I would take an entire separate spin-off series of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli just hanging out around Middle Earth man.
okay i‘ve only finished the first part of Octavia Butler’s Dawn so far (the section entitled Womb), but already my mind and my heart are crying out.
have you ever had the experience with a piece of fiction where, in engaging with it, you realize, "this is something that should have been a part of me all along, it fits so neatly into what fascinates and excites me about the world"? very much a "where have you been all my life?" type of feeling. that's been me with this book so far.
i'm amazed by the way it tackles huge, consciousness-altering problems in such a low-key and casual manner. what if developing cancer was a talent? what if you could never close your eyes, and had no choice but to see at all times, even while sleeping? why are humans inherently xenophobic, even when they understand they're being xenophobic, and are trying hard not to be?
can't wait to read more. thanks to @radicaledward and @Gaagaagiins for the recommendation.
Man, that‘s a good way to put it. Felt the same way. Couldn’t believe I'd spent my whole life not reading Butler when her books were just hanging out available like it was no big deal
here's a passage from La vida breve (Onetti, Juan Carlos. La vida breve. Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 1950, pp. 141-142.) (tr my dumb ass) that has the density of atmosphere and suggestion of mental states and moods I think is great imo
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Díaz Grey was already halfway up the staircase, beginning to comprehend the L-shaped layout of the hotel‘s rooms, some made of wood and others of brick; he saw the old building beside it and its large, green-painted door, probably a storehouse for vacationers’ cars or bicycles or for clutter; he could just distinguish the repressed curiosity on the faces of the men and women sipping drinks or simply relaxing in the stillness of the veranda, in the growing gloom, all in silence, with tanned, blank faces all turned toward the brick staircase that joined the hotel to the street. Elena had reached the veranda and paused, stretching her body straight, when the doctor recalled in sudden amazement an old dream, a fantasy so many times repeated, the only thing connecting him to the future. A dream in which he saw himself on the veranda of a hotel made of decrepit wood, nearer the water than this one, more damp and chewed-through, with a blackness of mussels adhering to the semirotted beams that supported it; sitting, alone and without desire, nearly horizontal, looking with the gentle curiosity of the contented at the staircase up which a pair of strangers were returning from the beach, incapable of suspecting that the man and the woman carried with them, together with their colorful bags, umbrella, and photo camera, the changeable fate of lonely Díaz Grey, absent minded drinker of soft drinks before a maritime twilight. It was the beginning of autumn in the dream.
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@“MoH”#p97281 introduced me to Dalkey Archive, so it might have been a net positive for me.
that's good books right there, yeah
@“yeso”#p97791 Yep, this book is like this all the time.
Still loving every damn page of Don Quixote. Our dear knight and his devoted squire are currently engaged in a western CRPG open world game sidequest involving some in-game literature based environmental storytelling, the moral deliberation of what to do with an NPC's discarded loot, and said NPC is a depressed incel dandy who runs really fast
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@“edward”#p97283 There are a lot of reasons why the indie press community shrank to what it is now that may be of interest, though I’d say the biggest one is that people began treating indie presses as stepping stones rather than a viable alternative to Big 5
This is a good point. Also, thanks for sharing your personal experience. Do you mind me asking what the presses were? If you prefer not to go into it, that's okay too.
Back when I was in MFA right (that's right--I'm an MFAer), AWP was always full of small, somewhat interesting presses. There was always an "unoffical" AWP bookshow for the presses that didn't/couldn't pay the vendor fee for the main floor. Those tended to be more interesting. The good and bad part about them, however, is they came and went like bubbles. I doubt much are around anymore. It reminds me of the feeling you get when seeing something really cool in a zine library that turns out to be from, like, 2005.
Anyway, I finished _Leave Society_, and I'd actually give it a moderate to strong recommendation. Lin's writing fools you into thinking it's flat when in reality it's quite turbulent on both a micro and macro scale. What I mean is paragraphs and sentences can shift you into sudden emotion while the structure of the novel has a few "clicking" moments where everything falls into place. I'd even go as far to say it has a Sebaldian flavor!
I'm reading _Warlock_ by Oakley Hall now. I had read _Butcher's Crossing_ a few weeks ago and seems the books are in conversation with one another.
@“MoH”#p97885
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Do you mind me asking what the presses were? If you prefer not to go into it, that’s okay too.
I had books published with KUBOA, Civil Coping Mechanisms (better known by just CCM), and Perfect Edge Books, which was an imprint of John Hunt Publishing.
I was reasonably involved with Mudluscious Press, The Lit Pub, and Entropy Magazine along with several others. I went to AWP from 2012-2016, I think! Sort of became friends with most of the small presses from back then. I never wrote anything for the Bizarro genre, but I always liked Bizarro people the best. But so many of these presses don't exist anymore and I can't remember all the names and there's no good way to look them up, haha.
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I’m reading Warlock by Oakley Hall now. I had read Butcher’s Crossing a few weeks ago and seems the books are in conversation with one another.
Been wanting to read this for years. Butcher's Crossing was way better than I expected it to be.
As for me, I started reading this giant vampire book called The Passage by Justin Cronin which was made into a tv show I never saw that got canceled. It's pretty exciting! He's set up an interesting enough scenario but we'll see how this goes.
@“edward”#p97893
I'm familiar with Entropy and CCM--the others ring a distant bell. That's cool to know. Fiction, or something else?
_Butcher's Crossing_ was very good. I had resisted _Stoner_ for years just because, but when I finally gave in, I was equally bowled over.
@“MoH”#p97923
Yeah, three novels. Though I also ran an interview series at Monkeybicycle and had a film column at Entropy. Did book reviews regularly for several other sites and had short stories come out in lots of places. Hilariously, some of those magazines that published my stories didn't even last an entire year, which had the result of my publications just dropping into blackholes!
Been meaning to read Stoner and his other books for a long time but so many other books are always getting in the way! Though maybe now would be a good time for Stoner.
@“edward”#p97925
You sound like a cool person, @"edward"#1011 🙂 I have a feeling there's a chance we would have intersected outside these hallowed halls eventually.
_Stoner_ is like, insanely good. It not only continuously surprises you with how good it is, but it's such an intimate novel that by the time you're done you'll feel like you're the only person on earth who has read it, which is why you need to proselytize it at every chance. Much like I'm doing now!
@“MoH”#p97999
Ha, thanks! I'm a pretty all right guy, if I do say so myself.
This is definitely bumping Stoner up to the top of my list.
@“MoH”#p97999 Stoner is really one of the best novels I‘ve read. It’s sad because the first novel John Williams made was terrible and had some clichés that were really terrible, but Stoner is really good and there were a part of it where I wanted to make a fanfiction about one of the characters.
It has some clichés that were boring and kinda outdated, but even with those the novel is really good.
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@“Gaagaagiins”#p97798 Still loving every damn page of Don Quixote. Our dear knight and his devoted squire are currently engaged in a western CRPG open world game sidequest involving some in-game literature based environmental storytelling, the moral deliberation of what to do with an NPC’s discarded loot, and said NPC is a depressed incel dandy who runs really fast
I am once again floored at how funny the conclusion to this ended up being......... ||the chivalreeaboos had a Tumblr style slapfight over their headcanon slash fic||
IDK how much Grossman's translation is doing the heavy lifting here but man Cervantes seems like he must have been a chill weird dude
Maybe not exactly the right place to post this, but there's a charity sale happening in the fantasy subreddit right now. I have a few books available in there. Check it out and download my books for free!
Got some fun books for Christmas but I'm still working through The Passage, which becomes a completely different book about a third of the way through its significant length. It's not bad but it's also not better than what preceded this big shift.
^ I picked up Glossolalia not long ago, looking forward to it
general question: are any of those Apocalypse House books good? Is it just more gross nerd shit?
@“yeso”#p98297
Thanks!
I don‘t think I’ve heard of Apocalypse House.
Do you mean Apocalypse Party? I haven‘t read their books, but Blake Butler has a book coming out there and people who like Blake Butler sure do like Blake Butler! Vi Khi Nao is also meant to be very good. They’re a small boutique press so if you like one of their books, you'll probably like all of them, since they lean hard towards experimental literature.
I used to like that kind of thing a whole lot but don't care so much for it anymore, since I think many experimental writers are very bad. There are some exceptions, but I think a lot of writers lean towards the experimental, especially with regard to language, because they never learned how to write a person that doesn't feel like a robot.
Party not House my mistake ty
I’m not a big sci-fi person but prompted partly by watching the recent re-release of Johnny Mnemonic in black and white (which I highly recommend at least for the weird magic of the cyberspace sequences drained of color; if not for the way this version somehow manages to make artist-turned-one-time-director Robert Longo’s vision clearer, that there was in fact a better movie hidden within and likely ruined by studio involvement), I had a great time finally checking out William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy. Pleasantly surprised to find it way more in the vein of Burrough’s paranoid/psychedelic noir than something people like just because “woah look how prophetic it is” (if anything it seems only prophetic in defining “cyber” language while remaining wholly fantastical in its details; can’t say much of this has come true, at least not yet!).
**_Neuromancer_** is the clear winner of the bunch and is pure excitement in both its fascinating world building, flashy pace, and detective story reveals; not to mention an ending that worked slightly better if left more ambiguous than what the sequels dive into (i.e.|| having the _meaning_ of an all powerful AI less the focus than just the inevitability of technology’s forward march; the later books' jump to having all powerful AI turn into a series of voodoo gods is uh…fun but maybe too goofy?||).
**_Count Zero_** trades the single character writing style for a more disorienting multi-character approach that kills a lot of the pacing magic of _Neuromancer_ and feels like the _Quantum of Solace_ of the bunch as it’s all transitions and actions whose meanings don’t quite coalesce until the very end; lots of “where are we headed” that is mostly answered with “we’re heading to book three”; and naturally as a result **_Mona Lisa Overdrive_** is more or less an improved version of book two: better pacing, more clarity about how the different timelines are related (and building clearer excitement for their convergence instead of just leaving you blankly wondering how they’ll connect). Definitely feels a lot of the themes fall apart a bit and generally a jankier plot (especially the ending that is more or less ||“well, the AI that came together in the first book needed to uh…come together again, and when it did it realized there were aliens so uh…let’s go check out those aliens! The end!”||)
Anyway, I loved the quiet Velvet Underground references throughout (Linda Lee from “Cool It Down” makes an appearance, as does early-taper-cum-Lou-Reed-Bandmate Robert Quine) along with a Steely Dan nod with "Deacon Blues". I"m not sure if I’m a full Gibson convert (or too interested to check out fellow cyberpunk progenitor Snow Crash), but Neuromancer at least definitely met the hype.
Also: funny to see how three different decades try to depict "cyberpunk" as I picked up versions with covers from 2018, 2006, and 1989:
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