Next by Michael Crichton annoyed the heck out of me. I couldn't finish it, it made me all crabby.
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Next by Michael Crichton annoyed the heck out of me. I couldn't finish it, it made me all crabby.
Solfe
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'That was tops! Who's not good at math? I was all, "Four!"' - Finn, Adventure Time.
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I read Michael Crichton's Timeline. Oh brother. I had a very strong disbelief that the history students who went back in time could understand the language of anyone from 14th century France (or be understood), even with a translator gizmo. I also recall reading poorly-written action sequences that looked like blocking instructions for the movie script that would eventually result. And a number of years later the movie looked just as bad although (truth in advertising) I did not see it. After Timeline I stopped reading Crichton; he was just writing poorly-disguised scripts.
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There was one series I was reading some years ago, can't recall the title but it was military hard-SF that billed itself as a realistic portrayal of life after a nuclear war. Then suddenly in one book they dropped an invisible man into it.
He wasn't wearing active camoflage or anything plausible. He was just turned invisible by some kind of experiment gone wrong. That was the shark-jump for that series.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
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Dark skinned people can do bad things too. This was a world that had been devastated by an all-out nuclear and biological war. The society was awful, but it seemed clear to me it was a case of people doing awful things. They were only dark skinned because more dark skinned people had survived.Originally Posted by Noclevername
The "rational black character" had a choice of living like a king but avoiding the pork, or being hunted. There was no useful opposition to the ruling civilization, and they didn't take kindly to dissent. His rationalization demonstrated why racism is bad: He was bitter because of his treatment in early '60s society, and he was now living in a society that pushed "superior race" propaganda. It was easy for him to buy into that.
I've read the story, but unfortunately, I don't recall the scene. I have a lot of my books boxed up where it's hard to get to them, but I'll try to see if I can reread that one. However, I'm not clear, with that limited detail, how that would indicate the author is racist. There were black people that hustled small change and talked like Amos and Andy in real life.In "Blowups Happen", there's a black character who hustles small change and talks like Amos & Andy. The main character interacts with him-- once.
Again, don't recall that. I do recall that Heinlein had once mentioned that he had pictures of two women, one black, one white, in his office, which were inspiration for Eunice. He said that he wrote with the view she could have been either one, but there's nothing actually said in story about her race.In I Will Fear No Evil the main character hires a black bodyguard who is nearly identical to the black character from 1940.
Also, Johnny Rico was Filipino (Starship Troopers). A major character in Tunnel in the Sky (Caroline) was black, but you'd only know that from one line mentioning she was Zulu. Heinlein later indicated that the main character was also black, and there may be some vague hints in the story, but that would have been downright subversive in a '50s juvenile. All three characters were intelligent and very competent, as was common with Heinlein's main characters.As I said, he tried, and many times succeeded. Certainly in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress he does an excellent job of portraying a mixed-race extended family, complete with them being treated poorly on Earth in the southern U.S.A. because of it. And a throwaway line in Number Of The Beast implies that Hilda was black. Those novels showed that he could do it right sometimes; but he had his poor examples too, an FF is right at the bottom of that list.
Anyway, I don't agree with you about Farnham's Freehold. It was a very dark story, however (no pun intended). At that time Heinlein thought nuclear war was very likely, and it was reflected in the story. Not a happy time.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
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Wow. That's amazing. Most of the reviews give it one star. Some tags are "Worst book ever" "Worst novel written" "Bad writing" and "Avoid at all costs." Heh.
Yes, I'd love to hear how that happened. This sounds like it has both a terrible plot and it makes more scientific errors than a bad Hollywood movie. Science fiction editors usually are good enough not to let howlers like the ones you mentioned get past them.The book was published by Tor, and I know they don't have a reputation for producing the highest quality stuff, but I really don't see how this stuff could get past any editor. This is elementary school science. I would have probably enjoyed this book when I was in second or third grade, but it's marketed to adults.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
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Overall, I think Heinlein's racial attitudes were within the normal range for his generation. Whether he was going through a racist phase when writing Farnham's Freehold or was trying to hold a mirror of contempt to contemporary anti-segregationist attitudes, I've no idea. Regardless, Farnham's Freehold cannot but serve as evidence to support the view of people who think that Heinlein was a racist, ultra-right-wing, bigot.
I don't like Farnham's Freehold. I think his extrapolations of the behavior of black masters over white slaves is the result of fears of a middle-aged man, born and reared in the segregated state of Missouri, during the era of the civil rights movement.
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I think one of the reviewers speculated that Mr. Shufeldt had in his possession compromising pictures of one of the executives at Tor.
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How do you fit Stranger in a Strange Land into your conception of him?
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Give me a break. Do you realize that the divide in that post-nuclear war world didn't have today's racial divides? Someone we (in the U.S.) would call Asian today would be the same "race" as any other light skinned person in that future. One of his points was that the situation was NOT LIKE then common prejudices, nor was it a simple reverse of them. Racism was being shown as an accident of history, this time because much of the light skinned population had been reduced to savages, their cities destroyed and technology lost. The dark skinned people kept more technology and had more intact civilization, and came out the winners eventually. Though you did get the impression things had been very bad for a few centuries for everyone.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
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I'm sorry I started this sidetrack.
I'm dropping the subject now, feel free to join me.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
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I read van Vogt's The War Against the Rull Made it through the whole book, but only just...
I believe the first Covenant book was Lord Foul's Bane I got about as far into is as you did...I read another of Donaldson's books; The Real Story, which was better than the Covenant book I started, but not good enough to interest me in the rest of the 'Gap Cycle' series.
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The first three Thomas Covenant books are like a punch in the face; Thomas Covenant starts off as anti-hero with an event horizon AND accretion disk around him. By the end of the second trilogy, he mellows significantly.
Solfe
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'That was tops! Who's not good at math? I was all, "Four!"' - Finn, Adventure Time.
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The Mote in God's Eye was one of the better books I've read for about the first 2/3 of the book. After that it just whimpered out.
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I hold the Covenant books in very high regard. Yes, it took me three attempts to get past page 100 of Lord Foul's Bane, but wow, was I pleased I made the effort! This was some of the most rewarding fantasy I read for decades. (I've since encountered Robin Hobb, but unfortunately haven't had the time to give her work the attention it deserves. I've also read Philip Pullman, and would put His Dark Materials in the top rank.)
I'd probably rate the second Covenant book, The Illearth War, as one of the most emotionally affecting books of my late teens. In trilogy terms, it's comparable with The Empire Strikes Back, in that it features familiar characters but ends on a real downer.
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Perfectly well: I never said he was simple. Like everybody, he is the product of his upbringing. I said I believed he was fearful of a change against the racial conditions that he, and probably everybody he knew, had been told, especially in childhood, were necessary to the survival of a cultured society and the white race. I'm not going to say being brought up in Missouri resulted in a worse attitude towards race than being raised anywhere else in the US -- look at the difficulties of school desegregation in Boston (in the North, segregation was achieved by refusal to sell to people of color in neighborhoods, enforced by the occasion fire-bombing).
Last edited by swampyankee; 2012-Jul-27 at 09:19 PM.
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The man liked the ham-fisted polemics genre.
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I was introduced to the series thanks to a play-tester experience for a table top game. The game represented events in the Illearth War, specifically the retreating battle the heroes fought. Nothing ever came of it, (EDIT) the plan to license the work was dropped when it was found that the rules were poorly equipped to handle the actions depicted. The heroes could not only win, but win so well that the replacement of enemy troops was pretty much meaningless.
Last edited by Solfe; 2012-Jul-28 at 01:54 AM.
Solfe
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'That was tops! Who's not good at math? I was all, "Four!"' - Finn, Adventure Time.
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The blurb for the SF comic Zero-G sounded great, but after viewing the preview pages available online, I had no desire to read any more. It seemed like just a string of space-story cliches cut and pasted in... here's the immature astronomy student using the telescope to peep in windows, here's the crusty old creationist senator opposing the mission, etc.
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That one's sitting on the shelf, waiting. It's a fix-up, a Frankenstein composed of three of his shorter works. I found a write-up somewhere, and apparently vV didn't even change the descriptions of the aliens when he shuffled the pages.
vV's fix-ups are almost as bad as The Man With a Thousand Names.
Fred
"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684
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That's one of my all time favorite books. The sequel didn't measure up, though.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
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Interesting, I'm reading the sequel now. It's OK, but kinda drags.
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That was my reaction. I didn't hate it, but it was slow, and wasn't anywhere near as interesting as the original.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
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I didn't even know it had a sequel.
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Can I ask a question, to be taken as just that, an honest inquiry and not as snarkiness?
What makes you try to read the same book over and over, when you have trouble reading it the first time? I have always tried to make it a point of powering through a book, even when it takes effort, but once I truly give up, that is it, I never think, "Hey, I should try that one again."
Having to try a third time seems even more bewildering. Which is why I ask.
I understand that the Thomas Covenant series is popular. I just don't understand why. (Which is fine, I am sure I like a lot of books that other folks do not.) I think my problem was, that old Thomas was a disagreeable, annoying, and in at least one scene, a truly disgusting nasty human being. (you know which one I mean) I didnt read much further than that, as the scene made no sense, and for all I knew, or know, is replayed out many times throughout the series. No one has ever explained to me what the point of it is. Maybe I just have poor skills when it comes to understanding that sort of thing, but it turned me off the whole thing in a hurry.
Which is not to say, I have a problem with the hero being less than heroic. I do applaud some human weaknesses in a character. I am quickly bored by the hero/heroine being smarter, richer, cleverer, better looking, and luckier than anyone else. But there seems a limit, where the character merely becomes repugnant and disagreeable to a point where you no longer want to associate with him. I reached that point very quickly with Thomas Covenant.
Sorry, that simple question got out of hand. HA!
TJ
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If we're including fantasy now, I've read The Eye Of Argon. And my must-miss list has about tripled in size.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
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I was very annoyed by the hype around his Airframe. I, and I think every engineer dealing with aircraft, wanted to scream from the rooftops "we knew about this stuff; we don't need some hack writer to tell us!"
We did. Airframe fatigue (catastrophic fatigue hadn't been seen as a problem before the Comet. I worked with one of the engineers who had done the full-scale fatigue tests. Because of these tests, the design of the 367, the 707 prototype, was changed), deep stall (stick pushers literally push the stick forward to keep the aircraft from being so nose-up it gets into the stall regime), pilot-induced oscillations (careful control system design; this one has been around as long as flight), aeroelasticity (careful design), turbulence (careful design, and operating restrictions -- see maneuver speed and Vno), explosive engine failure, multiple system failures (numerous JARs and FARs), bird strikes (design, specified in FARs and JARs. The B-1 lost due to a bird strike over Colorado would have failed civilian certification standards), hail, heavy rain (after an incident some had blamed on a rain-induced flameout, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft put the same model engine [test engines are usually not pristine and new; they've usually been around the block a few times] into a test cell and sprayed the water from a fire hose, at full capacity, into the engine. The engine kept running).
Sorry for the rant about one of Crichton's books. I've read a few of his books; he was usually entertaining, which was just what I want out of my fiction reading. Alas, some of the hype about Airframe, hype which he did not discourage (he never said "Oh, the engineers aren't stupid; they know about this stuff," but "yeah, those engineers need to be told about this."), soured me on his books.
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Of course.
And I can answer that one in two words: Peer pressure!
There was more to it than that. In about 1980 I read The Lord of the Rings, but wasn't a huge fan. On the other hand I did want to be a fan of an acclaimed fantasy series, and there weren't many back then. In the fan circles I was frequenting, a lot of people were praising Donaldson and dismissing Tolkien, and (I've only just remembered this) an old schoolmate of mine was impressing the ladies by claiming his curly hair had been brought on by reading the Covenant books.
Yeah, for me it's Mervyn Peake. I started Titus Groan about three times because everybody - including Michael Moorcock - were pushing it as a must-read. Heck, I might even try it again. Yeah, I'm still doing it now - if someone recommends a book enough, I might give it several goes. This is not as insane as it sounds - sometimes it takes a few goes to get the style.
I know what you mean, and for me it made it a difficult read. No matter how heroic he was in later books (and he was, eventually) nothing could change the fact that he had done that. He never (deliberately) did anything like it again, and in fact there's a very moving scene in which events play out in a very similar way, but this time he's able to do the decent thing. He explains it (though IIRC never tries to justify it) thus: he found himself in a dreamworld that he absolutely couldn't allow himself to believe in because he knew he'd end up like the leper in the clinic if he did; feelings were returned to him in a certain place after a long absence and... well, as far as he was concerned at the time, Lena was not a real person. Afterwards he accepts the guilt, and tries to make amends, but often makes matters worse.
I know what you mean, and I sometimes lose patience with, say, Doctor Who, who always chooses the goody-goody approach, no matter how impractical, and it always turns out right.
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I know this wasn't directed at me, but I do have an answer since I have done that very thing.
To begin with, a lot of times when you are trying to read a book you may lose interest because either you're not really paying attention to what you are reading, or you feel that you may have missed something important somewhere. In that case, you need to back up and read it again. On my case, if I'm still fairly close to the beginning I may put it down and start again later. The first time I read The Return of the King I was twelve or thirteen years old and I must have started that book two or three times before I got into it and actually enjoyed the story.
Other times, the style of writing may not just fit your mood. When I read Stephen King's Tommyknockers, I read the first part of the book (I believe the book is split into at least three major divisions) twice before I could continue into the second section of the book. The first time I read it I was enjoying the story and it abruptly changed at the beginning of the second section. King is known for his lengthy asides and backstories inserted into random (it seems random to me, anyway) places in his books. I just didn't want to spend the day reading a backstory when I really wanted the story from the first part of the book to continue uninterrupted. A few months later, I decided to give the book another shot and I just read the first part again so I would have the story fresh in my mind.
Finally, peer pressure sometimes has a little to do with it, too. Someone tells you a book is good and maybe drops a few interesting plot tidbits, and you just want to know what happens. This could be after you've already started it a couple times.
I find that when I 'plow' through a book I miss too much. So I try not to do it.
Last edited by primummobile; 2012-Jul-28 at 02:29 PM.
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You might want to reword that to be a little more specific! Especially given the scene TJ was referring to.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
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Maybe I'm just being dense, but I don't know what you mean.
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