is that like, rural heartland America is typically depicted as this vast heterosexual monoculture, where there's like one or two gay people around, and then any others have fled for the coasts. Miseducation presents a much more complicated view, and probably more true-to-life view, with quite a few folks popping up somewhere on the queer spectrum. Because of Cameron's personal tragedy she's just too emotionally uninvested in life to fake being heterosexual very well, but she meets a variety of people working with more or less success to deny their sexuality or or at least keep it private, folks who 10 or 20 years later might have been willing to openly identify as gay or bisexual. Cam's mom's childhood best friend, middle aged and unmarried, talks about how deeply she loved Cam's mom with a bit too much intensity, Cam's best friend admits to her that his uncle is gay, and then Caley, who starts to panic as her relationship with Cam gets more emotionally intimate and her own sexual identity is brought into doubt.
Anyway, yeah, both very good books. 1890s translations of Chinese classics, OTOH, not recommended.
(Also I'm still trying to get through The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and so far it is NOT working for me. Which is weird, because it's so many things I typically would say I want more of in sci-fi.)
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
The movie is a fairly loose adaptation and leaves Mercerism out entirely, along with the idea of owning animals being a sign of empathy
I think it streamlines things, personally, to shift to a direct contrast of Deckard's humanity with that of his targets, and leave out the empathy of society at large, but if you're looking for it I suppose it would seem jarring to lack it
Ah! Well would you be interested to know there are multiple cuts of the film, with different endings? And that, furthermore, none of the people who made the movie agree on what those endings mean!
Stuff like Mercerism and the... emotion machines, or whatever, are just redolent of SIXTIES SCI FI to me and I think by the 80s there wasn't much interest in adapting those elements
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Mercerism and the animals and the debate over fake vs. real animals is great but it's one of those things that probably doesn't translate to film well without seriously wrecking the pacing.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
Mercerism and the animals and the debate over fake vs. real animals is great but it's one of those things that probably doesn't translate to film well without seriously wrecking the pacing.
PKD actually has a few instances of kinda hippie metaphysics that don't add much value to the story for me
I wasn't prepared for everyone in Man In The High Castle to be way into the I Ching for example
Mostly skin exposed by Wes Chatham and Steven Strait, but it's a hell of a gain.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
Posts
Eh, it wasn't stupid but there are a bunch of classics that just don't get mentioned unless somebody here is actively rereading them. Like, searching this thread via google shows up only two mentions of Shakespeare stuff and that was because Straightzi was reading something with a facsimile play in it. I'm sure the majority of us have seen Shakespeare's stuff, I know I really like some of them, but unless it was recent I'm unlikely to mention it here.
He's on my list of classic authors I should read more of but Le Guinn's passing meant that my old book reading has been more focused on her stuff lately.
So the fun part about this is that Scalzi will freely admit that he was trying to write something in a genre that would be well received (it was his first published book) and milspec scifi was popular at the time. The later books in the series completely turn the narrative of the first book on its head and make it clear why all the pro-war sentiment is ass fuckin' backwards and whoops turns out humans were the aggressors.
Doesn't necessarily forgive the first book, but does make it a lot more palatable IMO. It's definitely his weakest work.
would be good if Neal Asher had come to the same conclusion at some point, instead of doubling down on his space-libertarianism
(I do like his books for the most part, but they're probably best in small doses. Also "what if the culture, but more badass?" seems like it kind of misses the point of the Culture.)
By a goddamn country mile.
I fell into a pretty deep PKD hole a while back. I devoured most of the short stories and novels and eventually got around to the VALIS trilogy. I remember that as being a colossal slog. Did I miss out? Would I maybe get more out of it now, like 25 years later?
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
I will say his titles are top-notch though
e: that might have come off as a jab
it's not at all, a good title is hard to come up with and his were nearly always excellent
I spent a summer on the farm listening to a huge selected works collection of his. The short stories were all pretty great, but I could not hang with VALIS.
The epilogue to "Look to Windward" is also more notable because it is unusual in tone from the rest of how things have been presented about the Culture.
Its kinda feels like they went to write an old person, and arrived at an age neutral 2005 Republican that references a past wife and past frailty. Referenced ideas but not much of the voice.
I listened to it via audio book so there was less importance on the language of the elderly, as it was acted.
Also finally got around to reading Signs Preceding the End of the World and holy crap is that an amazing book. I wish it hadn't ended but also it's exactly as long as it needs to be.
This was not someone whose poetry I found comforting, or necessarily beautiful, but reading it almost always gave me a chill - even if it was the chill of inevitable death.
RIP you scary, incisive bugger.
It makes me so happy that most of this thread is reading Long Way to a Small Angry Planet because it's just such a delightful book.
I think I like the idea of the book and the ideas it raises more than I like the book itself. It feels incomplete, somehow.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I finished the book tonight. I'm not sure I fully grasped everything that was going on at the end there, but overall I thought it was a good book.
First I grabbed Annie on my Mind, a title I'd known of for a while but had never gotten around to actually reading (only 2 bucks on kindle!). Annie is, if not the first YA novel to deal with queer themes, certainly the first that actually provided positive representation and a non-tragic ending. It was released back in 1982, and honestly it's aged amazingly well all things considered, especially considering the author was already in her mid-40s when it was published. Like, the dialogue is definitely a bit more purple than you'd expect from any possible teenagers in 1980s New York, but it's kind of charming that way. It's a romance between Liza, a upper-middle class girl who goes to a kind of yuppie upper-class private school, and uptown girl Annie, whose parents are first-generation italian immigrants. The two girls meet at a museum, immediately hit it off, and begin a courtship that neither is quite willing to admit is indeed a courtship. The romance itself is not really going to give you any surprises, and neither girl is that complicated of a character. But it's really charming anyway, and it nails so many little details so well. And it goes a lot farther than I had expected, past the standard milquetoast "young love" plotlines which leave open the potential of them eventually going straight somday in the future. Instead as the girls become more honest with each other about their feelings and their attractions, they start pooling their resources, sharing LGBT zines and books that they buy in bookstores far away from their own neighborhoods. It really drives home just what a vacuum so many gay kids were growing up in before the internet, any little passing reference to an adult LGBT world is a treasure trove to them. Eventually the girls have to deal with being discovered, and whether they'll try to honestly come out to their families or deny everything. Even as I was reading it I couldn't help but think about what a huge resource this book must've been to a lot of gay kids in the '80s and '90s.
I was then GOING to read Dream of the Red Chamber, cuz I'm trying to finish all four chinese classics this year (I've already finished Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and it was legitimately fun). But I accidentally bought the like old ass 1890-something translation, and it is just unforgivably dense and awkward. So I returned that and I'll have to find a different translation. I've read excerpts from it before and those were perfectly readable, so I think it's just the translator over-compensating, to clue in xenophobic Englishmen that this is Fine Literature.
Then I read Emily Yoshida's positive writeup of the Cannes debut of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a movie adaptation of a novel of the same name, and then the first blurb I read about the novel compared it to Annie on my Mind, so I thought it'd be an interesting companion piece to read and bought the novel (9 bucks on kindle!). Miseducation isn't really a romance, it's more of a bildungsroman about the titular young lesbian Cameron Post, growing up in Miles City, Montana in the early 1990s. It's late enough that gay rights are now a topic of conversation, but too early for any major victories in that fight yet, especially not in middle-of-nowhere Montana. The novel is written by Emily Danforth who is, go figure, a lesbian who grew up in Miles City, Montana. There's definitely the strong sense of autobiographical elements to Cameron, especially the first half which really just, gay themes to the side, really kind of wonderfully captures the ebb and flow of life for teenagers out in a tiny town in Montana and how the hell they spend their time (spoiler: lots of alcohol and lots of weed).
So Cameron first kisses a girl when she's twelve, and a day later both of her parents die in a traffic accident. Understandably this leads to a bit of an emotional shutdown for young Cam, who for the next four or five years is mostly occupied in keeping herself emotionally withdrawn from dealing with her feelings of grief and survivors guilt. She rents VHS tapes in stacks, and when she's not watching movies she's running, or swimming, or smoking pot. As she gets older she starts to emotionally recover a bit, and eventually gains some friends, including Caley, a hot blond who works on a cattle ranch and is basically the hetero cover model of Future Farmers of America. Caley also has a boyfriend, as - at least technically - does Cameron. Nevertheless, their relationship becomes increasingly intense, until Caley eventually confesses what's been going on between the two of them. Cam gets sent off to a gay conversion camp out in the woods, run by an earnest and pathetically, transparently gay-in-denial Reverend.
The picture that Danforth draws of the camp is really interesting. It isn't outright abusive - it is, in fact, mostly just boring and milquetoast, a year-long christian summer camp, with all of the terrible music that that entails. But the fundamental message of the camp, combined with the tremendous pressure from their family and society outside of the camp, creates a psychologically destructive and untenable situation. The counselors genuinely believe they're helping the kids, but really just don't know wtf they're doing, and can't - or at least, are willfully blind to - the deep harm they're doing.
Anyway, that all makes it sound like just a series of tragedies, but it really is a wonderful novel, frequently very funny, with an interesting, unique perspective. One of the things I find really interesting about Miseducation is that like, rural heartland America is typically depicted as this vast heterosexual monoculture, where there's like one or two gay people around, and then any others have fled for the coasts. Miseducation presents a much more complicated view, and probably more true-to-life view, with quite a few folks popping up somewhere on the queer spectrum. Because of Cameron's personal tragedy she's just too emotionally uninvested in life to fake being heterosexual very well, but she meets a variety of people working with more or less success to deny their sexuality or or at least keep it private, folks who 10 or 20 years later might have been willing to openly identify as gay or bisexual. Cam's mom's childhood best friend, middle aged and unmarried, talks about how deeply she loved Cam's mom with a bit too much intensity, Cam's best friend admits to her that his uncle is gay, and then Caley, who starts to panic as her relationship with Cam gets more emotionally intimate and her own sexual identity is brought into doubt.
Anyway, yeah, both very good books. 1890s translations of Chinese classics, OTOH, not recommended.
(Also I'm still trying to get through The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and so far it is NOT working for me. Which is weird, because it's so many things I typically would say I want more of in sci-fi.)
The Mercerism stuff didn't land with me at all
I think it streamlines things, personally, to shift to a direct contrast of Deckard's humanity with that of his targets, and leave out the empathy of society at large, but if you're looking for it I suppose it would seem jarring to lack it
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
and it's already so good!
I wasn't prepared for everyone in Man In The High Castle to be way into the I Ching for example
Yeah it's a good show but it ends up being very different from the books.
Mostly skin exposed by Wes Chatham and Steven Strait, but it's a hell of a gain.
However this book is very,very gay. I can't think of a single female character who spoke or acted in any fashion.
There was some female wallpaper in the 1st story, but that's it.
When I think back to the asimov collection of short stories I had in high school, I reach the same conclusion.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Even the royal drama in story three lacked a space Cerci.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534