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name_here
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Post by name_here » Tue Nov 23, 2010 2:06 am

I've been re-reading David Drake's Lord of the Isles series. I really, really hate the half-sprite twins. They love talking about how people shouldn't run away from fights even if they're going to lose, but neither of them has ever lost a fight. An instance that particularly pisses me off is when a wizard gives up Cashel's girl of the book to a much more powerful wizard who has been unstoppable for a thousand years and is threatening to obliterate his immense manor and presumably most of the occupants. It's not exactly the most heroic decision, but it's hardly rank cowardice.

> DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.

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Cynic
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Post by Cynic » Tue Nov 23, 2010 3:01 am

Recently reread "Wizard of Earthsea" and "Tombs of Atuan." Ursula Leguin likes using a new character as a protagonist in each new novel and then bring back the protagonist of the last novel.
Read "The New weird" fiction anthology. The new weird is pretty awesome as a writing style/movement. I've got like thirty new authors that I need to read now.
Picked up "The Hyperion Cantos" from the library. I really like novels that reference other novels or pop culture. But the way Dan Simmons does it makes it seem a little cute. The ending of "Hyperion", the first part of the Cantos, was very cute but appropriate. The second novel "Fall of Hyperion" is a little different to read now that I was used to the "Cantebury Tales" style of writing in "hyperion."
Read the first four "Ex Machina" graphic novels and I have to say that Brian Vaughn is awesome.

> Ancient History wrote:We were working on Street Magic, and Frank asked me if a houngan had run over my dog.

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Sarandosil
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Post by Sarandosil » Tue Nov 23, 2010 6:45 am

> Maxus wrote:
> Apology accepted.
> It's hard to phrase that sort of thing right, actually.
> "Herbert wanted the average reader to see the Baron's family as depraved, so he thought about every trait most people would find undesireable. This being written when it was, the list included homosexuality."
> I should have been clearer.
> But yeah. Does anyone have any reasons I should even make an effort to continue the series?

The first book was the best one in my opinion. I liked the series well enough to read through all six of his books, but I'm not sure you're missing much. I found the second book to be worse than the first, and the third worse than both of them. After that the timeline moves forward far enough into the future that the fourth book sort is a bit of a new story and is more enjoyable. The fifth and sixth book go off into lala land and it felt like he wrote them just so he can share his bizarre views on sex.
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Maj
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Post by Maj » Tue Nov 23, 2010 6:47 am

> Sarandosil wrote:just so he can share his bizarre views on sex.

Care to share so I don't have to read them?
My son makes me laugh. Maybe he'll make you laugh, too.
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Sarandosil
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Post by Sarandosil » Tue Nov 23, 2010 7:12 am

I would, but I can't say I understood any of it. It's all very heterosexual and as usual I don't know what to do with that stuff because carving out any kind of gender based distinction in romance always seems arbitrary to me.
But anyway, in the fourth book humanity gets flung all over the universe, the scattering, and in the fifth book humanity is starting to get in contact with people who are returning from the scattering. Among them are the Honored Matres, which I think are supposed to be a Bene Gesserit offshoot, as the book hints at their similarity to the Bene Gesserit, but they don't use spice (presumably they didn't have any) and whatever they use instead makes them rather unstable. They also have a breed of women who have super sex powers that can use to enslave men. So you got crazy sex women going around enslaving people.
So Duncan Idaho is the only character to show up in every Dune book because for some reason they keep making more and more gholas of him. The incarnation in the fifth book is the uber-Duncan because this one magically gains all the memories that every Duncan incarnation had, and somewhere along the line he turns into some kind of super lover. Then one of the villians of the book tries to use her super sex enslavement powers on him and of course it fails because she can't resist his manly might and they fall in love because I guess when you're some kind of super lover you might as well shack up with the only super lover of the opposite sex in existence.
I'm probably butchering what happened in the book. It's been some years since I read it, but I mostly don't remember much because my brain checked out somewhere halfway through the fifth book.
Last edited by Sarandosil on Tue Nov 23, 2010 7:29 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata » Tue Nov 23, 2010 7:18 am

Please, please don't read Herbert's work beyond the first Dune.
Your sanity will suffer if you do.
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name_here
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Post by name_here » Tue Nov 23, 2010 11:23 am

It only really becomes incoherent in the last two. Also, he rants a lot about how bureaucracy is evil and stupid, and the best way to organize a large group is to have no formal organization.

> DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.

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Cynic
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Post by Cynic » Tue Nov 23, 2010 11:19 pm

The Dune universe is hurt mostly by the fragmentary connection between stories. God emperor of doom could most possibly be a single book. The first books could be a single book. and the last two could be a single book. I'm not counting any of the Brian Herbert books because I haven't read them. Although I hear that they are just as ridiculous.
However the one thing that really drew me to the Dune universe was the gigantic scope of the books. A book that works across millenia is pretty awesome. I just wish it was done better.

> Ancient History wrote:We were working on Street Magic, and Frank asked me if a houngan had run over my dog.

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Maj
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Post by Maj » Tue Nov 23, 2010 11:35 pm

Random thought...
Is it possible to write fiction and not put some sort of ideology into it?
My son makes me laugh. Maybe he'll make you laugh, too.
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Cynic
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Post by Cynic » Tue Nov 23, 2010 11:57 pm

Is it possible to write a sentence without an ideology behind it? If so, then it is theoretically possible to write longer forms of prose.
There was a king called John who ruled ruritania.
---
That's fiction and a single sentence. I suppose you can pull out ideas of fictional countries and monarchy from it. But that's a stretch. It really is a personal point of reference.

> Ancient History wrote:We were working on Street Magic, and Frank asked me if a houngan had run over my dog.

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Maj
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Post by Maj » Wed Nov 24, 2010 12:56 am

Isn't that a bit logically fallacious?
My son makes me laugh. Maybe he'll make you laugh, too.
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Maxus
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Post by Maxus » Wed Nov 24, 2010 3:24 am

Yes, it is possible to write something without making it the secrets of your soul.
I mean, post-modernism says differently, and I hate this because one of the freshmen lit majors at college was surprised and asked me a question several times. The question being "You're okay with a story being written just to be a story and be fun to read?"
He could not comprehend that I don't always read an author to sample their ideology. Not the first four times I answered that, anyway.
Unless you consider "you will never write something without some of yourself in it" to be a valid answer, which I don't.
Logically fallacious? I don't really care for logic much (I don't think I've ever seen someone use logic and then find out he's wrong, but I've seen plenty of cases where someone is thinking on something and goes 'SHIT, that won't work!'), so I'll abstain comment until the specifics are laid out.
Last edited by Maxus on Wed Nov 24, 2010 3:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Cynic
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Post by Cynic » Wed Nov 24, 2010 3:51 am

> Maj wrote:Isn't that a bit logically fallacious?

l
It is to a degree. But, I was also just trying to be something of a devil's advocate/douche.

> Ancient History wrote:We were working on Street Magic, and Frank asked me if a houngan had run over my dog.

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Maj
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Post by Maj » Wed Nov 24, 2010 4:03 am

> Maxus wrote:Logically fallacious? I don't really care for logic much (I don't think I've ever seen someone use logic and then find out he's wrong, but I've seen plenty of cases where someone is thinking on something and goes 'SHIT, that won't work!'), so I'll abstain comment until the specifics are laid out.

I guess I wasn't particularly clear about my response.
And the Pathfinder thread is actually a good example of what I meant to say but didn't:

> MfA wrote:Not all monsters got buffed ... animals and vermin got hit with a huge nerf bat making the summoning lists almost useless. Although there are some curious exceptions like the tiger, they seem to have a thing for tigers, the big cat animal companion is also the only useful one.

Each individual monster might not say something directly relating to the designers' personal philosophies about the game, but when taken together, a pattern emerges that's clear enough to draw the conclusion, they seem to have a thing for tigers.
The idea that each sentence being non-ideological will produce a work of fiction that is therefore also non-ideological just doesn't make any sense (and there's actually a fallacy for that that I actually remember because I actually used it way too often ) - taken as a whole, a piece of literature is more than individual sentences.
If I described one of my classes like this:

> A Random Description wrote:We have class on the third floor of F building. The teacher is Mrs. Harris. William Jeffries in in the class. William has brown hair, and is 6' tall. He's a basketball player and is on the debate team. William doodles squiggles on his tests when he has finished them, he smiles a lot, he helps the other students when they have problems with their work. There are 20 other students in the class.

It wouldn't really be a stretch to say that maybe I have a thing for William. Not because I say I do. Not because any of those statements is anything but factual. But because when I'm describing a class, most of my actual description revolves around one person - I didn't even mention the subject of the class.
So saying that if you can write a sentence that's ideologically neutral, you can therefore write a piece of fiction that is, too, isn't really great support for the conclusion, "Yes. It's possible."
And I'm just wondering if it is. A lot of the fiction I read about gets broken down to its ideologies, and it just got my mind wondering. Are there books that anyone here would consider ideologically neutral?

> Cynic wrote:It is to a degree. But, I was also just trying to be something of a devil's advocate/douche.

Or hey, you know, a Cynic.
Last edited by Maj on Wed Nov 24, 2010 4:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata » Wed Nov 24, 2010 4:38 am

Even if you write fiction without ideology (assuming that is even possible), then your readers will add in one for you anyway.
That's how Heinlein's Starship Troopers ended up being "Fascist" despite its explicit model being the Swiss system of democracy.
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Cynic
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Post by Cynic » Wed Nov 24, 2010 4:51 am

Zine: Heinlein is a neocon fascist. It's not just Starship troopers but other books such as Glory Road, Stranger in a strange land, and the rest of the cheap teen scifi books he used to write.
Really neocon and fascist are, in my opinion, as close to being the same as can be. I'm not here for a debate on the subject but that's my opinion. If you do want to talk about that, do so in another topic. I'm cutting off any discussion before it happens. I shall now end this post with both a and a lol to show that I was just kidding, obviously.

> Ancient History wrote:We were working on Street Magic, and Frank asked me if a houngan had run over my dog.

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Calibron
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Post by Calibron » Wed Nov 24, 2010 4:56 am

Because we are our brains, essentially, we can't actually experience any sort of objective reality without it running through "ourselves"; our filters of ideology and prejudice, and the lens that's been crafted over our lives through which we process information in a way that isn't just seemingly random unconnected sensations. So yes everything we produce and do, including every word we write, has been filtered through our own personal ideologies, and we literally have no experience or thought that is not filtered through that.
In short, yeah, everything is ideological.
Oddly enough, deciding to, whether or not you are aware of having made the decision in a conscious manner, make "a story being written just to be a story and be fun to read" is an action just as filtered through an ideology as every other piece of writing ever produced.
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Cynic
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Post by Cynic » Wed Nov 24, 2010 4:58 am

How many hedons is a story being written for just being a story and fun worth?

> Ancient History wrote:We were working on Street Magic, and Frank asked me if a houngan had run over my dog.

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Maxus
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Post by Maxus » Wed Nov 24, 2010 5:24 am

My problem is when it's assumed everything is deliberately ideological.
And you have a point that of course stories are filtered through ourselves, but there's a difference between "Doing it for fun" and "deliberately using it to advocate your beliefs."
So, say, David Eddings' Belgariad vs. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
Or, in some depressing forum post I saw several years back--but it stuck clearly in the mind--a guy trying to write an action-adventure novel set in the Ottoman Empire, with a European man going around assassinating Turkish lords for "daring to touch white women". Some trawling revealed the guy hated the Arabic people and viewed the Ottoman Empire as the worst shit ever and wanted to save up and by a historical saber which had actually killed Turks in a battle and his character's ominousness would be shown by him leaving a dagger at their door.
Then he went apeshit when someone mentioned the original Assassins would come in the night and leave a dagger on the pillow of their target as a way of saying "Get your affairs in order because we will come again soon". Apparently he didn't like the idea of being topped several hundred years before he was even born.
Told you it sticks in a mind.
-----------------------------
I can't even remember who linked me to that shitty forum, but I remember it was some neo-Nazi shit that someone went "Dude, you're going to need to soak your brain in acid after reading this guy" and I was dumb enough to clik the link, and now five years later I still remember the general flow of that skinhead's big "Help me fill in the gaps" post and him going berserk when he found out about the dagger-on-the-pillow thing.
Last edited by Maxus on Wed Nov 24, 2010 5:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Maj
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Post by Maj » Wed Nov 24, 2010 5:43 am

Calibron, that was good. It actually reminds me of the book I'm currently reading - Tools of the Mind, the application of psychology in the education of children as outlined and observed by Lev Vygotsky.
Essentially, the context of learning is - by definition - set in the culture in which you live. You can't really separate the two (and that's not a bad thing).
But I think you hit it, Maxus. Not everything intends to impress the author's thoughts on the reader.
So while no book is ideology free, not all books have an agenda. For some reason, that kinda makes me feel better.
My son makes me laugh. Maybe he'll make you laugh, too.
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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata » Wed Nov 24, 2010 6:32 am

> Cynic wrote:Zine: Heinlein is a neocon fascist. It's not just Starship troopers but other books such as Glory Road, Stranger in a strange land, and the rest of the cheap teen scifi books he used to write.

*shrugs* I've only read Starship Troopers. People I trust have read the others and think they're a waste of time and border on the looniness of Herbert's later works.
Heinlein has said straight out that his inspiration was the Swiss Democratic System though, and I don't think he's lying. "Service = The right to vote" was a very big thing in Europe back in the late 19th Century.
Which is why it frustrates the heck out of me that people go Starship Troopers = Fascism simply because military veterans run everything. Service = Citizenship wasn't something the Fascists invented. It was something that was practiced by very many democratic systems (including France) during the 19th Century, and it's something that the Swiss continue to practice to this day.
And it's this debate that really led me to believe that people will believe what they want, regardless of what the author intended. Which The Onion rather funnily deconstructs here:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/god-an ... -rule,222/
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Calibron
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Post by Calibron » Wed Nov 24, 2010 9:14 am

> Maj wrote:But I think you hit it, Maxus. Not everything intends to impress the author's thoughts on the reader.
> So while no book is ideology free, not all books have an agenda. For some reason, that kinda makes me feel better.

Yes, and thank you for the compliment; I rarely get them.
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Maxus
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Post by Maxus » Wed Nov 24, 2010 6:36 pm

Hey, Maj blew me a kiss.
I feel all cool now.
I think G.K. Chesterton had it right on that one-- "A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
That really is the difference. A good writer is broadminded enough to NOT assume they're automatically right. I mean, David Eddings did an interview once where he said "You know, the people and ideas I like tend to win in my books. Funny how that works out."
I love that quote. It's one of the reasons I keep a lot of David Eddings' stuff around even now. The man didn't take himself seriously. He has his flaws, but he didn't think he was going SAEV TEH WELRD BY SAVIG PEOPLE FORM TEHMSELFS. He enjoyed writing the books, and it showed.
Contrast someone who is desperately scribbling a seven-hundred page plea to the universe to BE LIKE ME OR YOU'RE WRONG.
Of course, the seven-hundred page pleas make money by ending up on summer reading lists...
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata » Thu Nov 25, 2010 1:41 am

> Maxus wrote:I think G.K. Chesterton had it right on that one-- "A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

Good quote.
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Sashi
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Post by Sashi » Thu Nov 25, 2010 3:47 am

The only universally positive thing Heinlein did was invent the word "grok". And the only thing Heinlein 100% believed in was that old crusty dudes should get lots of hot young poontang.
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