the mortal enemy of videogames

general
85

I like “A Boy And His Dog” as a subversive “young adult fiction” choice. Its one of those things were the movie is more popular than the book, which is unfortunate because the movie drops the final crucial (and titular) exchange between the boy and the girl he escapes with:

||The girl is hungry and the dog is injured. The girl argues that they should eat the dog.
she says, "Do you know what love is?"
Vic asks himself. He then answers: "Sure I know. Love is a boy and his dog."||

It's also a fun subversion of the "damsel in distress" trope, on a few levels.

Harlan Ellison uses children in his works occasionally, like in "Jeffty Is Five", a short story about a boy who doesn't age, but warps the world him so that all the media he consumes is reconfigured to be in a nostalgic style of media from days gone by (when he stopped aging).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ptqnzlM1T0

Harlan has released a few albums of him reading his own short stories, and while I cant say I think he's a good guy, personally, he certainly is pretty good at animating his own works in a new way when he reads them. He's a decent performer. IMO his reading of "I Have No Mouth No Mouth, But I Must Scream" is the best way to enjoy the work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgo-As552hY

I'd highly recommend the ["Voices From The Edge"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voice_From_the_Edge) collection of him doing readings of his own short stories. I've only listened to Vol. 1 & 2 ("Laugh Track" is another favorite of mine, and it shares some funny thematic similarities with "Jeffty Is Five", but in, like, an inverse way.) Looking at that Wikipedia page now, I'll probably have to go listen to Vol. 5 at some point. This is a good route to consume some classic sci-fi short stories even if you're not a big fan of, or dont have time for the act of reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vT3Px0px2U

As long as I'm on the subject of "audio fiction" I'm going to mention a couple narrative podcasts.

[A Twilight World of Ultimate Smoothenss](http://twilightsmoothness.com/) is no contest, hands down the best narrative podcast I've ever heard. It benefits immensely from the fact that it's just a six episode "mini-series", so it doesn't drag on endlessly. A R&B DJ whose career is failing watches his world disintegrate.

["THE TRUTH"](http://www.thetruthpodcast.com/story) is an anthology series. Most of the episodes have some kind of "speculative fiction" aspect to them. Its anthological nature is both a strength and a weakness, because the quality, tone, and subject matter of the individual episodes can vary immensely. TBH I haven't listened to this one much over the past year, because when I stopped driving a long commute, I cut down a lot on of podcasts, so I cant speak to some of the newer episodes, (but I'm sure they're fine).

86

@MichaelDMcGrath#18358 lol you're closer than you realize

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/jos%25C3%25A9-salas-subirat-the-eccentric-first-translator-of-joyce-s-ulysses-into-spanish-1.3951644%3fmode=amp

@Moon#18360

honestly did Harlan ever do that was really all that bad? Just being cranky seems like small change these days. Was an admirable promoter of progressive SF writers for decades, women particularly

87

@yeso#18362 that's amazing

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@yeso#18362

well, cranky, very litigious, and (if you believe the stories) just kind of an asshole in general

I personally dont think ["Soldier Of Tomorrow"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_from_Tomorrow) bore enough resemblance to "Terminator" for his lawsuit to have had merit. He's also been a huge stickler about copyright over the years, and many of his contemporary authors and critics have not had the nicest things to say about his interpersonal conduct.

[(this is by no means an exhaustive list of his controversies)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Ellison#Controversies_and_disputes)

>

“I kind of lost interest in all that years ago. Ellison clearly did too, along with everyone else. (Although I gather he went on with his magical thinking if anyone asked when he was going to deliver). Many of the stories were withdrawn, because Ellison acted like a dick. Of the ones that remain, most of them are by writers who are now deceased, so the rights have expired and the estates would have to be traced. A lot of the writers have disowned their stories as juvenilia, or outdated, or simply because Ellison was acting like a dick.”

But yeah, being a cranky asshole isn't the end of the world in the grand scheme of things.

89

just learned of the “harlan ellison groping incident” so withdrawing my earlier question. Also not going to check out the “harlan ellison groping incident” truther movement that I also just learned of

90

Speaking of litigious old cranks, this post where the author of “The Postman” complains about Kojima ripping him off in “Death Stranding” is quite something.

https://david-brin.medium.com/we-need-to-reconnect-the-world-b751066df3ff

92

kojima's lucky carpenter is a gamer

93

@Syzygy#18378

I don't know, man. It's hard for me to call it a rip off since one of the key things about "The Postman" is that the main character is not, in fact, a postman.

94

Uhh, dank alert.

I must find a way to read this immediately. [URL=https://i.imgur.com/Zzb6fEz.jpg][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/Zzb6fEz.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

http://talkingwriting.com/connie-willis-history-is-the-raw-data

>

I grew up reading a bunch of end-of-the-world science fiction. True end of the world: The virus has wiped everybody out. Or nuclear war. A few survivors are looting among the rubble kind of thing. And the part that I thought they got totally wrong was that there was never any emotional dimension to that. It was more of a Robinson Crusoe or boys’ adventure kind of story, where everyone’s emotional life was still fine even though this terrible thing had happened.

>

So I wrote a short story called “The Last of the Winnebagos,” in which the entire dog population had been wiped out. I wrote this story during the parvovirus, which they thought might really kill all the dogs. Anyway, I wanted a small end of the world. One that really didn’t affect commerce, or politics, it didn’t affect history, really, except that it affected everybody in incredibly emotional ways, and then there were resonances that went out through society in all different ways. The guilt people felt and the blame that people put on others and so on, and I wanted to really deal with the emotional aspects of the end of the world. That’s one of the stories that I’m proudest of, because I think that is an issue that needs to be addressed.

>

You can make an argument that the Titanic served as the end of a particular era. An era that would have actually ended anyway. But the Titanic symbolized that.

95

@Moon#18383 I haven't read the story, but I really like the way she framed it in the interview you quoted. “Small end of the world.” These tiny micro-apocalypses happen all the time in real life — like, all of history is just a series of ends of the world for different groups of people.

Anyways, thanks for bringing this story to my attention! it seems really interesting.

96

VALIS by Philip K. Dick has been one of my favorite books OOT. The last book I read was that Mike Tyson book, Undisputed Truth, which was entertaining. I like to read this book about mushrooms called Mycelium Running every now and then. I‘m currently reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. Sometimes I read Infinite Jest, but I don’t think I‘ll ever finish it. I just think it’s fun to open it at a random page and read a bit.

97

[URL=https://i.imgur.com/mOC2aMe.jpg][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/mOC2aMeh.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

98

I want to make a question to someone for something I wanted to try once I finish Ulysses and that question is if anyonw had read something about Anne Carson, because there's a book that really piqued up my curiosity.

99

@MichaelDMcGrath#18407

This is the only book I've read by her and I liked it a lot but comparing it to "Confederacy Of Dunces" confuses the shit out of me.

100

@Moon#18426 Same on all counts haha

101

I finished Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage last night. I‘ve read several Murakami books and this one sure is a Murakami book! I enjoyed Tsukuru’s arc of growth, and it‘s a bit of a quiet book. It reminded me of some of the pieces in After the Quake which I only read about the first third of. There’s very little of the fantastic or magical realism in the book. That‘s a bit of a ding from me because it’s one of the reasons I enjoy Murakami. Overall, I enjoyed Killing Commendatore and 1Q84 more.

I read Iain Banks' _Consider Phlebas_ last summer and enjoyed it greatly. I think I'm going to check out _The Player of Games_ next.

103

Ok, I am at a Barnes and Noble for the next 45 minutes while I wait for my bus to get here. The two Haruki Murakami novels that I haven‘t read are Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Killing Commendatore. I’m not a massive Murakami fan or anything, but I feel like I might as well get it over with and read these last two books by him. Can someone get in here before my bus arrives and articulate an argument for why I should read one or the other first?

104

Alternatively you can try to convince me to read something better than Haruki Murakami (that Barnes and Noble would have). I just have no plans for the next week and want a medium length novel to read

105

ryu > haruki in my opinion, as long as we’re talking murakamis

106

Coin Locker Babies, Almost Transparent Blue, Piercing, In The Miso Soup = all good

in the miso soup if you want a tenuous videogame connection