new novels and why they suck and whatever

"world-building" happens in p much all fiction although theres a specific kind of world-building that gets done in spec fic that i can see finding more compelling than "literary realism"

but im just like "..." over warhammer 2666K

lethem's a hack there I posted it

oh well i dunno. motherless brooklyn is my favorite lethem book and its his most 'realist' isnt it? no flying kids or anything.

I dunno if I would call it realist - it's a pretty obvious noir homage, more than anything. Probably the last decent thing he did imho

the last sci fi book I read was the first book of the new sun when I was a teen, I saw an old dude reading it in a diner a month ago and kind of nodded at him but he was reading and didn't see me

book of the new sun is terrible, there i posted it

Never particularly happy with that 'this is what all books are supposed to do' argument tbh.

I hope this isn't how I'm coming across - I pretty directly disputed this above somewhere iirc

Wolfe is great there I said it. altho I wouldn't recommend everything of his (the amnesiac greco-roman soldier stuff got kinda tiresome)

Never particularly happy with that 'this is what all books are supposed to do' argument tbh. Novels can do what they damn well please - it's the freedom of what can happen between the pages that fascinates me, the enjoyment to be had in reading, rather than any real world relevance (<---ugh).

ok fine but "books are supposed to shift perspective and help you see things in a different light" isnt a very precise restriction is it? i mean its vague enough to be sort of meaningless which i guess is my point. having aliens and shit in your book doesnt make it better at shifting perspective than have a particularly acute way of talking about emotions or something

yeah I kind of skipped around it but there are still some cool scenes I remember like when people were sitting at a dinner table in a forest and tripping out on some sci fi fantasy drug and eating that dude's gf

I dunno if I would call it realist - it's a pretty obvious noir homage, more than anything. Probably the last decent thing he did imho

― Master of the Manly Ballad (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, July 9, 2010 2:03 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

noir isnt realist!? but those guys are all hemingway stans!

postman always rings twice is one of my fav books I think

Anyone who thinks Gibson has ben shit for 25 years has not read Pattern Recognition

I flipped through a Star Wars novel that appeared to be 90% concerned with architectural and political considerations on building a large public-works project like the Death Star, and was thinking did they dig up an old novel about the Panama Canal and just search/replace on proper names?

re: motherless brooklyn -- is this the one with the guy with asperger superpowers? that seemed like a book that is ambiguous as to its being set in the real world or not.

anyway i sort of thought we had established that shakeys real problem with books isnt books its that hes too lazy to seek out books he wants to read

yeah it was that

no noir is not realist

xposts "books are supposed to shift perspective and help you see things in a different light" isnt a very precise restriction is it

No, no, not at all, it's a fine achievement when it's done (no matter how its achieved), I just wouldn't personally use it as a blanket for everything that I've liked. The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr (to take an example), doesn't really make me look at the world in a new way, but when I'm reading it, I'm like 'Yeah! This is great!'

hes too lazy to seek out books he wants to read

dude I'm reading 4 different books right now (Horace satires, Process Church of the Final Judgment bio, Disch short story collection, Riddley Walker) so um fuck you

also not exactly helpful to blow up my very specific criticism of a couple of sci-fi writers into a LAW OF FICTION WRITING but thx for the strawmanning well done

but shakey how many of those books have aliens in them?

SORRY FOR MISUNDERSTANDING YOU I BASICALLY ASSUMED YOU WERE CONTINUING YOUR DUMB CRITIQUE OF ALL LITERARY FICTION NOT JUST WILLIAM GIBSON MY BAD DOGG

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_c_L6wtZ6XJA/Sut19E2jMcI/AAAAAAAABHo/OqgCQgHQzaQ/s400/Signs_alien.jpg

like I said a few posts back my dumb literary critique boils down to = modern realist novels, I hate them

yeah

*shrugs*

i wonder if there are books that have both emotions and aliens, that i cld recommend to shakey mo

shakey have you read stanley crawford stuff

i wonder if there are books that have both emotions and aliens, that i cld recommend to shakey mo

The Forever War!

did you ever read forever free? that one is *mind*blowing*

i wonder if there are books that have both emotions and aliens, that i cld recommend to shakey mo

― Lamp, Friday, July 9, 2010 2:21 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

they discovered all abt this in party down midway through season two at steve guttenbergs house, have you guys tried tv it might be just what youre looking for there i posted it

I've read the Forever War. Dreading the movie

theres a party down ep abt that 2

Not a stan, and haven't read a ton of his stuff, but always seems a little weird to me that Wolfe doesn't have much of literary rep - sustained immaculate style, bags of narrative tricks, incredibly inventive in a sort of hazy territory between realism and allegory, tons of stuff that clicks with some big literary themes of the age (memory, identity). The Soldier books aren't zippy reads, but they're a really intense imaginative effort to see Greece in the era of Herodotus. Kind of amazing.

(more generally, agree with Gamaliel, just take out detective novels & sub in idk Wodehouse or something.)

haven't read Forever Free yet, will move onto that once I finish the Black Company books (which btw, MASSIVE THUMBS UP)

xp: okay this is silly but I am lolling that a dude calling himself "woof" is repping Wolfe

I was really into the first Soldier book but as the series wore on I got tired of trying to constantly untangle all the oblique references. it is a pretty fascinating exploration of that particular era/culture tho

xp

Really wanted to read Wodehouse today, feeling totally in the mood.

To get away from the Emotions v Aliens stuff, I think it's a lot to do with the sets of emotions that are used. A book like Wyndham Lewis' Tarr (character exploration etc), which is a book I love, has a thoroughly new feeling way of delineating character and exploring the world, abstracting it, playing around with it, having fun with forging a way of writing and description, savage wit and comic tragedy. Whereas I pick up some (far more recent) books and go, 'Oh, this stuff again'. I remember feeling that most disconcertingly with Jack Maggs by Peter Carey - the fact it was a historical novel made the whole well-trodden modern character investigation stuff jump out all the more.

Now, Emotions v Aliens 2...

xp

hmmm yes I see the oddity there, may not start thread on the literary dog biography genre (Maf, Flush etc) after all.

Shakey, what was the last "realist" novel you read? Just curious about what repelled you.

iirc it was the kite runner!

well see there's your first mistake

im sayin

for real i would be more sympathetic to your novel woes if it were not the kite runner, Shakey.

like, many terrible novels were published in all eras since the novel's inception, what are you gonna do?

refuse to read novels ever again i guess

that is a totally valid life choice, btw.

That's like watching Cold Mountain and saying that novel adaptations suck.

to be honest, a lot of this sounds like, let's say, a guy who once lived next door to a Thai place where everything was VERY spicy, and then spent the rest of his like "food now is terrible! most of it is non-spicy! why would you not want all your food to be extremely spicy? I went to this place called 'Bennigan's' and had a 'hamburger,' and it wasn't spicy at all, it just tasted like normal food. and the dessert was horrible, it was even less spicy than the hamburger. the person who took me was like 'do you want to go somewhere else? I know this great Italian place that has terrific grilled octopus,' and I was like 'is that spicy? no? then what's the point of it?'"

hahahahahaha

I understand a preference for sci-fi over "realist" fiction; what I don't understand is beating up on "realist" fiction for qualities it may or may not have. My favorite novelist is Henry James but I sure don't expect other novelists to mimic him.