roseweird posted:babyhueypnewton posted:i liked sci fi when i was 12
what do you like now bhpn other than communism
roseweird posted:blade runner is really bad, it omits mercerism from the book do androids dream of electric sheep? which is pretty fundamental to understanding the story and setting, also its aesthetics are boring cyberpunk grime
the soundtrack is ace thoe
great tunes
palafox posted:TG posted:
idk who is worse, pkd or the trot china mieville
there's a lot linking the two of them, i think. what is probably mievile's best (only readable) book, the city and the city, is essentially a police procedural with a goofy semiotic overlay. similarly so are "flow my tears . . ." and "scanner darkly," only instead of semiotics it's whatever solipsistic musings about reality and identity that dick can't seem to stop talking about. both authors attempt fancy-brainy glosses on pulp genre tropes here with varying success. when we look at dick's background as a pulp author and mieville's longwinded fantasy epics (and awful book "king rat," basically the ccru in megacrap novel form, nineties english boredom and jungle and amphetamines and amphetamine driven awful writing), plus the debt of "man in the high castle"' to pulpier genre predecessors like CM kornbluth, a startlingly symmetrical picture starts to emerge.
so, the surface: both of these authors are at first glance men with highfalutin intellectual pretensions who are stuck with genre to pay the bills. they're both handily at their best when they utilize the tropes of precedent pulp fiction (crime/noir for both, dick paying close attention to certain early 50s pulp scifi writers, and mievilles obsession with "weird fiction"- in other words a catchall term for dork interests across several eras). in reality they aren't any brainier or more innovative than the genre hacks they try to transcend, and their particular flights of fancy tend to end in inauthentic, wordy, shit pulp with none of the conscious ghettoized pleasures of their "literary" forebears. they're essentially the same unhappily situated person 30 years apart
Good post, neither of them are a Vonnegut
man in the high castle was intruiging in it's premise but and some of the characters were interesting but it sort of all fell apart and i lost interest
roseweird posted:what's your favorite vonnegut novel iwc, what about him do you prefer to pkd (the idea of comparing mieveille to any of these people is hilarious, lol, he should properly only be compared to people who write novels about dark elves who ride dragons)
check this book out, if you wasted any time on pulp stuff (and I did, lots), you'll see there's at least a similar relationship to the genre. http://etextlib.ru/Book/Details/35268
what's the d&d thing tho?
roseweird posted:yeah, you didn't finish it? man, that's a shame, i don't know, maybe it's because i'd already read some pkd novels and was contrasting the style, and because i'm interested in divination so that aspect of the plot (and the divinatory style in which it was written) really grabbed me, but i just can't even explain how vibrant that book was for me. it's also deeply about american culture and identity though, so i can see how it might not grab you in the same way, plus with pkd it really helps to have had an amphetamine addiction at some point.
i've had the latter since lol, maybe i should go re-read it. Don't get me wrong i enjoyed much of it but i just couldn't grasp the eastern spirituality stuff.
As goony as it is i really like the idea of alternate history and it's a shame i've never read anything that really fulfills it's potential as a premise.
so what if he's easy to read though? he's a lot less autistic than a lot of science fiction writers and has a better sense of humor and moral
totally agreed. I'm not a sci fi fan but i liked SH5 precisely because of it's humanity, as well as the most prosaic reason that he could have the timeline jump around all over the place while still keeping the book and story as a whole perfectly readable as a linear sort of story.
thirdplace posted:i really like science fiction, even bad science fiction!
same but with emo
roseweird posted:thirdplace posted:what did you think of left hand of darkness? it seems approp
i never finished it actually, i barely got past the first chapter. in fact i've never finished a le guin novel, i tried a few others (lavinia, plus some earthsea book) and just can't get through them, i don't know what the problem is, i really like her short stories a lot, i like her sensibility and aesthetic, but something about her novels just immediately bores me. i'm going to give it another try eventually though, probably whenever i finally get around to reading ammonite too
i hadn't even heard of lavinia, and earthsea is for children...i'd recommend left hand since its basically femiweirdism.txt, but take my opinions with a grain of salt b/c i read all the standard critiques of science fictions and go "yeah thats what i like about them"
The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.
Bud had a nice new pair of blades with a top speed of anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and fifty kilometers, depending on how fat you were and whether or not you wore aero. Bud liked wearing skin-tight leather, to show off his muscles.
On a previous visit to the mod parlor, two years ago, he had paid to have a bunch of 'sites implanted in his muscles— little critters, too small to see or feel, that twitched Bud's muscle fibers electrically according to a program that was supposed to maximize bulk. Combined with the testosterone pump embedded in his forearm, it was like working out in a gym night and day, except you didn't have to actually do anything and you never got sweaty.
The only drawback was that all the little twitches made him kind of tense and jerky. He'd gotten used to it, but it still made him a little hinky on those skates, especially when he was doing a hundred clicks an hour through a crowded street. But few people hassled Bud, even when he knocked them down in the street, and after today no one would hassle him ever again.
it is also marxist and continually reinforces class, since it depicts a practically postscarcity global society that nonetheless keeps the periphery in substantial poverty mostly by way of a rigorously enforced intellectual property regime
He'd hear it was not such a good thing to be a Communist, but under the circumstances he figured he could hold his nose and quote from the little red book as necessary. As soon as those Ashantis left town, he'd bolt.
...
The gate was guarded, as always, by a couple of twelve-year-old kids in red neckerchiefs and armbands, ancient bolt-action rifles with real bayonets leaning against their collarbones. A blong white girl and a pudgy Asian boy. Bud and his son Harv had whiled away many an idle hour trying to get these kids to laugh: making silly faces, mooning them, telling jokes. Nothing ever worked. But he'd seen the ritual: They'd bar his path with crossed rifles and not let him in until he swore his undying allegiance to Mao-Gnnzalo-though, and then--
roseweird posted:in pkd's novels it seems like he was pretty bad and awkward with women but i think he still wrote them with a certain refreshing care and honesty, even if they were usually sex objects and adjuncts to the overall plot. man in the high tower is an exception, and he responded to joanna russ' criticism of his female characters by writing an excellent protagonist for the transmigration of bishop timothy archer. in contrast blade runner is full of creepy rapeyness and minority report just has typical hollywood action movie girls (or like, just one girl? i forget). the movies are all really bad imo, pkd died 3 months before blade runner was released tho so who knows what he would have thought of it
he knew it, he liked it, blade runner is great, silence
Philip K. Dick became concerned that no one had informed him about the film's production, which added to his distrust of Hollywood. After Dick criticized an early version of Hampton Fancher's script in an article written for the Los Angeles Select TV Guide, the studio sent Dick the David Peoples rewrite. Although Dick died shortly before the film's release, he was pleased with the rewritten script, and with a twenty-minute special effects test reel that was screened for him when he was invited to the studio. Despite his well known skepticism of Hollywood in principle, Dick enthused to Ridley Scott that the world created for the film looked exactly as he had imagined it. He said, "I saw a segment of Douglas Trumbull's special effects for Blade Runner on the KNBC-TV news. I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly." He also approved of the film's script, saying, "After I finished reading the screenplay, I got the novel out and looked through it. The two reinforce each other, so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel." The motion picture was dedicated to Dick.
Shut the fuck