shutupbanks
Castellan
There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.
Likes: 5,686
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Post by shutupbanks on Nov 9, 2021 21:39:11 GMT
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shutupbanks
Castellan
There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.
Likes: 5,686
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Post by shutupbanks on Nov 9, 2021 22:41:16 GMT
Jackrum! I would've loved to see that! And thanks for the link--I'll definitely be spending some time scrolling through that. Only Discworld merch I've really seen outside the books was a set of really elaborate wooden bookends, depicting the whole of the disc, turtles and elephants and everything. It was a great show: when I get onto a computer I’ll see if I can upload a couple of pictures: the costume for Carborundum was one of the best props I’ve ever worked with.
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Post by Kestrel on Nov 9, 2021 22:49:37 GMT
Do you have any photos of the costumes or sets? I'd love to see them! Was it Germany where the translator inserted adverts into the plot? In just eleven words you have inspired me a scathing fury beyond all reason. What kind of monster would do such a thing? Jesus. It's be more respectful to douse the book in gasoline and set it on fire.
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Post by tuigirl on Nov 10, 2021 8:45:28 GMT
Do you have any photos of the costumes or sets? I'd love to see them! Was it Germany where the translator inserted adverts into the plot? In just eleven words you have inspired me a scathing fury beyond all reason. What kind of monster would do such a thing? Jesus. It's be more respectful to douse the book in gasoline and set it on fire. Back in the day, these adverts were quite common. They were placed in pretty much all pop culture "low literature" paperback books. For example, they were also in my old Star Trek books. At least they came with a bonus: most of the time, they came with a drawing of the TNG crew or something similar.
However, this was done 30 years ago and is not common practice anymore.
I was a teenager back then, and the cup a soups they were advertising were not something we had in our house, nor would my parents buy these.
I just accepted the advertising and moved on reading.
I do not think I was annoyed.
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Post by grinch on Nov 10, 2021 19:24:47 GMT
The Big Time (Fritz Leiber)
A science fiction novella which actually won a Hugo Award back in the day. Has a truly fascinating approach to the idea of time travel and the relationship Time has with an individual. And that’s just one of the many ideas present in what is admittedly probably too short a piece to successfully convey them all. Has some truly wonderful language and descriptions even if it does admittedly come at the expense of character development.
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Post by Kestrel on Nov 11, 2021 14:38:52 GMT
Do you have any photos of the costumes or sets? I'd love to see them! In just eleven words you have inspired me a scathing fury beyond all reason. What kind of monster would do such a thing? Jesus. It's be more respectful to douse the book in gasoline and set it on fire. Back in the day, these adverts were quite common. They were placed in pretty much all pop culture "low literature" paperback books. For example, they were also in my old Star Trek books. At least they came with a bonus: most of the time, they came with a drawing of the TNG crew or something similar.
However, this was done 30 years ago and is not common practice anymore.
I was a teenager back then, and the cup a soups they were advertising were not something we had in our house, nor would my parents buy these.
I just accepted the advertising and moved on reading.
I do not think I was annoyed.
I probably wouldn't have minded as much as a kid, but the older I get the more annoyed I am by being marketed to. Like, especially when I'm reading, I just want a few moments to myself in life where people are trying to sell me ****. And, like, as someone who's worked as a translator... the whole practice is excruciatingly unethical.
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Post by Kestrel on Dec 3, 2021 4:38:40 GMT
So while it's been a few months since I've read it, I wanted to give a shout-out to The Fossil Hunter, which is a book about Mary Anning, a woman you're probably peripherally aware of even if you don't know the first thing about her. Who was Mary Anning? She's the person, " She sells seashells on the seashore," refers to. Basically she was instrumental in the birth of paleontology as a scientific field. The book is pretty solid, but if you're inclined to learn more without diving through 300 or so pages, there's also a pretty good (much shorter) article about her you can read at MentalFloss.com. Blame this post on Ela , whose comment on collecting shells in the Collection thread reminded me about the book.
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Post by Ela on Dec 3, 2021 5:51:08 GMT
So while it's been a few months since I've read it, I wanted to give a shout-out to The Fossil Hunter, which is a book about Mary Anning, a woman you're probably peripherally aware of even if you don't know the first thing about her. Who was Mary Anning? She's the person, " She sells seashells on the seashore," refers to. Basically she was instrumental in the birth of paleontology as a scientific field. The book is pretty solid, but if you're inclined to learn more without diving through 300 or so pages, there's also a pretty good (much shorter) article about her you can read MentalFloss.com. Blame this post on Ela, whose comment on collecting shells in the Collection thread reminded me about the book. Sounds interesting!
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Post by Kestrel on Dec 17, 2021 17:50:17 GMT
So yesterday I finished The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik, and I really enjoyed. It's basically a riff on Harry Potter (so very YA) with some really neat dark twists. The magic school is basically a prison where the students are constantly being killed by these diverse, grotesque magical creatures that sneak in, leaving only 1/4 of them able to survive the full four years. There's a lot of fun politicking at both the "high school (melo)drama" and "international" levels, and the characters are all pretty fun. Especially the protagonist, who very much reminds me of a girl I went to school with--very abrasive, often angry and prone to lash out vocally... but also unfailingly kind. She's a lot of fun.
If you like magic schools, Novik's Scholomance series comes highly recommended here. The Last Graduate is the second book and the third book is due out in August, I think.
And now I'm about halfway through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which I'm really enjoying, but goddamn is it dark. Thankfully the prose is somewhat removed from the violence, so it's not graphic, but this is still very much a post-apocalyptic (or, more accurately, mid-apocalyptic) setting where lives are cheap, and the murder and rape of very you children common. It's very ugly, but there's an implied hopefulness to the text, as the excerpts included at the end of each chapter kind of indicate that eventually the protagonist will survive at least long enough to establish her new pseudo-religion.
I guess it's maybe embarrassing to say, but this is actually my first Butler book. In my defense, I'm American, and over here we still segregate books based on the skin color of the writers, so she just never popped up when I was browsing the SF sections of the libraries or bookstores growing up. On the upside, I now have several stories to look forward to reading that I can be reasonably sure are pretty good.
Also, Parable of the Sower was written in the 90s, but it's surprisingly not very dated. This whole idea of people stuck in their homes/neighborhoods, struggling to find jobs that aren't there, often relying on unreliable technology to work remotely, walling themselves away from the masses of the poor and homeless and diseased... being afraid to call the emergency services for fear of the bills being far more than they can afford... is all, needless to say, quite prophetic.
(Though I do think her vision of,the future is a bit too cynical. A little too individualistic--we've seen time and time again how tragedy affects communities, and it usually results in collective action and mutual support, not the kind of Lord of the Flies dog-eat-dog mentality found here and, indeed, in most post-apocalypse settings.)
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Post by Kestrel on Dec 19, 2021 3:50:36 GMT
Wellp... finished Parable of the Sower. I was enjoying it, right up until the end.
By which I mean the end of the book. The story itself doesn't have an ending--it just stops.
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Post by coffeeaddict on Dec 26, 2021 21:44:59 GMT
I've been in a reading mood during the time I have spent visiting my parents. Clearly off 14 books over the past 12 days.
Among them both volumes of the Terrance Dicks collection. One gripe, they did a really crap job editing them. The number of times words were merged into others was a bit annoying and something which should have easily been caught. I don't recall seeing that in the original run of any of those books.
Sherlock Holmes and Dracula was a fun and well crafted story. The first volume of the Shackled Fates series was excellent as was Sherlock Holmes and the Great War.
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Post by newt5996 on Dec 30, 2021 18:34:15 GMT
I’m reading The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett which while always fun to read, doesn’t seem to hit as hard as a lot of his other Discworld novels. Like there doesn’t seem to be a central theme of this one except Australia which is a shame because it’s after four or five really brilliant ones.
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shutupbanks
Castellan
There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.
Likes: 5,686
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Post by shutupbanks on Dec 30, 2021 23:34:51 GMT
I recently finished Forever Free by Joe Haldeman, a sequel to The Forever War, which is a modern classic and a book I love. Forever Free takes place about twenty years later and starts off as an exploration of how difficult it is for veterans to fit into society when the return from war, which is something that The Forever War did superbly. Free then takes a bit of a right turn and turns into Libertarians In Space which reduced my enjoyment of it somewhat, but I was hoping there was a point. It then - just over halfway through the book - makes a flip that makes me think Haldeman sent his publisher two halves of different novels because it suddenly goes all Left Behind and winds up the story even more ridiculously without any reference to the story that the novel began as. It just reads like the author realised he’d written a dud partway through and fixed it up with an even greater dud. The ending is the worst kind of deus ex machina because the machina has not referenced the deus at any point in the book previously: it just comes out of nowhere. It’s more than a disappointing or lesser sequel; it’s the most baffling collection of authorial choices I’ve read in a professional piece of work in many years.
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Post by Kestrel on Jan 8, 2022 8:00:28 GMT
I think I'm probably done with Snow Crash now. Made it to the 50% point and then my new(!) Kindle Paperwhite died on me. (Luckily soon enough that I can return it; here's hoping I don't regret buying a replacement in a few months' time.)
It took me several hours of reading, off-and-on-and-off-again to conclude that it was not a parody. Apologies to any fans there may be here, but... I do not think very highly of this book. The prose ain't great and the sheer, uncritical fetishization of consumerism present throughout is pretty constantly grating.
I guess I'll give Neuromancer a try before I totally wrote off the genre, but so far based on what I've seen in games and film, I don't have a lot of respect for cyberpunk as a genre. Not even gonna touch the elephant in the room other than to say the only time I thought it worked was in the Shadowrun games, mainly because of using high fantasy races instead of human ethnicities.
Of course, it's also possible that living in a dystopian future has somewhat soured me on fictitious dystopias.
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shutupbanks
Castellan
There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.
Likes: 5,686
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Post by shutupbanks on Jan 8, 2022 10:15:05 GMT
I think I'm probably done with Snow Crash now. Made it to the 50% point and then my new(!) Kindle Paperwhite died on me. (Luckily soon enough that I can return it; here's hoping I don't regret buying a replacement in a few months' time.) It took me several hours of reading, off-and-on-and-off-again to conclude that it was not a parody. Apologies to any fans there may be here, but... I do not think very highly of this book. The prose ain't great and the sheer, uncritical fetishization of consumerism present throughout is pretty constantly grating. I guess I'll give Neuromancer a try before I totally wrote off the genre, but so far based on what I've seen in games and film, I don't have a lot of respect for cyberpunk as a genre. Not even gonna touch the elephant in the room other than to say the only time I thought it worked was in the Shadowrun games, mainly because of using high fantasy races instead of human ethnicities. Of course, it's also possible that living in a dystopian future has somewhat soured me on fictitious dystopias. Cyberpunk is the SF that your cool friends who never read SF read. As a subgenre, I don’t like it: it’s SF with big coats and sunglasses and body modifications and no really fresh ideas. The settings and characters are pretty much pizza cutters: all edge, no point. 2000 AD did it best and they were taking the p@ss half the time. For authors like Gibson and Sterling and Cadigan, it was just another backdrop to put brilliant ideas on; for other authors it was chance to write pulp fiction and not feel dismissed by the cool kids. Neuromancer is a great book but I really only like it for its writing rather than its story or characters, which are pretty bog standard.
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Post by Kestrel on Jan 8, 2022 10:17:54 GMT
Yeah, from my experience it definitely feels more like an aesthetic than a proper genre. Like, for the most part you could just call it, "Blade Runner fanfiction." Otherwise, I mean, all that race essentialism and "yellow menace" stuff is really freakin' weird, right?
Glad you think Neuromancer has some value, as I'll be reading that soon.
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Post by fitzoliverj on Jan 8, 2022 11:17:33 GMT
I think I'm probably done with Snow Crash now. Made it to the 50% point and then my new(!) Kindle Paperwhite died on me. (Luckily soon enough that I can return it; here's hoping I don't regret buying a replacement in a few months' time.) It took me several hours of reading, off-and-on-and-off-again to conclude that it was not a parody. Apologies to any fans there may be here, but... I do not think very highly of this book. The prose ain't great and the sheer, uncritical fetishization of consumerism present throughout is pretty constantly grating. The writing's not great, and neither are the characters, but the *ideas* are worth following through, even if you have to only skim-read (as I think I did, particularly towards the end). There are certainly better books by Neal Stephenson, even better early books, but I think this one has the strongest central concept even if the execution doesn't carry it off.
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Post by relativetime on Jan 8, 2022 16:55:26 GMT
I think I'm probably done with Snow Crash now. Made it to the 50% point and then my new(!) Kindle Paperwhite died on me. (Luckily soon enough that I can return it; here's hoping I don't regret buying a replacement in a few months' time.) It took me several hours of reading, off-and-on-and-off-again to conclude that it was not a parody. Apologies to any fans there may be here, but... I do not think very highly of this book. The prose ain't great and the sheer, uncritical fetishization of consumerism present throughout is pretty constantly grating. I guess I'll give Neuromancer a try before I totally wrote off the genre, but so far based on what I've seen in games and film, I don't have a lot of respect for cyberpunk as a genre. Not even gonna touch the elephant in the room other than to say the only time I thought it worked was in the Shadowrun games, mainly because of using high fantasy races instead of human ethnicities. Of course, it's also possible that living in a dystopian future has somewhat soured me on fictitious dystopias. I'm sorry you haven't been enjoying cyperpunk that much. I've personally found the genre a great exploration of questions about what makes a person human with the dystopian aspects mostly serving as a background or, again, allegory/parallel to real life. Then again, I've only really watched the Blade Runner films and some of the most prominent anime, Ghosts in the Shell and Akira both of which I'd highly recommend if you haven't seen them. I think the anime are absolutely more interesting to watch because they don't really have quite that same western approach to the genre films like Blade Runner have, and it might be more what you're looking for from the genre.
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shutupbanks
Castellan
There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.
Likes: 5,686
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Post by shutupbanks on Jan 8, 2022 23:18:29 GMT
I think I'm probably done with Snow Crash now. Made it to the 50% point and then my new(!) Kindle Paperwhite died on me. (Luckily soon enough that I can return it; here's hoping I don't regret buying a replacement in a few months' time.) It took me several hours of reading, off-and-on-and-off-again to conclude that it was not a parody. Apologies to any fans there may be here, but... I do not think very highly of this book. The prose ain't great and the sheer, uncritical fetishization of consumerism present throughout is pretty constantly grating. I guess I'll give Neuromancer a try before I totally wrote off the genre, but so far based on what I've seen in games and film, I don't have a lot of respect for cyberpunk as a genre. Not even gonna touch the elephant in the room other than to say the only time I thought it worked was in the Shadowrun games, mainly because of using high fantasy races instead of human ethnicities. Of course, it's also possible that living in a dystopian future has somewhat soured me on fictitious dystopias. I'm sorry you haven't been enjoying cyperpunk that much. I've personally found the genre a great exploration of questions about what makes a person human with the dystopian aspects mostly serving as a background or, again, allegory/parallel to real life. Then again, I've only really watched the Blade Runner films and some of the most prominent anime, Ghosts in the Shell and Akira both of which I'd highly recommend if you haven't seen them. I think the anime are absolutely more interesting to watch because they don't really have quite that same western approach to the genre films like Blade Runner have, and it might be more what you're looking for from the genre. I think you’ve nailed it there: a lot of western cyberpunk, to me, just feels like a rehash of the “gritty” aspects of the genre, while other countries which had aspects of it being popular for years prior to it exploding on us seem to be open to exploring it thematically. Then again, it just might be that anime and cyberpunk are a good fit artistically.
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Post by Kestrel on Jan 9, 2022 13:19:04 GMT
I've seen Ghost in the Shell, one of the movies at least, and it was... interesting. Nothing about the characters really grabbed me strong enough to get me to watch SAC, which I'm told is the "main" thing. I also, many years ago, picked up the (inverted) Dark Horse boom of the manga, which I found... pretty incoherent. Apparently the anime adaptations took a lot of liberties?
The main cyberpunk media that clicked with me was the Shadowrun games. But I think it might be a less "pure" due to also incorporating a lot of high fantasy tropes? I dunno. I thought 2077 was pretty (laughably) bad. I love some of the transhumanist ideas present in the genre, but I can't help but feel like they're better explored... elsewhere. Cyberpunk, by itself, mostly seems characterized (IME) by a profound cynicism and extremely reductive understanding of societies. And then there are the icky bits, too. Overall it feels a lot like the SF equivalent of Lovecraftian horror: there are a lot of interesting elements to consider, but it's hard to disentangle them from the whole... morass.
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