The Book Thread

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Somes J
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Re: The Book Thread

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Shroom Man 777 wrote:I always liked Species and felt very partial to Sil's character. It helped that she was very sexy. And, yeah, she was kind of the ultimate victim in the movie. Artificially created, and then sentenced to execution for a wrong she never committed? And then, lost in the outside world and with nothing to guide her but her brutal killy alien instinct? Then she gets burned alive, along with all her babies? Poor girl. :(
You know who I think would have been perfect to do the novelization of that movie? Peter Watts. Come on, biologist with interest in embodied cognition and a great talent for coming up with all sorts of crazy and off the wall but scientifically hard stuff and portraying very alien creatures in interesting and sympathetic ways. He already did something similar with The Thing.

The novel did have some interesting tidbits that could have been taken to interesting places. Like when they notice that they haven't been finding any signs that Sil has been eating after she became an adult and start speculating about her life cycle. It's not mentioned, but it made me think of these insects I heard about on a PBS program where the adults don't even have mouthparts, I guess they just live barely long enough to reproduce before they starve to death. It would have been poignant if Sil was like that, and she must mate before she dies of starvation in a couple of weeks.

One problem I wish the book would have addressed was the huge fridge logic problem of how Sil's descendants are supposed to keep their alien traits after multiple generations of interbreeding with humans. I mean, logically they'd have only 1/2 as much alien DNA after every generation. Even if all the alien traits are heterozygous dominant they're going to start losing them pretty quickly in a couple of generations. Give it 5 or 6 generations and they'd probably be virtually indistinguishable from baseline humans.

Maybe that's thinking about this wrong. One way proposed to perpetuate cloned extinct animals when you can't create a clone of the opposite sex is to get it to mate with another compatible animal (if available) and then back-cross the hybrid offspring to the parent to breed out the traits from the other animal. Maybe that's what Sil was trying to do. Mate with a human male and produce a hybrid son that she could then mate with to found a breeding colony.

The problem is that this means a horrendously inbred population, but maybe occassional outcrossings with humans could supply enough genetic diversity to keep the species viable without hybridizing it into effective extinction. It would help if the alien traits were heterozygous dominant. Plus exotic biology may make it more feasible.
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Re: The Book Thread

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THRICE DAMNED RECESSIVE GENES! SNAAAAKE!

I kind of like the whole idea of Sil designed to die of starvation after reproducing. There's another answer to this though, far more bullshitty than your hypothesizations!

What if, after sampling human DNA and spawning a (male) child, Sil dies. Yeah. But the male child matures and starts impregnating women, yeah? But what if the way he does it is NOT like how humans or other normal creatures do it. His impregnation of them is NOT having icky alien sperm that mixes with human eggs. Instead, he shoots his load and puts his own FERTILIZED EGGS into the women, and then they start giving birth to alienoids. Like those wasps that lay eggs in spiders. Like those birds that put their eggs into the nest of different bird species, because they are lousy parents. Suddenly, women will be giving birth to alienoids!

Wait. Wasn't this the plot of Species 2? URGH! :D
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Re: The Book Thread

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Shroom Man 777 wrote:There's another answer to this though, far more bullshitty than your hypothesizations!

What if, after sampling human DNA and spawning a (male) child, Sil dies. Yeah. But the male child matures and starts impregnating women, yeah? But what if the way he does it is NOT like how humans or other normal creatures do it. His impregnation of them is NOT having icky alien sperm that mixes with human eggs. Instead, he shoots his load and puts his own FERTILIZED EGGS into the women, and then they start giving birth to alienoids. Like those wasps that lay eggs in spiders. Like those birds that put their eggs into the nest of different bird species, because they are lousy parents. Suddenly, women will be giving birth to alienoids!
Another possibility is hybridogenesis:

In hybrids of the two species of fish mentioned in the link the DNA from one type of fish is always rolled off into a runty nonviable ova during meiosis. The result is that when the hybrid reproduces the portion of its DNA that it inherited from its mother is passed intact to the offspring, while none of its father's DNA gets passed on. And when the daughter fish reproduces the same thing happens. So the mother's DNA is passed, unchanging, from generation to generation while the father's DNA gets no continuity. It's a pretty neat trick, bypassing what from a genome survival point of view is the major downside of sexual selection, which is that even if you manage to pass your genome on it will be mostly reduced to unrecognizable tatters in a few generations anyway, while still letting you take advantage of the opportunity to combine your genetic assets with somebody else. It's the best of both worlds (if you're the female fish; from an evolutionary perspective the males get screwed - no pun intended). In the fish the trick only works for females, but it's not too much of a stretch to imagine a similar process happening during spermatogenesis. Should nicely solve Sil's problem.

While we're on the subject I offer this random idea. Females of Sil's species have a spermatheca, like certain insects, in which they can store and keep alive the sperm of males they have mated with. In addition to being able to fertilize themselves with said stored sperm again and again at liesure, they also have the ability to transfer this sperm to other females, thus being capable of acting like functional hermaphrodites even though strictly speaking they cannot produce sperm (and of course the supply of stored sperm is rather limited). It is easily concievable that they might opportunistically impregnate human females in this manner (performing the actual sperm transfer without it being noticed would be challenging, but might perhaps be doable with sleight of hand techniques...). Thus our hypothetical slightly less shitty alternate version of Species 2 may include LESBIAN FANSERVICE.

I love how that's cribbing of stuff that actually exists in animals on Earth, with the ability to transfer stored sperm between females being the only real innovation (as far as I can tell - I wouldn't put it past nature right here on Earth to actually have come up with something that weird!)
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Re: The Book Thread

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Species? Peter Watts? I'd buy three of them.
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Re: The Book Thread

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while still letting you take advantage of the opportunity to combine your genetic assets with somebody else
I don't get this. If the INFERIOR male RECESSIVE GENES get tossed away, and the offspring possess only the MOST DOMINANT (female) GENES IN THE PLANET, then how can the next generation of female Natasha Henstridge fish "combine genetic assets with somebody else"? I might not be understanding all sorts of genetic science subtleties, but yeah.

SNAAAAAAAKE!

Also, oddly enough I HAVE been musing on a Species-like character for Comix. Just as PREGRIN or Vic. I've been going about it on and off for months now.
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Re: The Book Thread

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Shroom Man 777 wrote:I don't get this. If the INFERIOR male RECESSIVE GENES get tossed away, and the offspring possess only the MOST DOMINANT (female) GENES IN THE PLANET, then how can the next generation of female Natasha Henstridge fish "combine genetic assets with somebody else"? I might not be understanding all sorts of genetic science subtleties, but yeah.
The DNA from the hybrid's mother gets passed along and combined with the DNA of a male fish, while the DNA from the hybrid's father is discarded. When the resulting little fish breeds it again passes along the DNA of the mother while the DNA of the father is again discarded. So the DNA from the mother is passed down intact from generation to generation, while the other half of the genome which comes from the father changes with each generation.

The fish gets to combine its genome with male fish that may have useful traits, while the maternal half of the genome gets passed down intact for a theoretically unlimited number of generations.
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Re: The Book Thread

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I finished reading The Lost Horizon by James Hilton. Awesome book about a lamasery Utopia. The story starts out as a prologue, where a few fine Englishmen (I deduce) are having a nice crumpet and tea chat at some hotel, when an author and a pilot talk about an incident in Baskul where an Oriental man hijacked a plane with four passengers. The Author then tales the narrator about how he met one of the passengers, Conway, in China, who had amnesia. When Conway got better, he told the author his story and suddenly vanished.

Do I really have to go about explaining the plot of a classic? It's just an awesome suspense Utopian anti-war book that is a must read for anyone wanting of HIGH ADVENTURE (as in, more than ten-thousand-feet-high-mountain valleys that grow mangoes and have women that are only "moderately chaste").


On the other hand, I'm trying to read some modern The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. It's a young adult novel about teen cloning thingy. I tried reading the first page, but I dunno, I feel tainted reading it. Maybe it's because I am reading too much classics. Once I picked up the book, images of the Moonlight and Twilight Series popped up and I don't have the will to read it right now. I wish I finished reading HAWK HUNTER and his SPACE AMERICAN journeys now. Pity.
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Re: The Book Thread

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I just today finished 1984 on the train, and I have to say that despite how overexposed we, as nerds, are to the ideas of this book (I knew the entire plot years ago) it is still a powerful book and one which I'd recommend, but only if you think you are up for reading something which has an interesting and influential perspective on politics and society which is also monstrously depressing.

Now I do not know much about George Orwell other than what I've learned in the odd documentary, and I obviously don't know what it is like to live in a totalitarian society, but in my inexpert opinion it's clear that he had that experience. Right from the get go this book paints a vivid picture of the kind of horrible isolation that these societies put people under, with people scrutinising their every word and action, conscious or unconscious, to make sure they don't draw attention to themselves. Then there is the despair that comes with that from the main character, who seems to accept it as a given that one day he, and his lover, who are breaking the laws of their society, will be brought in, tortured and shot, and more, he seems to believe this will happen to just about everyone around him, as if the course of life in Oceania inevitably goes baby-child-adult-thought criminal-dead.

The main theme of the book seems to me, inexpert as I am at this, to be the dictatorships destruction of what I, as a staunch materialist, must still call the human spirit. The Party in this book want to destroy anything that makes people individuals, anything that gives them any kind of agency or purpose of their own, and just reduce them to basically a bunch of brains running on automatic to do their beureaucratic work and love the Party. That's just in the first bits of the book, in the end, where the motives for it are properly explained (that's the bit with the famous footwear related line) it gets into far, far more awful detail. I was really surprised by how affected I was by the last bit, I wasn't just depressed by it, I was disgusted. I really came to hate the Party and everything it stands for, because it is essentially the most evil ideology imaginable, it doesn't even have any motive that makes sense. It literally exists to perpetuate oppression and suffering for their own sakes, so that the upper classes can maintain power, for the sake of maintaining power, and they want to systematically remove anything good in human beings, any possibility for progress or even change. This should reduce them to the level of moustache twirling, puppy kicking charicatures, it really should, there is no way I can imagine human beings adopting an ideology like this en masse, but it's written in such a way that I couldn't feel anything like that, I just felt a deep loathing for the whole Party and everything it stood for.

Which, I suppose, is the point, because although Oceania is a massive exaggeration, there isn't really any state like that, I think the closest that exists is North Korea, it is an exaggeration of traits that really exist. Doublethink, the ability to deliberately deceive yourself, to hold two contradicting opinions and believe them both to be true, is something which I can easily believe happens. Totalitarianisms do isolate their people from one another, try to turn everyone against everyone else and limit peoples autonomy of the mind. And I at least would agree that some people enjoy power for its own sake, I think a lot of people do, in fact, and in some people this causes terrible results for countless people simply because these tyrants want to prove they can exert that power.

There is a lot of other stuff in this book which is very interesting, and which I'd like to go into, but I've wittered enough. All I can say is read it if you want to understand what all the fuss is about, but please don't cheapen the book by then calling everything you don't like 'Orwellian'. Please. And only get into it if you are prepared to read something that will make you despair, rage and shiver like someone walked over your grave and think you will get something out of it.
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Re: The Book Thread

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speaker-to-trolls wrote:Which, I suppose, is the point, because although Oceania is a massive exaggeration, there isn't really any state like that, I think the closest that exists is North Korea, it is an exaggeration of traits that really exist.
I remember watching the Vice Guide to Travel video where they visit North Korea, and thinking that if somehow a portal got opened to 1984-world and Oceania ever let people from our world visit there, it would probably look a lot like that, only with English-speaking white people in the place of the North Koreans.

I have this idea for writing a RL/1984 crossover fanfic based on that premise, but I have the feeling I might be biting off more than I can chew, especially as I'm not all that terribly enthusiastic about the idea (it hasn't gone past the "this could be cool" place where a lot of my ideas languish at). The idea of the world being confronted with such a horror and just more-or-less ignoring it kind of appeals to me in a literary way though; it's both morally ambiguous and highly realistic (I'm envisioning both sides fortifying their side of the portal to Korean DMZ-like levels, and then more-or-less ignoring the either, maybe with our side trading 1984 world some tidbits of our superior technology in exchange for access to their world's relatively lightly tapped natural resources).

Incidentally, remembering that made me look up that video again ... and watching the beginning where they show the clip of the NK military parade or whatever that is is creepy, because despite knowing what a pathetic hellhole the place is a part of me responds to the militaristic-authoritarian pagentry. The impression of power and unity is powerful and appealing.
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Re: The Book Thread

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It'd be interesting to see someone from the real world interact with a loyal member of the Party in a setting where no one was being tortured.
We definitely wouldn't march in to liberate Oceania, that's for sure. Occupy a nation of 300,000,000 covering half the globe whose entire middle class is indoctrinated to the point of insanity? Sure, it's not as if wars are expensive or anything.
We might end up having a trading relationship with them, advanced technology for resources, as you say. However, I think this could only happen if the Inner Party was either incompetent or absent at the time, because they know that any change in the status quo is dangerous to their regime.
Unless of course our people know full well what they're doing on the other side of the portal and sell them devices designed to help their surveillance systems. At the very least there are some unscrupulous companies who would do such things.

I have been reading, of late The World of Myth by a variety of authors, which takes an analytical look at some myths of the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Norse and Celts. I have only read the Greek and Roman bits and they make for fascinating reading, partly because of what they reveal about the culture (though a lot of it you could probably work out from first principles, Greeks were interested in the nature of life, death and mans place in the Universe, Romans were interested in why Rome is awesome and how you can serve it), and mostly just because I enjoy seeing the stories retold in a way which makes them more comprehensible. I love reading these things and reimagining all of the detailed accounts of various heroes and dynasties and adventurers and so forth, it's awesome. My favourite myth at the moment is Perseus and the Gorgon, simply because the way it is described Perseus gets sent after Medusa because he wanted to be a smartarse:
Perseus and his mother, Danae, had been living for most of Perseus' life under the protection of King Polydektes of Seriphos, who did not get on with Perseus since he was in love with Danae and Perseus would not let him near her. Why he didn't take advantage of their difference in status earlier is not explained. Anyway, on some special occasion, all the young worthies of Polydektes court promised to bring the king fabulous gifts; chariots, hunting dogs, weaponry, all the usual accessories. When everyone but Perseus had spoken all eyes fell on him. Perseus, as I said, deciding to be a smartarse, fixed Polydektes with a glare and said "well since I hold your majesty in such esteem, I'll get you the head of Medusa"
Polydektes begins to fume with rage, then a smile creeps across his face. "Why, Perseus, I am honoured. You'd best get going, the isle of the Gorgons is quite a way from here".
Of course this didn't turn out well for Polydektes, but I love the image of Perseus suddenly realising what a mess that bit of bravado has got him into.

I've also been reading A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfeld, which attempts to condense the terrifyingly complicated history of the former Ottoman and Persian Empires over the last 200 years down into a 300 page paperback. It is incredibly dense with information, but I think some of it is seeping in. For instance I do now know what the hell was going on with Egypt in the early 1900's (I was always curious as to whether it was or wasn't a British posession, the answer is; both, apparently. It was administered by Britain but not a part of the Empire, because the British had kindly wiped out its army in 1882 because the Sultan was worried about insurrection and they wanted the Suez canal, or something).
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Re: The Book Thread

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The last books I bought, I bought a few months ago. Upon seeing them at the second-hand bookstore's sci-fi section, I instantly knew I had to buy them, no question.

One of the books was Neuromancer. Self-explanatory.

The other one was The Legend of Banzai Maguire by Susan Grant. I never heard of it, but once I saw the cover and the synopsis at the back*, I knew I had to acquire it.

*Behold:
The year: 2006. The mission: routine. Or so U.S.A.F. pilot Bree "Banzai" Maguire thinks. Then she's shot down over enemy airspace, captured and put in bio-stasis. When she wakes, everything's changed. It's one hundred and seventy years later--2176--the world is in crisis, and she's a hotly contested prize. Once, Banzai's job was to protect democracy; now a mysterious voice claims she must bring it back.

Two men vie for her heart. Kyber, her captor, the rich, ruthless Emperor Prince of Asia, has all a man could desire. Then there's U.C.E. SEAL commander and would-be rescuer Ty Armstrong. He has all the right moves. With two such choices, Banzai regrets she has but one heart to give for her country.
Unfortunately, despite being unemployed and bumming at home, I have not yet started reading anything so far. Neuromancer is on my desk, and this one is at the head of my bed.

Bah, I am so lazy.
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Re: The Book Thread

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I have once more taken up the incredible tome that is A History of the Modern World, which starts with a brief overview of ancient times (Greece, Rome, rise of Christianity), then moves through the early and high middle ages, and goes into overdrive and a ludicrous amount of detail once it hits the 14th century... And doesn't stop until it's dealt with Western Europe after the Cold War, 1114 pages later. The appedix, suggestions for further reading and index of this book alone are 143 pages long. Currently I'm working through chapter 4, which deals with the growing power of Western Europe in the 17th century, and I'm also looking forward to chapter 5 which deals with Eastern Europe from the mid-17th to the mid-18th century. I've never read much about that region before so that should be interesting... If I ever get there, because I tried working through this book before and it's all but undoable due to sheer information overload. Here's to trying though!
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Re: The Book Thread

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Siege wrote:I have once more taken up the incredible tome that is A History of the Modern World, which starts with a brief overview of ancient times (Greece, Rome, rise of Christianity), then moves through the early and high middle ages, and goes into overdrive and a ludicrous amount of detail once it hits the 14th century... And doesn't stop until it's dealt with Western Europe after the Cold War, 1114 pages later. The appedix, suggestions for further reading and index of this book alone are 143 pages long. Currently I'm working through chapter 4, which deals with the growing power of Western Europe in the 17th century, and I'm also looking forward to chapter 5 which deals with Eastern Europe from the mid-17th to the mid-18th century. I've never read much about that region before so that should be interesting... If I ever get there, because I tried working through this book before and it's all but undoable due to sheer information overload. Here's to trying though!
Very interesting.

I recently finished a heaping biography of Theodore Roosevelt - a biography which despite its tremendous size only deals with his life until he becomes president. The rest is dealt with in the next two installments. Nevertheless the book was truly excellently written and researched.

Next I read the latest and probably last in a recent Hemingway binge, The Sun Also Rises. I've read all his major works now and while this one was solid, I still think my favorite is The Old Man and the Sea.

What has me most excited, however, is that I just picked up One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest after catching the Jack Nicholson film version on TV the other day. I very much empathized with it on TV and I fully expect this book to skyrocket up my favorites list.

Anybody else read any good, solid literature lately? I haven't touched much sci-fi since I read a collection of Lovecraft stories somewhere in between the books I mentioned earlier.
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Re: The Book Thread

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I haven't read anything in half a year.
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Re: The Book Thread

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I'm re-reading Harry Potter 5 and Harry Dresden 2 in parallel at the minute. Mainly because at 1000 plus pages in hardback OotP is not a book i want to read in the bath.
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Re: The Book Thread

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What hoe, I am returned from the cold and windswept lands of Englands ancestors (probably geographically inaccurate and it was painfully hot, but whatever)

Well I've given up on A History of the Middle East since I'm up to 1995 and can't remember anything since Nasser died... or most of what happened before that. I'll go back to it and read it all the way through at some undefined point in the future.

At the moment I am reading Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott so as to get a better feel for old timey speech for my current project. I find that there is something very charming about the old fashioned speech patterns, it's probably something to do with the patterns making it seem more removed from reality than other books, a little more in the realm of fables, but I don't think that quite covers it. The villains are still threatening, the heroes are still heroic and the jokes actually seem that much wittier for being delivered in such a complex and longwinded way. For instance: The main antagonist, the Templar Brian De Bois-Guilbert (sidenote, what kind of a name is Brian for a Norman nobleman?) is being entertained at the house of one of the heroes, Cedric the Saxon, and tells him that the crusaders have made a truce with Saladin.
Wamba the Jester: Ah, these truces with the Saracens make an old man of me!
Cedric: Why say'st such, fool?
Wamba: Why, because I remember three such truces, each promised to last not less than fifty years, which by my reckoning must make me at least one hundred and fifty years old!
Brian then responds with the following, to clarify, Wamba had earlier given him bad directions in the hopes of misdirecting him from Cedric's house: 'I can assure thee, though, that ye shall not die of old age. Indeed I can assure thee against any death save that by violence, should thou continue to give such advice to travellers that thou did to me'.

I like it, anyway. Admittedly it does get a little too longwinded even for me at some points, especially in the narration, which goes to great pains to describe pretty much everything, and all the thees and thous and my fair lady by the rood of St Dunstans do get a bit cumbersome in places.

A couple of things surprise me about this book, since it seems at first to be a pretty lighthearted story of chivalry and adventure and so on. First is that a lot of the characters are posessed of various degrees of cynicism, including the shrewder of the heroes. The titular character is by far and away the least cynical of the lot, and also the least present in the book, spending most of his time either in disguise, absent or unconscious. Moreover what screentime he does get doesn't really show one much of his character, just shows him to be noble, honourable, brave and generally completely devoted to his ridiculous code of chivalry. The rest of the cast, even those who only appear for a few chapters like Urfried the Crone or Waldemar Fitzurse the politician get far more character development.
Second, for a story of chivalry and adventure there is actually very little action and violence, there's a lot of talking, in fact two of the major action sequences are described entirely by other characters observing the events, though in the second instance it's described in some detail. There's also a lot of moving about and setting of plans into motion and this sort of thing, but very little actual fighting.

A few gripes; The book does get a bit repetitive at some points, such as its constant berating of the normans, though that's kind of the whole point of the story, and it sounds as if they deserve it. Why Scott (and Cedric the Saxon, who hates the normans even more than he hates... whatever else 12th century englishmen hate as much as normans) make exception in the case of Richard Couer-de-Leon I'm not sure, maybe his love of mother church and extreme violence just appeal to him. There's also the constant referring to the saxons by the normans as 'churls', I know it's a historical insult directly relating to saxons, but come on, these are supposed to be men of culture, surely they can think of a few extra names. A couple of the characters are also jews. Now I know this is a big deal in the middle ages, but that doesn't mean one necessarily has to point it out, nor point out just how poorly they were regarded, three times on every page they feature on.

Also Scott's characters must be really long lived. The book is set around the end of the 2nd (3rd? Whichever one Richard was in) Crusade, so 1192? But Cedric says his father remembered the Norman Conquest, in 1066. One hundred and twenty eight years ago. By my calculations if Cedric is 70 (and he'd be a damn spry 70 year old if so) his father would have to have got his wife with child at the age of 74 to have been 16 at the time of the conquest. Does not compute, mang.

But in any case a thoroughly enjoyable book if you have time for extreme longwindedness, an annoying and faceless hero and a cast of hundreds.
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Re: The Book Thread

Post by Heretic »

Doesn't Ivanhoe have Robin Hood in it or something? Too lazy to wiki it right now.


As for me...damn.

So I was walking through my local library and skimming through the Science Fiction/Fantasy (they seem to be always bunched together) section, looking for a silly book for my silly mind. My finger landed on a silly title, unaware of how silly I was to venture into British silliness.

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AHHHHH!!!!!!!

It's ridiculous. It's a parody of all that is popular in science fiction like galactic empires and cyberpunk and grimdarkness, by kicking it in the balls and adding a handlebar mustache to it.

The basic premise is that Captain Isambard Smith of the British Empire is given the task to safely transport a hippie girl from New San Fransisco or something back to New London. To do this, our hero gets the best of the best in equipment and crew:
  • A M'lak (Morlcok of HG Well universe), whose race is on the surface a honorable warrior race and speaks in refined English, but in their own tongue, they, like, totally speak in, like, whatever, dudes.

    A fugitive sex toy who joined the fleet to escape the depraved son of a CEO. Pollyanna Caverth doesn't like it when you call her fat.

    A hamster named Gerald.

    And a battered second hand freighter ship named John Pym which has no lasers or anything, and could be broken with a sneeze.
As our "Vaguely Competent" heroes embark on their journey, they fight off Void Sharks by actually going out into space with suits and guns and personally fighting them (Smith says they look like flying socks, and had nightmares of them smothering him), battle cultists, deal with cyberpunk resistance groups in worlds where all literature up to 1989 are banned, and fight the worst enemy to Democracy, the Ghast Empire!

I would like to go on, but the silly book traumatized me, so here's the link to Toby Frost's website and a teaser to the second book (don't worry, there is nothing really spoiled and just so you know, it's a parody of Frank Herbert's Dune) :

http://spacecaptainsmith.com/tease2.php


EDIT: Here's the summary of the first book from the website.

Egad!

The British Space Empire is threatened by legions of bloodthirsty ant-men, religious lunatics and other rum types!

Captain Isambard Smith must rescue a psychic hippy maiden from her hippy world and bring her to the safety of the British Empire where her hippy truth will be revealed, or it will all go to hell in a space cart.

With only his trusty sidekicks - a blood thirsty alien with a literal take on life and a renegade android with a secret past and hit man on her tail - he must steer the good ship John Pym through all kinds of scrapes and adventures if disaster is to be averted.

Will our hero get the girl, or will the ghastly Ghast do unspeakable things to him?

Only one way to find out - brace yourself for a stirring tale of war, romance, tea and tiffin in Space Captain Smith.

Set a course for adventure!
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Shroom Man 777
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Re: The Book Thread

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

That is awesome! It sounds totally ridiculous!

Are you sure you didn't get that book from the future, when future-you was writing ridiculous books and selling them to past/now-you? :lol:

Man, that is brilliant.
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Re: The Book Thread

Post by Booted Vulture »

Just finished Grave Peril (Book Three of the Dresden Files which I've been told is where the series really starts to get good and by 'get good' it seems to mean takes a hard turn at the corner of grim and dark. To the point where the book seems ridiculously packed with a never ending litany of bad things happening or getting worse.

In its favour it introduces some cool new characters. (hello, Michael the Paladin) and its unlike the second book didn't have sequences that ape the first book so closely I have to re-read to make sure its not just been copy and pasted.

Still poor Harry needs life to cut him a break, like seriously.

And now I really want to read the next book...
Last edited by Booted Vulture on Mon Aug 23, 2010 12:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Artemis
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Re: The Book Thread

Post by Artemis »

Oh, Harry doesn't get breaks. That's why he's so darn loveable.

To paraphrase the author, Jim Butcher: "You know how Harry's always looking up at the sky and going, 'someone up there must really hate me'? Yeah, that'd be me."
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Re: The Book Thread

Post by Siege »

Yeah, no breaks for Harry (like, ever) are one of the red threads running through the whole series -- it gets to the point where other characters in the books start commenting on it, too, in a "how the shit are you still alive" fashion.
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Re: The Book Thread

Post by Artemis »

Speaking of books and characters who mix dark fantasy with crime fiction, may I introduce to the room the many creations of Richard Kadrey. Imagine if Neil Gaiman, instead of growing up in '60's and '70's Britain, had grown up on the means streets of L.A. or Detroit during the worst of the economic collapse, had been in lots of fights, most of which he'd lost, and only got tougher because of it, and supplemented his writing income as a fetish photographer. That guy? Still wouldn't be as much of a badass as Richard Kadrey.

Kadrey is a mean, angry, vicious writer with one of the best-tuned senses of sardonic humor I've ever read. He can, within a single paragraph, make your face screw up with disgust, bust a gut with laughter, and have to put the book down for a moment as you repress a bad memory something he wrote just drudged up. His stories are chock full of demons, monsters, and gods, but really the stories are about how humans are all those things - and how they can sometimes be angels, too.

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(Click the image to download THE ENTIRE NOVEL as PDF. Totally free and legal - Kadrey put it up online a few years back on a Creative Commons License)

Butcher Bird was the first of his novels I read, and it was a fun little romp through a world that managed to cram every mythological pantheon I've ever heard of into a single, cohesive story, and did it smoothly and without tripping over itself, tying the whole thing together with tattoos, drugs, and one of the the strangest, truest love stories ever. It gets a little... I'm gonna say "crowded," towards the end, but the ride there is completely worth it.

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I'm reading Sandman Slim, one of his more recent novels, and loving the piss out of it. Short synopsis: Our boy Stark breaks out of hell with the intention of brutally murdering his former friends that sent him there in the first place. Of course, Hell's got other plans for him.

By the way - check out that frickin' quote from William "the father of cyberpunk" Gibson. If that ain't a guarantee of gutter fiction quality, I dunno what is.
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Re: The Book Thread

Post by Somes J »

The day before yesterday I picked up Alastair Reynolds's Pushing Ice so I'd have something to read on the train while I went to get some paperwork straightened out for my graduation. I finished reading it yesterday, which is impressive speed by my standards as it's, like, 400 pages.

The premise of the book is basically that sometime in the future Saturn's moon Janus starts accelerating out of the solar system and turns out to be a camouflaged alien spacecraft. Some guys who normally make a living deflecting comets toward the inner solar system so they can be mined are sent to go intercept the spaceship/moon, because they're the only ship that will be able to catch it before it leaves the solar system. And then all sorts of whacky stuff happens.

It's a pretty fun book, it kept me interested enough that I kept reading pretty much all day because I wanted to find out what would happen. Reynolds does a pretty good job creating lots of little mysteries throughout the book to keep the reader interested in what will happen next, and actually making their resolutions unpredictable. He really gives a good sense of a situation where people are having one curveball thrown at them after another and don't know what's is going on. He also manages to avoid the stereotype of hard SF as being all about tech and science and GRAEPHS with characters who only exist to be exposition fairies; the book has some pretty strong character story elements. The book also has some fairly cool aliens, especially the Musk Dogs. They're like Ferenghi done right.

Now I have an idea of a Musk Dog Quark. That would be pretty cool.

My only problem with the book was I'd occassionally run into some minor fridge logic issues. Like there was one bit where an astronaut died (he got better) because he got partially entombed in some quick-drying concrete-like stuff and his suit couldn't cool itself down, but they were pumping some compound into his suit to shut down his metabolism so they could freeze him and then hopefully bring him back later so you'd think they could have just hooked some kind of external cooling unit to his suit. Or after they'd been forced to land on Janus fuel was supposedly a big problem and they risked running out in a few years, but the ship supposedly had enough delta V left to decellerate from ~4% c. Granted they were partway through their burn already before they were forced to turn back but running a habitat, even a city-sized one, would be a trickle compared to the kind of energy you'd need for that. They should had enough fuel left for thousands of years of even relatively high-level power usage (gigawatts), even if only a fraction of their fuel was left. I suppose their engine and their generator might have been totally different systems that used different types of fuel (that's actually pretty reasonable), but there was nothing to indicate that in the text. These problems are all really just nitpicking about trivia though and didn't really detract from my enjoyment of the book.

In conclusion, a pretty good book and one I'd recommend to others.
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Re: The Book Thread

Post by Heretic »

Does anyone know if Orson Scott Cards' stuff any good?

Also, I finished an old 80s western book called the Bounty Hunter by some author I really can't remember (I think it was J.D. Hardin) and it was a nice read about a young bounty hunter chasing after a Russian professional killer who accidentally killed a boy. It wasn't the best, and i can't remember names, but it was a nice read for a pulp fiction feel.
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Re: The Book Thread

Post by Invictus »

Heretic wrote:Does anyone know if Orson Scott Cards' stuff any good?
Card is a shambling subhumanoid thoroughly consumed by the Brain Eater, but there is a reason you have heard of his name even if you haven't read any of his books. Ender's Game is a classic. Its various sequels and sidequels are good but offer diminishing returns. If you want to explore Card, stick to his early stuff.
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