Guilty Secrets

[Alasdair5000]

Ya know, I haven't read Childhood's End, or A Canticle for Leibowitz.  I guess you've got company there.
I've never read any of the Heinlein juveniles, but that's accounted for by my late entry in the genre.
The biggest ommision: Gibson.  Never read any of his stuff.

Awful as it is to admit given my pathological fondness for Cyberpunk (The game and the literary genre), I still haven't made it to the end of Neuromancer.

Or Count Zero.

Or Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Or Burning Chrome.

   His later books, stuff like Virtual Light and Idoru and Spook Country I absolutely love.  'The Gernsback Continuum' is flat out my favourite short story of all time but the classics?  Not for me.

Oh and I've never read Canticle for Liebowitz either...

[Planish]

I feel especially stupid in conversations about Delany's Dhalgren because it sounds like the sort of brainy book I should have read and haven't.

Dhalgren reminds me of something attributed to Mark Twain: "Wagner's music is much better than it sounds".
Or,

William Gibson calls Dhalgren "A riddle that was never meant to be solved."

I really enjoyed it the first time I read it, lo, these many years ago, but I recently tried reading it again and got easily distracted.

I did like the idea of the "scorpions" though.

[shwankie]

First, a correction:

I haven't read any Hubbard, either. I had some, not sure what happened to them, but the two books I reference ("Mirror of her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through") are by Donelson (Or however you spell it, I am not looking at the books at the moment). Sorry about that. One more deficiency, it seems.

And, to pursue a remedy for my sadly lacking SF background, Thaur and I went to a local going-out-of-business bookstore that was selling books for $1/each, or buy 10 get 10 free. The selection was pretty picked over, but here's the SF/Fantasy we picked up:

-A City in Winter, Mark Helprin
-The Death of a Necromancer, Martha Wells
-Childhood's End, Clarke (Which Thaur has already started reading. I've read it, but had no idea what became of my copy)
-The Voyage, David Drake
-All About Venus, anthology including Clarke, Poul Anderson, C.s. Lewis, and Olaf Stapledon
-Changeling, Zelazny
-The Man in the Maze, Silverberg
-The Robots of Dawn, Asimov (I will likely read this first, just to stop the embarrassment)
-The Number of the Beast, Heinlein (I've been wanting this for a while)
-The Making of Dune (the original movie, not the miniseries)

I realize it's not a complete cure, but at least it might help treat some of the symptoms.

[AarrowOM]

For now, I'll forgive your serious Pratchettlessness, but if you tell me you actually liked any of O.S. Card's 3rd or 4th books in any series, I am afraid I'll have to take to heart you comment of beatings about the head and neck with Gormenghast.

Would that include Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind?  I'll admit they aren't nearly as good as Ender's Game, but still better than the Shadow series sequels.

[sirana]

Planish reminded me of this little secret: I have never been able to finish the LOTR books. I don't like them. I've gotten as far as The Hobbit and then the first book, and just can't get into it.

You lucky one. I actually rather liked The Hobbit and because everybody kept saying that Lord of the Rings was THE BEST FANTASY EVARR!!!1! I read it.
I plowed through the parts where they walked for some time and then they rested. And then they walked again. And then they rested again. Hey guess what, they walked some more.
Then I listened to pages upon pages of crappy elven poetry. And elven songs.
I endured merciless Hobbit inner turmoil.
And when I finally reached the last page I cried: "I suffered through the book for THIS?"
And then I threw it against the wall.

I learned a valuable lesson here, if I don't like a book within the first 30 pages I put it down, no matter how good somebody tells me it is.

It is a good rule and I follow it religiously.
Except when I <a href="http://forum.escapeartists.info/index.php?topic=1271.msg19272#msg19272" > don't [/url].

[Tango Alpha Delta]

Planish reminded me of this little secret: I have never been able to finish the LOTR books. I don't like them. I've gotten as far as The Hobbit and then the first book, and just can't get into it.

You lucky one. I actually rather liked The Hobbit and because everybody kept saying that Lord of the Rings was THE BEST FANTASY EVARR!!!1! I read it.
I plowed through the parts where they walked for some time and then they rested. And then they walked again. And then they rested again. Hey guess what, they walked some more.
Then I listened to pages upon pages of crappy elven poetry. And elven songs.
I endured merciless Hobbit inner turmoil.
And when I finally reached the last page I cried: "I suffered through the book for THIS?"
And then I threw it against the wall.

I learned a valuable lesson here, if I don't like a book within the first 30 pages I put it down, no matter how good somebody tells me it is.

It is a good rule and I follow it religiously.
Except when I <a href="http://forum.escapeartists.info/index.php?topic=1271.msg19272#msg19272" > don't [/url].

You could probably formulate some corollary rule regarding the length of the book...

I'm just relieved that you liked something based on something I said! 

[Darwinist]

For now, I'll forgive your serious Pratchettlessness, but if you tell me you actually liked any of O.S. Card's 3rd or 4th books in any series, I am afraid I'll have to take to heart you comment of beatings about the head and neck with Gormenghast.

Would that include Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind?  I'll admit they aren't nearly as good as Ender's Game, but still better than the Shadow series sequels.

Ouch, I have the Shadow series in paperback but have not read any of it yet.  Thought Speaker and Xenocide were good but Children was hard to get through.   

[AarrowOM]

For now, I'll forgive your serious Pratchettlessness, but if you tell me you actually liked any of O.S. Card's 3rd or 4th books in any series, I am afraid I'll have to take to heart you comment of beatings about the head and neck with Gormenghast.

Would that include Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind?  I'll admit they aren't nearly as good as Ender's Game, but still better than the Shadow series sequels.

Ouch, I have the Shadow series in paperback but have not read any of it yet.  Thought Speaker and Xenocide were good but Children was hard to get through.   

Personally, I think the Shadow series goes up and down.  Ender's Shadow was decent, though I think it detracts from Ender's Game by somehow reducing Ender's importance.  That and the retcon with regards to terminology stands out.  Shadow of the Hegemon, in my opinion, was worse than Shadow Puppets, though my personal library database seems to be missing a..., well, reason.

I will concede that Children of the Mind is the weakest of the original 4 Ender novels.

[Windup]

Any Robert A Heinlein* - He's hugely influential, enduring popular, politically engaged and provocative.  He's right up my street.  But he somehow hasn't turned up on my bookshelf.

* Other than The Number of the Beast, which was apparently a bad place to start.

Yeah, I've read most of Heinlein's adult novels and many of the juveniles, and you must have had a little extra negative something on the random number generator to pick that one.  It's the only RAH novel I ever failed to finish, and I don't give up on any book very easily.  (I have this "thing" about sets and completion.)

My personal favorite is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If you can forgive the title -- which I admit sounds like a cheesy romance -- you get a very compelling story and some of RAH's best characters rattling around a fascinating venue.  I like RAH's Luna a lot better in this book than when he revisited it The Cat Who Walks Through Walls; the latter suffers from being written after he went off the Libertarian deep end.

Starship Troopers may be the most influential.  It's certainly been instrumental in getting lots of people (including me) to join the military.  Of course, it was also insturmental in getting me to leave the military, at least in part because the book left me, as my wife puts it, "cursed with the vision of the perfect organization" -- an ideal no flesh-and-blood polity of stinky humans could ever measure up to. 

Just some thoughts; I'll do my own confession in a later post.

[Tango Alpha Delta]

Any Robert A Heinlein* - He's hugely influential, enduring popular, politically engaged and provocative.  He's right up my street.  But he somehow hasn't turned up on my bookshelf.

* Other than The Number of the Beast, which was apparently a bad place to start.

Yeah, I've read most of Heinlein's adult novels and many of the juveniles, and you must have had a little extra negative something on the random number generator to pick that one.  It's the only RAH novel I ever failed to finish, and I don't give up on any book very easily.  (I have this "thing" about sets and completion.)

My personal favorite is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If you can forgive the title -- which I admit sounds like a cheesy romance -- you get a very compelling story and some of RAH's best characters rattling around a fascinating venue.  I like RAH's Luna a lot better in this book than when he revisited it The Cat Who Walks Through Walls; the latter suffers from being written after he went off the Libertarian deep end.

Starship Troopers may be the most influential.  It's certainly been instrumental in getting lots of people (including me) to join the military.  Of course, it was also instrumental in getting me to leave the military, at least in part because the book left me, as my wife puts it, "cursed with the vision of the perfect organization" -- an ideal no flesh-and-blood polity of stinky humans could ever measure up to. 

Just some thoughts; I'll do my own confession in a later post.

I wish I hadn't read this post 5 minutes before leaving for work... WindUp: you and I should have a beer and rail against stinky humans some time!    I tell some of my stories (appropriately name-changed and fictionalized, of course) on my "Tad's Happy Funtime" blog, if you care to see how I developed the opinion that the service was like a giant amoeba - no brain to speak of, just a very hungry foot.   

As for Mr. RAH, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the way he writes female characters; maybe we are simply products of our respective times, but he seems caught between trying to seem hip to the "liberation" of women and trying to keep them in their 1950's "place".  I have the impression that Starship Troopers did a better job of actually treating women like equals, but it's been a while since I read it (and I've read Forever War since then, too).

Edit: I fixed the link to point to my original "Tad's Happy Funtime" blog, which has stuff I wrote in 2004-2005.  My mother couldn't handle the silly url "happyphuntime", and kept going to "happyfuntime", which was a detailed list of one shallow man's sexual adventures.   So, after the Escape Pod <300word story contest, I started a new blog at http://tadshappyfuntime.blogspot.com, which has more recent stuff.

[stePH]

As for Mr. RAH, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the way he writes female characters; maybe we are simply products of our respective times, but he seems caught between trying to seem hip to the "liberation" of women and trying to keep them in their 1950's "place".  I have the impression that Starship Troopers did a better job of actually treating women like equals, but it's been a while since I read it (and I've read Forever War since then, too).

How would you get that impression?  There were almost no female characters in Starship Troopers.  Carmen Ibanez appears briefly in one scene I seem to recall, and unlike the film, there were no women in the Mobile Infantry.

[Tango Alpha Delta]

As for Mr. RAH, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the way he writes female characters; maybe we are simply products of our respective times, but he seems caught between trying to seem hip to the "liberation" of women and trying to keep them in their 1950's "place".  I have the impression that Starship Troopers did a better job of actually treating women like equals, but it's been a while since I read it (and I've read Forever War since then, too).

How would you get that impression?  There were almost no female characters in Starship Troopers.  Carmen Ibanez appears briefly in one scene I seem to recall, and unlike the film, there were no women in the Mobile Infantry.

In that case, I am definitely transferring memories of Forever War onto Troopers (and excuse my man-pig moment as I mentally review the co-ed shower scene from the ST film... ah... crap; now I'm seeing Doogie Houser mind-meld with a giant slug.  Of COURSE she's afraid, doofus; a bunch of monkeys just fired a nuke into her nest and lopped off her feeding stalk!).

But like I say, the female characters that I legitimately DO recall seemed to take the stage long enough to make the point that Heinlein believes that women do not have to be defined by traditional gender roles... and once that point is established, they seem to sink back toward their allocated two dimensions (along with many puns about their two marvelous dimensions).

Exhibit A: Wyoming Knott: revolutionary, warrior, key conspirator.  And yet, much of the strong independence attributed to her is undercut by constant references to her figure, her deferral to the paternalistic Professor, and her eventual subsumption into Manny's family.

Exhibit B: Nurse Jill (from Stranger) who is relatively tough and single-minded, leading a subversive crusade to free the weakened man from mars and her kidnapped boyfriend; at least until Jubal Harshaw is introduced.  After that, she increasingly becomes a statuesque backdrop, ending up in a kind of "backup chorus" to Mike Smith.

Now, I am NOT trying to make a case that Heinlein was irredeemably sexist; if there's a flaw here, I suppose it lies in my ability to keep the story in the context of the period in which it was written.  But when I read his books, I see these patterns of "flawed, but wise elder" and "brainy, but beautiful female sidekick" and it makes it hard to concentrate on other things.

Like, how nice libertarianism (or anarchy) would be, if only it didn't depend on the good behavior of predatory bullies....

[Windup]

I wish I hadn't read this post 5 minutes before leaving for work... WindUp: you and I should have a beer and rail against stinky humans some time!    I tell some of my stories (appropriately name-changed and fictionalized, of course) on my "Tad's Happy Funtime" blog, if you care to see how I developed the opinion that the service was like a giant amoeba - no brain to speak of, just a very hungry foot.   

Tad, I assume that was "Tad's Happy Funtime", not what the URL link spelled so phonetically....  <<icon of guy trying to figure out if that was an intelligence test or a mistake by a guy late for work>>

Do you ever read: An Army of Dude ?

As for the military....  It took a while, but I did eventually overcome the curse of the perfect vision.  Somewhere along the way, I figured out that in the case of my present (decidedly non-military) employer, the things I love about the organization are mostly the flip side of the things about the organization that make me crazy.  So, I've made peace with the whole notion of organizations populated by stinky humans -- they're all we've got to work with. And being something of a stinky human myself, it's the only kind that would let me in, even if there were alternatives.  A beer still sounds good, though... 

[Windup]

As for Mr. RAH, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the way he writes female characters; maybe we are simply products of our respective times, but he seems caught between trying to seem hip to the "liberation" of women and trying to keep them in their 1950's "place".  I have the impression that Starship Troopers did a better job of actually treating women like equals, but it's been a while since I read it (and I've read Forever War since then, too).

How would you get that impression?  There were almost no female characters in Starship Troopers.  Carmen Ibanez appears briefly in one scene I seem to recall, and unlike the film, there were no women in the Mobile Infantry.

But like I say, the female characters that I legitimately DO recall seemed to take the stage long enough to make the point that Heinlein believes that women do not have to be defined by traditional gender roles... and once that point is established, they seem to sink back toward their allocated two dimensions (along with many puns about their two marvelous dimensions).

Exhibit A: Wyoming Knott: revolutionary, warrior, key conspirator.  And yet, much of the strong independence attributed to her is undercut by constant references to her figure, her deferral to the paternalistic Professor, and her eventual subsumption into Manny's family.

Exhibit B: Nurse Jill (from Stranger) who is relatively tough and single-minded, leading a subversive crusade to free the weakened man from mars and her kidnapped boyfriend; at least until Jubal Harshaw is introduced.  After that, she increasingly becomes a statuesque backdrop, ending up in a kind of "backup chorus" to Mike Smith.

Now, I am NOT trying to make a case that Heinlein was irredeemably sexist; if there's a flaw here, I suppose it lies in my ability to keep the story in the context of the period in which it was written.  But when I read his books, I see these patterns of "flawed, but wise elder" and "brainy, but beautiful female sidekick" and it makes it hard to concentrate on other things.

I think most authors with much longevity tend to fall back on a few archetypes, mostly because it is so damn difficult to generate genuinely new, self-consistent, interesting characters to populate imaginary worlds. Particularly if you have to do it across many books, and particularly in genre fiction, which tends to reward aspects of the story other than character development.  (Quick: How many super-bright, maddeningly-reasonable, resourceful scientist characters of Asimov's can you name before you fall asleep?)  (Answer: Not many, because you can't remember their names and they all blur together, but you know exactly what I'm talking about.)

Heinlein's third wife -- who was eight years or so younger than he was -- is widely believed to be the model for many of those characters, so you can make a reasonable guess as to where the experiential raw materials for the "patterns of 'flawed, but wise elder' and 'brainy, but beautiful female sidekick'" you've noticed come from.

And finally, Counter-Exhibit A: Friday.  Bright. Built. (In several senses of the word.) Lethal. (For some reason, I remember the scene where she informs one of her former captors:"You're only alive right now because you let me pee!!") Her relationship with her "flawed-but-wise" boss doesn't break the pattern, but the plot intervenes... 

Like, how nice libertarianism (or anarchy) would be, if only it didn't depend on the good behavior of predatory bullies....

Unfortunately, I don't think you even have to go to that extreme.  I've come to the conclusion that true Communism and true Free-Market Capitalism are both elegant, self-consistent, theoretically beautiful systems that share a common flaw -- they can't be carried out by actual humans.

<<edit to remove Friday spoiler.>>

[Ocicat]

When I saw the "guilty secrets" thread title, I presumed this would be about the worthless fluff SF that we enjoyed, not the classics that we missed.

Enjoying authors like Piers Anthony and Terry Brooks should be a guilty secret.

Not having read all the classics is forgivable.  There's only so much time, and there are a lot of classics.  And not all of them have aged well.  I've never read any Lensmen, but it always just sounded silly and outdated by a modern sensibility anyway. 

Put me down among the legion of folks who have never read A Canticle for Leibowitz or Childhood's End.  And Childhood's End is one of the things that got me into Science Fiction in the first place.  Well, the title and the cover anyway.  My older brother was reading it, and I found the image fascinating.  He thought I wasn't old enough for it though - I was probably 7.  But I started reading a bunch of other stuff, starting with older classics like Vern and Wells.  Eventually it became a point of odd pride that I'd never read Childhood's End...

[Tango Alpha Delta]

When I saw the "guilty secrets" thread title, I presumed this would be about the worthless fluff SF that we enjoyed, not the classics that we missed.

Enjoying authors like Piers Anthony and Terry Brooks should be a guilty secret.

Hey, I was only 14!  What did I know about anything? 

But, anyway... I fixed the blog links I referenced above (see editorial note), and Windup, what you say makes perfect sense to me.  Ties in with several conversations I've had over the course of the week... but I won't burden you with that baggage!

[stePH]

When I saw the "guilty secrets" thread title, I presumed this would be about the worthless fluff SF that we enjoyed, not the classics that we missed.

Enjoying authors like Piers Anthony and Terry Brooks should be a guilty secret.

To say nothing of Elron