I’ve experienced that at a friend’s house and I don’t prefer it over just using our existing wax burner, if we are going to do something flameless. They were very pleasant smelling though!
Christian church is made of people. And people are sinful and evil.
Religion doesn’t come from what other people tell you is truth, but from your experience. What experience have you lead you to believe in higher power?
I have experienced Luck so good and so significant in my life that I can only exlain it by intervention of higher power. But maybe you didn’t experienced something like that, and I can understand that.
Religion comes from within, and not from external sources.
I mostly agree but I would argue that spirituality comes from within, while religion comes from external sources. Religion is just other people’s packaged version of spirituality/faith.
The entire Sprawl trilogy. But if only one was to be made, I’d love to see Count Zero on the big screen as that one had the most action and visually appealing scenes to adapt.
But I also agree with Dragonriders of Pern! I loved those books when I was in high school.
I could see the new enjoyers of Pern flat out giving it up when the twist happened. Plus, I wouldn’t trust the show’s makers to not trash the politics of the holds.
spoilerFantasy -> sci-fi is a pretty big change for a tv audience, I think.
Yes. Had religion shoved down my throat as a kid. Learned early on being a religious believer meant nothing, people are shitty no matter what.
Had to decide who I wanted to be, what rules to live by. Realized I don’t enjoy hurting people, try to learn from mistakes, random acts of kindness, to always try for the evolved, educated non violent option. That’s enough for me. If there’s a god who has a problem with that, oh well.
so it’d need careful handling of things like Lessa and F’lar’s relationship and such. And maybe, you know, keep Jaxom the hell away from Corana.
I read the original two trilogies in the 80s so I've forgotten some bits, but what were the things that would be problematic today? I don't think I remember any details relating to the above. Lessa is always one of the first people I think of when someone says "so and so was the first strong woman in scifi" and it's a character that came 30+ years later.
I only just read the Amber books a couple of years ago myself; I don't know how I'd missed them. Very much unique stories in my experience, really unlike anything else I've ever read. I did enjoy them, but I think I respected what he did as a storyteller more than I enjoyed them, if that makes any sense.
I read the original two trilogies in the 80s so I’ve forgotten some bits, but what were the things that would be problematic today? I don’t think I remember any details relating to the above. Lessa is always one of the first people I think of when someone says “so and so was the first strong woman in scifi” and it’s a character that came 30+ years later.
So, when the books were originally published, it actually was pretty feminist/forward-thinking that Lessa got to lead Benden Weyr as an equal partner, and she’s the one that saved Pern, and she’s the heroine who gets songs sung about her. Sure, F’lar “saved” her by slaying Fax and bringing her to Benden, but she mind-manipulated him into it so it was really her using him as her tool, and then she went on to save the WORLD all on her own. And that was all pretty forward-thinking, when most SFF of the era had ladies being damsels in distress, or running around in chainmail bikinis.
The bits that haven’t aged well today is how Anne McCaffrey writes romance. Basically, back when the books were written, there was this cultural trope that “good” women didn’t want sex. Like, even if the main gal obviously wanted the romantic lead, you had to put up a show of resisting, of saying no, for some dramatic tension or something, because if you said yes too quickly you were a slutty slut just slutting around or the like. Good girls don’t say yes, even to the people they want, too quickly. And it was “romantic” for the man to be pushy and not take no for an answer.
So McCaffrey has a lot of her lead men “ravishing” their partners in some way after the female resists or says no, which reads as really rapey with today’s understanding of sex and consent. F’lar grabs and shakes Lessa physically at times (I don’t recall if he outright hits her at all or not–he might, once or twice. I’d have to re-read). And Jaxom basically rapes Corana–she says no, but he’s just so horned up by dragons and goes ahead anyway, and the whole scene seems to be some attempt by the author to “show” that Jaxom is as virile a lead as any other dragonman, even if Ruth is asexual. It reads as if she were afraid Ruth not being a bronze would make people doubt Jaxom’s manhood or something, so she writes a scene to supposedly “prove” it.
And then the dragonlust thing during mating flights initially suggests between the lines the queen rider is going to have sex with the bronzerider whose dragon catches her queen, whether she wants to or not. “Aliens made us do it” is totally an old-school SFF trope especially any time a human or alien is telepathic, but again, in modern eyes it’s super-rapey since consent and being able to say no is important.
McCaffrey rolled the rapey sort of thing back in later Pern books as social mores changed going into the 90s–but the books written in the 60s and 70s mostly didn’t age great when it came to romance/sex. So there’s inconsistencies between the Pern portrayed in the early Pern books, vs. the ones written before her death in the 2000s, with the early Pern having some of the “heros” doing kinda awful things, and the later ones sort of forgetting or erasing that.
I don’t think it’d be going against the spirit of the books to update the mores here, though, for a modern audience. Anne McCaffrey was obviously trying to be forward-thinking with certain things, and it’s honestly really hard to be ahead of your time when it comes to the social/cultural stuff, esp. in the pre-internet era.
Personally, if I were to update Pern for a modern audience, I’d keep some of the dragon mating stuff, like I’d purposefully keep some of the huge downsides of being telepathically bonded to a mind that is not fully human and which can cause a human to act in inhuman ways when the dragon gets over-emotional. Mostly so there can be this cultural tension between the Weyrs and the Holds so that the Oldtimer storylines work better. Dramatically-speaking, it’d be a great scene to watch a dragon get hurt–but it’s the dragonman howling and clutching his eye or something, when he clearly isn’t bleeding at all and is getting feedback from his dragon. (Or, dragonwoman…I think I’m recalling Brekke right there.) And there’d be a huge contrast between the weyrs who have fluid relationships with other riders that start and stop on a whim, and the Holds that are very traditional and still do arranged marriages and such.
Also, if the Weyrs are seen as hotbeds of greed and depravity, it’ll be easier to take Pern through a story such as Dragonquest where the Holds and Halls start to rebel against the people who saved them from thread. The Oldtimer storylines from the books. Cultural friction, where the planet’s heroes also act in ways that are strange and different to ordinary men and women, and a way to play with modern cultural concerns too.
But I’d do away with things like the Jaxom and Corana plotline because there’s tons of other ways to make Jaxom an appealing lead character that don’t involve the future Lord of Ruatha Hold abusing his power over a peasant girl. I don’t think a modern audience would consider Jaxom weak or feminine just because Ruth is ace/nonbinary. In fact, him having a possibly nonbinary dragon might be a super-interesting story to follow. ::shrug::
Thanks that was a great analysis. Once you started in I did recall about half those details, but mostly I guess it needs to go on my reread pile since I've forgotten so much.
As a tangentially related side - one of the first emails I ever sent when I first started to use email in about 1996 was to Anne McCaffrey.
I was in the "everything you can imagine is on the internet" phase of just looking up random things, and somehow I found her email address.
I sent her a short note about how much I'd loved her books, and she sent me a brief, nice note back.
That email is long lost to the twists and turns of life - I didn't even understand the concept of keeping backups back then (Edit - that's not true, it would be more accurate to say I just never bothered) - but it was a cool little interaction that I always remember fondly. 🙂
Thanks that was a great analysis. Once you started in I did recall about half those details, but mostly I guess it needs to go on my reread pile since I’ve forgotten so much.
I find, when I re-read, one thing that stays with me is how vibrant and beautiful her narration is. I think the books are still worth reading, but that modern audiences who’ve been participating in more modern discussions around storytelling would recoil at some of the bits we sort of just accepted as being “normal”, as standards for what is “normal” have shifted. The spirit of the books always was forward-thinking, even if she got some stuff wrong.
When Anne McCaffrey did a signing in Chicago when she won her Grand Master award, I had a battered copy of Damia (from her Talents series), and she told me Afra Lyon was her own 2nd favorite character, behind Robinton.
I was on “The New Kitchen Table”, which is where her online fandom ended up in the late 90s for a while, but her fandom was HUGE and had already been around for nigh 20 years with Weyrfest and all at Dragon*Con so aside from the one in-person comment (after I waited hours in a line that twined around the bookstore–the only time since that I’ve seen a bookstore event line that long was for a Harry Potter release), I was very much on the periphery of the fandom vs. those who’d been in it for 20 years already.
Are you sure about that? Wizard’s First Rule was great, and they slowly (then quickly) started to unravel.
Richard being a white savior showing the mud people how to make tile roofs seems like it’d be nigh-unfilmable/unwatchable if it were rendered book-accurately cuz boy is it chock-full of veiled racism!
Disagree. There’s far too many rapes and weird sex shit in those. There’s the whole BDSM torture in the first book, the MC is a product of rape, the second book has some form of demon beastiality ritual. The way kalan loses her virginity (thinks it’s her bf evil brother and she is really not into it at all and her bf is offended at her because she thought she was being rapes be his brother)
Then there’s big bad conqueror who forces a woman to suck his dick while in a meeting, then there’s kalans sister who’s a queen who gets literally thrown into a pit with a dozen men who proceed to rape her to the point that she’s permanently traumatized.
I either don't talk to people much except for cutesy convos about weather or something or I know them well and im generally cool about whatever they want to talk about. At first I thought you meant online things which omg there are so many things but I block and subscribe my way to getting what im interested in.
Stuff that’s entirely subjective, like their enjoyment of TV shows, movies, how they feel about religion, etc.
I get that these things mean a lot to the speaker, but its just a statement I can either agree with or disagree with. I can’t really have a conversation, since it’s personal preference.
That’s rough. My heart goes out to you on that one. If you don’t mind me asking, what is it about for example a movie that you have trouble conversing? Is is a lack of caring about the movie itself so it is along the lines of you can say you liked it or not but were not invested enough to talk about plot points or which actors did well?
I try these days to just think of the characters and see if they had a purpose of being there, and if they did, what that purpose was to see if maybe it could have been better represented. All of which is opinionated as you said, it isn’t facts so I am never right, but at least I get to imagine a slightly different version in my head for a second that might give me a chuckle.
I didn’t see Star Wars until I was in my twenties. It isn’t a great set of movies. A lot of people really like it. And now power to them! But it’s not a great conversational gambit.
I hated the two made for TV Terry Pratchett adaptations of Colour of Magic and Going Postal. Like, they pissed me off so hard I couldn’t sleep. Particularly Going Postal (my favorite Pratchett book), they couldn’t have missed the point of it any harder even if they tried.
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