The Book Thread

[Metastachydium]

Where did I say it was wrong?

Correct answer! Carry on.

[Saph]

Yep, I'm with you here. A character can range the entire spectrum from unhinged to milquetoast, but as long as the story does something interesting with them I can enjoy myself. A boring character in a story that's saying something about stagnancy/novelty is compelling to me, even if the character themselves is a dud. It's all about whether I trust the creator to give me the payoff for their setup.

I've read the whole conversation upthread and can't quite be sure about the judgment that's being made about "dangerous man" characters in romance novels, but my thoughts are similar there. If he's meant to be the "mistake" that the heroine makes before switching to the "good" man by the end of the story, that tracks. If the dangerous man is meant to be the final, correct choice, I might be more lost on the writer's/reader's motivations.

On a weird tangent, that conversation makes me think about all the "nice guys finish last" discourse that saturated my friend group as a male teenager in America. My friend group was very broody about girls dating "bad boys"₁ who disobeyed authority, were crass or disrespectful with the people they were dating, and drank/smoked/etc. I'm not going to get into a full rant against the "niceguys" mentality here (I would never stop), I just wanted to point out a common thread: my friend group thought that a guy like that was a bad choice, because of these "bad" qualities. But people don't choose who to date based on a lack of negative qualities -- they choose based on a presence of positive qualities.

I think you, the friends that you talk about, and Warty here are all basically doing exactly the same thing – you've all got your worldviews which set out what people are supposed to find attractive in a romantic partner, and you're running into all these stories which seem to indicate something rather different, and you're trying to reconcile the contradiction. And yes, that's doable with enough effort, but personally I think it's a lot easier to just look at how things are and take that as a starting point instead.

[theangelJean]

I think you, the friends that you talk about, and Warty here are all basically doing exactly the same thing – you've all got your worldviews which set out what people are supposed to find attractive in a romantic partner, and you're running into all these stories which seem to indicate something rather different, and you're trying to reconcile the contradiction. And yes, that's doable with enough effort, but personally I think it's a lot easier to just look at how things are and take that as a starting point instead.

I think part of the problem is that "attracted to someone dangerous" and "finds happiness with someone safe" are both stories. Nobody is ever going to get into someone else's head and find out what makes their relationship tick, so in the end all we can do is listen to each other's stories (or watch and make up our own stories), and both have been told hundreds of times. And right now, the latter story is in vogue, and the actual consequences of the first one are being deconstructed to hell and back, so it's kind of jarring to see it played straight. (And older stories like, "finds happiness with someone who was chosen for them" and "hates the person chosen for them" are occasionally being threaded around the others.)

[LibraryOgre]

I realized I'd spent a few years following John Scalzi and Ursula Vernon on social media, but had never read anything by them. So, I'm reading Kaiju Preservation Society, which I'm enjoying a lot.

[Ionathus]

I think you, the friends that you talk about, and Warty here are all basically doing exactly the same thing – you've all got your worldviews which set out what people are supposed to find attractive in a romantic partner, and you're running into all these stories which seem to indicate something rather different, and you're trying to reconcile the contradiction. And yes, that's doable with enough effort, but personally I think it's a lot easier to just look at how things are and take that as a starting point instead.

I'm not sure I understand your point. My only claim about what people are "supposed" to find attractive is that they have to find some facet of the person compelling. I don't think that's an unreasonable or rigid worldview.

My point was about how I used to think there was a single correct rubric, followed by the realization that there's no right answer -- it's always going to be subjective. Negative personality traits (especially ones that only some people consider negative) are only part of the equation, and if a person is compelling enough in other ways then they'll still be attractive to the chooser.

The same applies to fiction. If a character is compelling to me, I'll overlook their flaws or even find them endearing. But if they're not compelling, it doesn't matter to me if they somehow possess zero negative or annoying traits -- "not being bad" isn't a real motivator for most people.

[Rodin]

I realized I'd spent a few years following John Scalzi and Ursula Vernon on social media, but had never read anything by them. So, I'm reading Kaiju Preservation Society, which I'm enjoying a lot.

I like John Scalzi's work a lot, and Kaiju Preservation Society is a ton of fun. If you're looking for more Scalzi, my personal favorites are Agent to the Stars, Red Shirts, and Fuzzy Nation.

Agent to the Stars is about first contact with aliens, who survey the Earth first and decide that if they landed humanity would attack on sight. So they go to Hollywood to get some good publicity first...

Red Shirts is a giant piss-take of Star Trek, and for my money stands alongside Galaxy Quest as the best loving parodies of the show. It's Star Trek written from the perpective of Ensign Ricky.

Fuzzy Nation is a first contact story about trying to prove the sentience of an alien lifeform to protect it. I love that type of story, and Fuzzy Nation is an excellent example of it.

Scalzi also wrote a couple series of police procedurals - the Dispatcher series and the Lock In series. The Lock In series is my preferred read of the two.

[Tarmor]

I've just finished Andre Norton's "The Beast Master" which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had the feeling that I'd read this decades ago, but nothing was familiar. I have the second book, Lord of Thunder, to start reading tonight.
After that, following recommendations here, I've got John Scalzi's "Agent to the Stars" and "The Androids Dream" to read. I'd previously read Red Shirts, and I agree its a great parody!

[KorvinStarmast]

I've just finished Andre Norton's "The Beast Master" which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I read it well before the movie came out. I think it was a Daw paperback. While I enjoyed the Movie, it wasn't quite what the book was. About the same time I read the Jargoon Pard, also by Norton. My early D&D years saw me dig up a lot of SFF and Speculative Fiction books (like The Forgotten Beasts of Eld).

[halfeye]

For parody, very little beats Harry Harrison's "Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers".

[GloatingSwine]

Fuzzy Nation is a first contact story about trying to prove the sentience of an alien lifeform to protect it. I love that type of story, and Fuzzy Nation is an excellent example of it..

Fuzzy Nation is also an authorised sequel/reimagining of Little Fuzzy by H Beam Piper.

[sktarq]

Very frustrated with my current read
Peter Jackson's (no not that one-the ponce in Staffordshire not Hobbiton's Shire)
From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane (published Feb of this year)
Don't click but I'm polite

It is tripe. After a long and arrogant introduction we have 450 pages of who begat who, who stabbed who, who camped where, long issues of office politics in three languages (Mongol, Turkish, and Persian). After that its runs out to page 725 with a couple of useful family tree's of the Ilkanate and other Central Asian lines but a pound of endnotes to tot around whenever the book is being perused.
Absolutely nothing about the cultural dynamics that was causing the issues that are alluded to in terms of nomad settled interraltions within the empire. economics, social norms around Islamisation of rule caste vs just its internal use by one bloke so that he could label his own tendency to slaughter and hold his political followers together via conquest some type of justified cause. Nothing about anyone not of noble blood (or affected noble blood). So real sense of time or place. What I wouldn't give for a good lake core pollen study to ground the musings about stray marks of royal documents. It is like reading a Bob Woodward white house tell-all from 1400 (well 1370-1405).

I love history, but this is the kind of rubbish that leads to the subject being well hated by many people.

I fully plan to finish the last few chapters and may trawl it again for various facts that will become important when I learn some third party fact or argument at some indeterminate future date, but Thor's Nuts it's frustrating.

I shall reward myself with the new edition of Confessions of an Economic Hitman (12 new chapters since the 2004? edition apparently) when I finish this.

anyway 2/10 do not recommend.

[Saph]

So I've been re-reading Mother of Learning and I've been reminded of just how good it is. It's probably the best of all of the modern crop of LitRPG/progression fantasy stories, and it's especially interesting if you're familiar with D&D 3.0/3.5 since it does a really good job of taking a lot of elements of D&D and fitting them together into a coherent world.

For instance, one of the fundamental elements of D&D is right in the name – dungeons (adventure locations) and dragons (huge lethal monsters). Which creates a lot of world-building challenges when you try to figure out how these things would actually work – how can you have these locations filled with deadly monsters at the same time as a human/demi-human civilisation? Wouldn't one side just wipe out the other? This is why low-level or low-magic setting like Eberron struggle to make sense – it's really hard to square human-scale settings which also happen to have CR 20 world-destroying entities that could raze entire cities to the ground if they ever decide to come out of the wilderness, but they just . . . don't, for some reason. The Mother of Learning setting does have both of these things, and does so due to a mechanic (ambient mana levels) that ties into the whole magic system and completely makes sense.

It's also a lot of fun seeing the D&D schools of magic organised into a coherent whole, with discussions of how the various schools would work in practice. For instance, the D&D equivalent of enchantment in the Mother of Learning is "mind magic", and has an extremely dodgy reputation due to its potential for abuse – as such, most mind magic spells are restricted and the mage guild comes down very harshly on anyone caught using them without permission. Necromancy and the creation of sentient undead was banned due to succession crises caused by members of the aristocracy turning themselves into vampires/liches so that they could rule their fiefdoms forever and never have to turn them over to their children, leading (unsurprisingly) to a continental war when the major necromancy-using country decided it didn't want to play along.

Mother of Learning was originally webfiction published on Royal Road, but it's now made the jump to traditional publishing and has paper/audio/ebook editions. I'd definitely recommend it.

[halfeye]

So I've been re-reading Mother-Learning. It's probably the best of all of the modern crop of LitRPG/progression fantasy stories, and it's especially interesting if you're familiar with D&D 3.0/3.5 since it does a really good job of taking a lot of elements of D&D and fitting them together into a coherent world.

I've read that, and for me (as a non-player of D&D) it's okay, but it's not the best ever web serial.

I read a lot of web-serials, and most of them are indeed barely worth reading, but there are enough real gems to make the whole process well worthwhile.

I really like Under the Dragon Eye Moons, I read it from the start on royal road, you can't do that any more because it's been published on Amazon. It starts off a little weak, Rynjin read the first book on Kindle and didn't like it, but it has been going for several years, and though it's still ongoing by now it's getting really good, IMHO.

Another good one is The Gods are Bastards, I think that's currently available to read for free, though I suspect that's liable to change pretty soon, it's again not finished yet, but what there is so far is amazing and bodes well for the future if it's ever finished.

The Wandering Inn is huge, I believe it's already the longest work of fiction (no doubt some AI is going to write something longer next week), and it's about half done according to the author. It's a sprawling mess, but there are a lot of good bits in it.

There are other good webserials, but these are probably my cream of the crop this week.

[Saph]

I really like Under the Dragon Eye Moons, I read it from the start on royal road, you can't do that any more because it's been published on Amazon. It starts off a little weak, Rynjin read the first book on Kindle and didn't like it, but it has been going for several years, and though it's still ongoing by now it's getting really good, IMHO.

Another good one is The Gods are Bastards, I think that's currently available to read for free, though I suspect that's liable to change pretty soon, it's again not finished yet, but what there is so far is amazing and bodes well for the future if it's ever finished.

The Wandering Inn is huge, I believe it's already the longest work of fiction (no doubt some AI is going to write something longer next week), and it's about half done according to the author. It's a sprawling mess, but there are a lot of good bits in it.

There are other good webserials, but these are probably my cream of the crop this week.

I've heard a lot about Wandering Inn, but most of what I've heard doesn't make it sound that amazing. I suspect just from its length that it has to be pretty mediocre for the most part – no way you're going to have good structure/pacing/plotting when you're churning out that much wordcount that quickly with minimal editing.

I might give the other two a try.

[Rynjin]

The Wandering Inn is a slice-of-life tale primarily, at least for a good chunk of its run, and is more focused on the world and daily lives of the characters in it than plot much of the time. That's why the volume of writing works to its benefit.

It is the kind of story that can ONLY be told within the confines of a web serial. Crunching down the plot to fit within the covers of a traditional novel would lose just about everything that makes it special. The entire story is basically about how one person just living their lives and being themselves can slowly but surely make a web of connections that affects the fate of entire nations.

It starts off a little weak, Rynjin read the first book on Kindle and didn't like it, but it has been going for several years, and though it's still ongoing by now it's getting really good, IMHO.

YMMV. The first book is pretty weak, but I did keep reading after that. I rarely judge a web serial by its first book/volume/whatever because they ALL tend to be pretty weak. As long as it manages to be minimally engaging and doesn't actively piss me off I will give it time. Hell, book 1 of The Gods Are Bastards is one of my least favorite book 1s of all time, and I managed to stick with it.

I read plenty of Beneath the Dragoneye Moons. It's...fluff, mostly. Entertaining up to a point but by the time they arrived in New Vampsville or whatever the vampire city was called I was pretty much checked out, and dropped it.

I largely lost interest post-timeskip and was continuing on via inertia at that point. The author gambled that the main character and the viewpoint character of an inferior side series were enough to carry the series while cutting the entire rest of the supporting cast and yeeting all of the existing worldbuilding out the window. IMO, they lost. Elaine is not a good enough MC to function without her supporting cast.

Anyway, this discussion DID remind me I haven't finished the last two Alex Verus novels, so I think I might pick those up now the series has concluded. I think I finished book 10

Spoiler

Show

whichever one he gets the super de duper fateweaving wand grafted to his body at the end of

but some of the details are fuzzy. Maybe requires a re-read.

[Rockphed]

I read plenty of Beneath the Dragoneye Moons. It's...fluff, mostly. Entertaining up to a point but by the time they arrived in New Vampsville or whatever the vampire city was called I was pretty much checked out, and dropped it.

I largely lost interest post-timeskip and was continuing on via inertia at that point. The author gambled that the main character and the viewpoint character of an inferior side series were enough to carry the series while cutting the entire rest of the supporting cast and yeeting all of the existing worldbuilding out the window. IMO, they lost. Elaine is not a good enough MC to function without her supporting cast.

Very few characters are strong enough to hold together a plot without their supporting cast. The Skyward series, by Brandon Sanderson, seems to drop most of its supporting cast at the end of every book, but the main character is still interacting with the same world and the same problems. Also, the main character keeps trying to get back home so the other characters get mentioned occasionally. "Speaker for the Dead" has about 1 character in common with "Ender's Game", but it is very much its own plot moving on rather than just another step in a serial. The only other series I can think of where main characters get dropped regularly is Narnia, and almost every time they switch up the main characters the quality of the books goes down.

[Saph]

A couple of new things that I've been reading:

• Theft of Swords by Michael J Sullivan. This was . . . okay. Writing quality is decent, setting seems reasonably interesting. My problem was the characters – the viewpoint characters are supposed to be thieves and mercenaries, but they really don't act like it. I think the author's one of those people who's got a very romanticised idea of the criminal underworld – his 'criminals' all act like nice, trustworthy, middle-class Americans whose jobs just happen to involve break-ins. I gave up around fifty pages in.

• The Mine Lord by Trae McMaken. Progression-style webfiction tends to go in for wish-fulfillment and extreme power creep, so this one was a nice little surprise. Survivalist story about a small group of dwarves founding a mine colony in the wilderness. I've never played Dwarf Fortress, but I suspect there are a lot of references here for those who have. Author is surprisingly knowledgable about mining – I learned a lot of new geology-related vocabulary. Story's apparently completed, though I haven't finished it yet.

[LibraryOgre]

I finished Scalzi's "Kaiju Preservation Society". In the writer's note, he describes it as a pop song of a book... short, light, with some catchy hooks... and it definitely was. But it was also very fun to read, with some neat worldbuilding about kaiju.

[Mordar]

Of late, with the end of the small (read as: manageable sized) bookstore that doesn't require a destination trip I have found myself seeking books from the category of "How is it that I haven't read this before?". The two most recent are:

War of the Worlds
An engaging and fairly quick read that let me know that the sci-fi, fantasy or scary story where the main character (not necessarily protagonist) survives a dizzying number of situations where tons of people die around them is definitely not a new phenomena. I always worry about vernacular in true classics (am I going to not understand something important because I have no idea what a strange word, likely slang, used in England in 189x means?), but that wasn't a problem this time around.

Dracula
Stunned that I have never actually started, much less finished, this novel. Particularly stunning because (a) I love the feel of the four characters adapted into the Paramount Monsters, (b) Frakenstein ranks as one of my favorite books of all time, though probably in part because of the reality surrounding the development of the story and the struggles with publication and all of that, and (c) Dracula, duh!

Is this the first found-footage scary story? If so, much MUCH better than that Blair Witch crap. So far I have yet to actively root for any of the protagonists to be eaten, and that happened about 30 seconds in to Blair Witch (and every other found-footage story I can recall seeing). The slang is an occasional problem, but the accent writing is sometimes more troubling...particularly when Stoker combines slang and accent. Ugh! At least I was able to figure out what "bloofer" meant before I moved past those references!

- M

[Rynjin]

Is this the first found-footage scary story? If so, much MUCH better than that Blair Witch crap. So far I have yet to actively root for any of the protagonists to be eaten, and that happened about 30 seconds in to Blair Witch (and every other found-footage story I can recall seeing). The slang is an occasional problem, but the accent writing is sometimes more troubling...particularly when Stoker combines slang and accent. Ugh! At least I was able to figure out what "bloofer" meant before I moved past those references!

- M

Frankenstein predates Dracula by about 70 years, so no.

[Rodin]

War of the Worlds
An engaging and fairly quick read that let me know that the sci-fi, fantasy or scary story where the main character (not necessarily protagonist) survives a dizzying number of situations where tons of people die around them is definitely not a new phenomena. I always worry about vernacular in true classics (am I going to not understand something important because I have no idea what a strange word, likely slang, used in England in 189x means?), but that wasn't a problem this time around.

War of the Worlds is startlingly easy to read considering its age. I was also surprised that despite being a progenitor of alien invasion novels it doesn't hew to the same "unstoppable alien that wins the war in 10 minutes" that so much modern fiction relies on. The Martian tripods aren't shielded and aren't made out of indestructible metal, and the military puts up a very good fight. They destroy a lot of tripods and force the Martians to resort to chemical/biological weapons to deal with all the cannons which keep sniping them.

[halfeye]

War of the Worlds is startlingly easy to read considering its age.

I always found Wells much easier to read than Verne, I don't think Burroghs was shelved with Science Fiction in the libraries I used.

[Ionathus]

War of the Worlds is startlingly easy to read considering its age. I was also surprised that despite being a progenitor of alien invasion novels it doesn't hew to the same "unstoppable alien that wins the war in 10 minutes" that so much modern fiction relies on. The Martian tripods aren't shielded and aren't made out of indestructible metal, and the military puts up a very good fight. They destroy a lot of tripods and force the Martians to resort to chemical/biological weapons to deal with all the cannons which keep sniping them.

I also enjoy alien war stories where it's not an anticlimax war one way or the other -- anticlimax does make the most "sense", though, given how hard space travel is. Whichever civilization manages to visit the other civilization (with hostile intent, given the scenario) is probably on a way higher scale of tech than the civilization they're visiting. It wouldn't be Stormtroopers vs. Ewoks...it would be Farmer vs. Rose Bush.

Of course, just because an anticlimax is the most "realistic" doesn't mean it's the most interesting. I love how District 9 explores the idea of aliens coming to Earth and then somehow getting conquered & captured by humans -- their leadership structure died en route and the "grunts" lack the skills to operate all their higher-scale tech. It's a fun way of leveling the playing field between interstellar travelers and a planet that's still pretty proud about touching its own moon.

[Mechalich]

I also enjoy alien war stories where it's not an anticlimax war one way or the other -- anticlimax does make the most "sense", though, given how hard space travel is. Whichever civilization manages to visit the other civilization (with hostile intent, given the scenario) is probably on a way higher scale of tech than the civilization they're visiting. It wouldn't be Stormtroopers vs. Ewoks...it would be Farmer vs. Rose Bush.

Of course, just because an anticlimax is the most "realistic" doesn't mean it's the most interesting. I love how District 9 explores the idea of aliens coming to Earth and then somehow getting conquered & captured by humans -- their leadership structure died en route and the "grunts" lack the skills to operate all their higher-scale tech. It's a fun way of leveling the playing field between interstellar travelers and a planet that's still pretty proud about touching its own moon.

War of the Worlds does operate with the conceit that the aliens are from Mars, making it an interplanetary rather than interstellar war, and interplanetary travel is about ten thousand times easier than interstellar travel. IIRC, the novel doesn't really speculate on the motives of the Martians, but it can be imagined that they had been monitoring Earth for some time, watched the industrial revolution occur, and came to the decision 'we've got to attack now or it'll be too late' sometime around 1850, but struggled with delays getting their invasion program going and ended up arriving with significantly less technological advantage than they anticipated.

A similar conceit is found in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, in which the aliens plan for a 'Stormtroopers versus Ewoks' scenario based on intelligence data from a probe sent to Earth in the 1100s, only to arrive during WWII and being absolutely gobsmacked by the tech development rate of humans. Those books are pretty campy, but the device works reasonably well to allow what is basically a late 1980s army fight the much larger but technologically inferior armies of WWII.

[BananaPhone]

I read Animal Farm over a couple of nights recently. A tragically predictable but haunting book.