A lot of the “stereotypes” around teenagers are based on an element of truth. Being a teenager is difficult for a lot of reasons. Probably the biggest one is that physical growth quickly outpaces brain development. They’re kids who are changing into adults but lack hindsight, experience, the ability to analyze risks, and a sense of their own mortality.
I tell my teenager that everyone makes mistakes. An honest person takes responsibility for their mistakes. A smart person learns from them. But, a wise person learns from the mistakes of others. None of those things is easy and they each require a lot of humility. If you can learn to put your pride aside and be a good student of life, it makes things a lot easier.
The Quantum Thief trilogy. Mainly because part of it takes place in Oubliette, a city whose buildings, plazas and monuments are carried across the surface of Mars by giant robots. That ought to be quite a spectacle.
I have to reread that series. I loved it, but it’s not easy to digest in one sitting.
I kinda think it’d do better as a high-concept anime, like the original Ghost in the Shell anime. I think some of the concepts/cultures would be easier to render in animated form than live action.
Can’t stand when someone recites a previous conversation instead of telling me the subject and results of the conversation. He said blah blah blah blah, she said blah blah blah blah, then she said blah blah blah… 🤦
Just talking poorly about a person in general is annoying to me. I don’t care to hear it. If they did something heinous like traffic people please let me know that but I really can’t care to know that your ex partner or soon to be ex partner did a, b, and c. I hear at least once a week someone saying their ex “has a small dick anyways” and comments about their sex life. I don’t care. I don’t want to know. I just want to tell those people to leave me alone but they obviously are already upset and trying to rage out so I don’t want to deal with the what happens after I tell them that. Likely just more rage now focused at me then.
There really wouldn't be much to update because a good chunk of it is still modern. Not only that, but Banks really fucked with gender, ideology, and civil rights in a way that is still incredibly relevant in 2023.
I also really want someone to try to portray Fwi-Song from Consider Phlebas.
Man, I’ve been stuck in this place where I really want to read those books (somehow I missed them), but I write SFF too and have some near-future thoughts that I don’t want to get tangled up with his stuff. (Part of the reason I went back and read the Chronicles of Amber was to keep my mind away from modern SFF while I work on projects.)
Some day I think I’ll just have to give in and read it and my own stuff is too close to his…oh well. I feel like I’d enjoy his work based on what everyone says about it.
The settings themselves vary wildly, and technically the books occur before, during, and after the present. The level of technology varies wildly.
The one thing in common is the examination of the content of the character of the "human" being, and how we are the same or different, adapt or don't, expand or hide.
It's truly masterful work that, yes has cool gizmos and concepts but worries more about how the gizmos make you feel.
PoG would make a good movie or TV show. Imagine Denis V putting Dune level effort into a movie adaptation of it. UoW would easily translate to TV and unlike most Culture novels, wouldn’t require that much CG budget.
Huh–crossing my fingers then! It’ll be interesting to see if it actually gets into development.
I was thinking about casting Corwin, and after the finale of Loki, I kinda think Tom Hiddleston would do a great Corwin. I think he could portray Corwin’s arc of fighting for the throne at first just so his brother wouldn’t get it, to someone who doesn’t even want the throne wonderfully. He’d also do great as one of Corwin’s brothers.
But I’d also kinda like to see some newcomer knock it out of the park too.
Technically I can relate to the dreams thing but for completely different reasons. Dreams on their own are fine to talk about IMO (most famously as a conversation starter and I even help host a group set up for them), but once in a while you’ll find literal dream preachers (my first BF was one of these, coming to the meal table was a chore), and I might ask something like “will this be on the test”. It’s not some kryptonite, it’s just dull-ish for a lack of a better word, though I’m not singling it out either.
Yeah, I studied psychology and I like to play Jung a bit when people feel the need to tell me about a dream they had, which in theory is by definition something their unconscious needs them to be aware of. So I ask what they think about it, what they felt at different points, etc. Usually the dream is either absolutely illegible, or unsurprisingly obvious. No in-between.
This, but primarily when someone is confounded by the idea that im not into sports. Ive had this happen with a few things, but sports are one of the weireder ones. I mean to the point of them going, nah you like sports, then continuing ro go on a rant about sone game.like i know im into a lot of stuff others arent, but if they sont want to talk about it, thats perfectly fine
LOL, when I moved to the South (American) people were stunned that I knew nothing about the SEC (regional college football conference) and didn’t have a favorite.
It was a big deal, for both men and women, around the office. Now that I’m at a software dev, people rarely comment, and only on their local team.
Yup, I figured I would not be the first to say this.
I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t mind a hearing a quick overview of whatever the latest game is, but I really really don’t want to hear a half hour analysis of which player on what team is going to lead them to victory and why coach x is far better than coach y.
Dan Simmons is an incredible author, I really should check more of his books out. The only other ones I read (before Hyperion actually) were the Ilium / Olympos ones which were very enjoyable.
There’s 4 aren’t there? Fair enough, I liked his writing but a third of the way through the 4th book I realized I didn’t give a shit about the characters anymore.
The age dynamic between them is really fucking gross and pointless too.
That first book was amazing though, no doubt about it.
I liked his writing but a third of the way through the 4th book I realized I didn’t give a shit about the characters anymore.
xD fair point. I guess we all have different tolerances for different stuff. I was dating women in their 40s when I was in my 20s so maybe the age gap stuff flew over my head when I read them. I just finished a really enjoyable book by Stephen Baxter called ‘World Engines’, the main character also appears in other books by him and I really, really struggled with it purely based on the character.
He’s called Malenfant, and would you believe it, he’s bad-tempered! ‘Malenfant grunted:’, ‘Malenfant snorted’, Malenfant scowled, oh very subtle Stephen. He is capable of imagining such diverse creatures, thought patterns and genuine ‘hard sci’ concepts, then went with ‘grumpy old man’ for the protag. There’s enough grumpy old men running the place already, I’d prefer my fiction to be a respite from that!
Looking forward to his next book about a protaganist paralysed by indecision called Soppy McSimpleton.
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.
Jeff Long’s The Descent:
In a cave in the Himalayas, a guide discovers a self-mutilated body with the warning “Satan exists”.
In the Kalahari Desert, a nun unearths evidence of a proto-human species and a deity called Older-than-Old.
In Bosnia, something has been feeding upon the dead in a mass grave.
So begins mankind’s most shocking realization: that the underworld is a vast geological labyrinth populated by another race of beings. Some call them “devils” or “demons.” But they are real. They are down there. And they are waiting for us to find them…
And it’s sequel, Deeper:
A decade has passed since doomed explorers unveiled a nightmare of tunnels and rivers honeycombing the earth’s depths. After millennia of suffering terror and predation, humanity’s armies descended to destroy the ancient hordes. Deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, a doomed science expedition killed the subterraneans’ fabled leader, and suddenly it seemed that evil was dead and all was right with the world again.
Now “Deeper” arrives to explode that complacency and plunge us back into the sunless abyss. Hell boils up through America’s subways and basements to take its revenge and steal our children. Against the backdrop of a looming war with China, a crusade of volunteers races to find the vestiges of a lost race. But a lone explorer, the linguist Ali von Schade, learns that a far greater menace lies in the unexplored heart of the planet. The real Satan can’t be killed, and he has been waiting since the beginning of time to gain his freedom. Man and his pitiless enemies are mere pawns in the greatest escape ever devised.
It wasn't exactly a story that made any sense, as it rarely is. I dreamed of fishing, and sea monsters. Later, I was part of a team fighting off...combatants in a tall building. Humans from another world. The elevators didn't all work and weren't all safe. We had to sneak about to get to the top to fight off the leaders.
This is pretty typical of my dreams.
Edit: It ended when I was watching some whales leaping from the water and one of them became stranded on the land. I woke up very upset about the dying whale.
Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe would be fantastic. The last thing I remember hearing was that he was working on a script for a Mistborn movie. I would’ve preferred a TV-show, but he feels it would work better as a movie, and I trust his judgement.
I both want and don’t want the stormlight archives books adapted to movies. On one hand, the books are amazing. On the other hand movie/tv adaptations usually go badly and it would require a lot of special effects that I think would come out badly
I honestly believe that if they adapted the story as an animated series similar to Arcane it would work really well. I don’t think I can image a live action representation of the various races and spren looking good without a massive budget, but with the right animation studio it could be gorgeous.
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