Re: Books
Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2015 4:09 pm
Mongrel wrote:Never mind "A Dinosaur CEO Turned Me Gay", the magic of self-publishing e-books has now brought us The Ass-Goblins of Auschwitz.
That cover is something else.
Mongrel wrote:Never mind "A Dinosaur CEO Turned Me Gay", the magic of self-publishing e-books has now brought us The Ass-Goblins of Auschwitz.
That cover is something else.
Thad wrote:I really enjoyed the first two books and am about to buy the third. I think the worldbuilding is fantastic and Stross is at the top of his speculative game. It was written in 2002, so the stuff set on "our world" is kinda in that uncanny valley where it's just recent enough for me to frequently forget it's not set in the present and just outdated enough that I get occasionally jarred out of the narrative when I'm reminded of it by references to, say, PDA's, and the administration's intent to go to war with Iraq. But that's not really a criticism so much as the nature of near-future SF.
NG: I think if you were a novelist writing in 1920 or 1930, you would simply be perceived as having written another novel. When Dickens published A Christmas Carol nobody went, “Ah, this respectable social novelist has suddenly become a fantasy novelist: look, there are ghosts and magic.”
KI: Is it possible that what we think of as genre boundaries are things that have been invented fairly recently by the publishing industry? I can see there’s a case for saying there are certain patterns, and you can divide up stories according to these patterns, perhaps usefully. But I get worried when readers and writers take these boundaries too seriously, and think that something strange happens when you cross them, and that you should think very carefully before doing so.
NG: I love the idea of genres as places that you don’t necessarily want to go unless you’re a native, because the people there will stare at you askance and say things like, “Head over the wall to Science Fiction, mate, you’ll be happier there . . .”
[...]
I have a mad theory that I started evolving when I read a book called Hard Core by Linda Williams, a film professor in California. It was one of the first books analyzing hardcore pornography as a film genre.
She said that in order to make sense of it, you need to think of musicals, because the plot in a musical exists to stop all of the songs from happening at once, and to get you from song to song. You need the song where the heroine pines for what she does not have, you need the songs where the whole chorus is doing something rousing and upbeat, and you need the song when the lovers get together and, after all the vicissitudes, triumph.
I thought, “That’s actually a way to view all literary genres,” because there are things that people who like a genre are looking for in their fiction: the things that titillate, the things that satisfy. If it was a cowboy novel, we’d need the fight in the saloon; we’d need the bad guy to come riding into town and the good guy to be waiting for him. A novel that happens to be set in the Old West doesn’t actually need to deliver any of those things—though it would leave readers of genre cowboy fiction feeling peculiarly disappointed, because they have not got the moments of specific satisfaction.
KI: I don’t have a problem with marketing categories, but I don’t think they’re helpful to anybody apart from publishers and bookshops.
KI: I would like to see things breaking down a lot more. I suppose my essential position is that I’m against any kind of imagination police, whether they’re coming from marketing reasons or from class snobbery.
François wrote:I got a couple audible credits piled up now that I'm almost done with A Song of Ice and Fire, and I'm thinking of broadening my horizons by picking up stuff I'd never even considered before. I'm wondering, is Tom Clancy's stuff any good for legitimate reasons or is it mainly popular because it's reasonably competent at tickling a lot of people's murica-guns-spies-russians-terrorists fetish?