gaytheist posted:
This might be a bit out of place but have any of you guys read sherri tepper she's a sci fi writer and her more popular books are grass and the door to women's country she's kind of a liberal but her books fucking own

maybe you guys have sci fi favorites? I like joan slonczewski(sp?), le guin, octavia butler, joanna russ and samuel delany most

i like le guinn and gene wolfe and good ol' stanislaw lem. james tiptree jr aka irl alice sheldon has a nice short story collection called her smoke rose up forever iirc. bye

John Truck is a freewheelin' spaceship captain bumming around the galaxy. This existence is interrupted by the appearance of the titular Device, a mysterious alien weapon. Although Truck does not know it, he has a unique connection to the weapon if indeed that is what the Device is. This brings him to the attention of the Earth's two superpowers, the Israeli World Government and the United Arab Socialist Republics. It also attracts the interest of various other factions such as the Interstellar Anarchists and the Openers, a religious cult.

Truck then spends the rest of the novel fleeing from one group straight into the hands of another, out of the frying pan into the fire, until he is eventually united with the Device.

The Centauri Device forms part of a group of novels including Samuel Delany's Nova and Barrington Bayley's The Zen Gun that prefigure the 'intelligent' space opera boom that started in the 80s and has continued unabated. It has been contended that The Centauri Device is too much of a parody to fit into this group but the book doesn't read like that. It fully embraces the tropes of space opera -- space battle, exotic locales -- whilst retaining New Wave sensibilities. Perhaps the impression of parody is given by the chatty, ironic tone of some of the narrative which is at times reminiscent of other British authors like Douglas Adam and Iain M. Banks.

Despite this tone however, the book is unremittingly bleak in outlook. The galaxy is seedy and depressing. Violence is casual and brutal. People are either users or are themselves used. Truck himself is not exempt from these facts.

The only moments of overt parody are some lampooning of True Believers. Beyond this, there is a weary contempt for ideology that underlies the whole book. Near the end of the novel we are told of John Truck:

"He loathed killing and conscious hurt, hypocrisy and cant, and the glib lip-service solution of human misery provided by ideology -- but could find no means to articulate that loathing."

Both the capitalism of the Israeli World Government and the socialism of the United Arab Socialist Republics comes equally under attack. A few lines later the question is rhetorically posed:

"Was he simply disgusted by the irrelevance to reality of the politics of his time?"
It seems that this can be asked of not just Truck but M. John Harrison himself. This antipathy for ideology underpins the existential angst that defines The Centauri Device. It is also the book's undoing.

Harrison's prose is impressive, his imagination is fertile and his subversion of genre clichés is admirable. However, there is little meat on the bones of the novel. There is no real plot just a descent into despair. There is no real insight, only anger and bitterness. The redemptive conclusion is as equivocal as the rest of the novel.

Coupled with this John Truck does not make a very endearing protagonist; he is entirely passive and is at one point accurately described as having the morals of "a cretin or a small animal." Of course, this is Harrison's intention but knowing this does not make it a more satisfying read.

It is quite possible this is a book that had to be written; as a slap in the face to the genre, as an act of protest. In this, The Centauri Device arguably raised the bar for future SF but it raised our expectations with it. This means that the modern reader is left with an empty polemic, artfully crafted but still hollow.

aerdil posted:
does any1 have a line on sum lacanian sci-fi?

Solaris lol

germanjoey posted:
guys, you're all gonna be really jealous. at the library sale this past saturday, i bought, besides a bunch of books about THINGS by AUTHORS (including extraordinary popular delusions & the madness of crowds for a dollar ftw), I bought a book called "Working Cats" for a dollar 50. Working Cats is a book filled with pictures of cats "working" at various blue collar jobs... "Woopsie and Doopsie," at the factory, hard at work sitting on the assembly line. "Rascal," at the grocery store, hard at work sitting on the checkout conveyor belt. "Munchkin," hard at work on the lawn....

ah! ah! ah!! awesome! poest pics?? ^_^

discipline posted:
why did u never post anything good about from hell joey

same reason i never posted anything about what its like to walk through the night, because ive been spending all my stupid time """"correcting"""" formatting """errors"" in my dissertation that my insane committee has found. its never ending and they never agree with each other. so i'll make one change, and then another one will ask me to do something different. all day, every day.

my flight leaves tomorrow so i'll try to write something on the plane

discipline posted:
yeah post pics and I'll put it on the fp

yeah ok i think i have a camera somewhere i'll try to figure it out! lemme ask around, we might even have a scanner here...

deadken posted:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA i'm actually making good progress on a thousand plateaus for the first time in ages

did you finally try it weededed as per my suggestions. actually i think the real problem was that i was getting nearly as badly bogged down in geology of morals as i was in the numerological bit at the beginning of cyclonopedia when i first read it. after that its smooth sailing

germanjoey posted:
guys, you're all gonna be really jealous. at the library sale this past saturday, i bought, besides a bunch of books about THINGS by AUTHORS (including extraordinary popular delusions & the madness of crowds for a dollar ftw), I bought a book called "Working Cats" for a dollar 50. Working Cats is a book filled with pictures of cats "working" at various blue collar jobs... "Woopsie and Doopsie," at the factory, hard at work sitting on the assembly line. "Rascal," at the grocery store, hard at work sitting on the checkout conveyor belt. "Munchkin," hard at work on the lawn....

that's cool edit: please make ctrl+s submit a post instead of of doing strikthru tags even tho those are also really cool

aerdil posted:
http://apps.sfsu.edu/cgi-bin/sims/classsch.details?row_id=AAASGQABPAAB0/0AAL&openu=N&CRSADMIN=Rall the kool klasses are grad standing of course

sounds like its time for a spontaneous outburst of Occupy ENG 742