Gentleman’s bastards, kingkiller chronicles and ASOIAF are killing me. I know its important to be patient but when its 7 plus years waiting as a reader I say “no more.” There are plenty of completed series that will leave you satisfied emotionally knowing the story is done and the themes and ideas told.
Been a rough year for reasons that need no repeating. I was speaking with a friend and she told me the fantasy genre is what’s keeping her going these days. She’s immunocompromised so she hasn’t left the house much since the pandemic started. She’s fortunate in that she can work from home and have essentials delivered. So she’s surviving.
But surviving isn’t living. She hasn’t been around other people in close to a year, hasn’t been able to do many of the things she enjoyed before the pandemic. Some days it’s been hard for her to just keep going.
That’s where fantasies come in. She’s been reading a fantasy novel every few days and she told me these stories are keeping her grounded. Giving her hope. Reminding her of all the good things in life.
Some people in the world still dismiss fantasies as escapist reading. While I totally disagree with this view – both because fantasies reveal so much about the reality …
Sorry if gushy posts about how a book made me cry aren’t allowed, but Jesus Christ man.
I knew what Lolita was before I read it. I knew it was about a sick, evil man “falling in love” with a little girl and taking advantage of her after her mother dies. But I think going into the book with this knowledge actually made it MORE difficult to come to terms with.
I hated Humbert. He’s evil, he’s deranged, and I wanted to feel happy when he died. But I couldn’t. When he killed Clare Quilty and drove recklessly, covered in his blood, so detached from anything, I cried. I hate Humbert, and the book was so wonderfully written that I actually empathized with him, and I was lowkey disgusted with myself for it. I know he’s the epitome of an unreliable narrator and that he spends the duration of his confession lying to himself and the reader, but I actually caught myself feeling sorry for him. He’s a deranged man, destroyed by an obsession that …
It’s frightening! Not only that, but on a literary level, it’s also written like a horror novel. Think about it.
Overarching sin? Yes, greed.
The supremely innocent entangled with the supremely guilty? Yes Jim Hawkins and John Silver.
Violence as a central focus? I’d say that’s a big yes from the appearance of Blind Pew on.
An overwhelming sense of dread and/or fear of death, likely caused by claustrophobia or known impending doom? Jim is stuck on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean with a crew of marauders led by the harbinger of Death heading to Murder Island.
It’s a horror novel. And people forget Robert Louis Stevenson was, in fact, a horror writer. Jekyll and Hyde, the Body Snatcher, Thrawn Janet, and that list goes on. His short story, The Waif Woman was so unsettling he held onto it for fifteen years without finding a publisher and it didn’t get published until after he had been dead for twenty years.
What I think happened was …
When people ask me what my hobbies are, I say, “books.” When pressed for more, I’ll expand: oh, I just love books, reading them and writing them and just being around them. And I’ll chuckle or smile as if to say, what can ya do, I’m just a bookworm!
Most people leave it at that, but some people, my people, my favorite people, get a spark in their eyes because they get it. They understand the deep well of love I have for all of it. The paper and the ink and the sensual scent and the way the letters rearrange themselves over and over to tear us all apart and stitch us back together again.
And you’re my people too, so I hope you’ll understand my pain. Perhaps you’ve been there and can offer advice. Or maybe you’ll never walk this road either by avoiding to take it in the first place or maybe never giving it up when you have and all you can offer is a pat on the shoulder and a sigh. I’ll take that just as well.
It appears …
Squishy gothic-looking biomechanical stuff with a strong political basis like The Dispossessed.
Books in my basket right now:
Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling
Blood Music by Greg Bear.
I recently read The Martian and Seveneves, and I’m itching for more stories like that. Something where people are stranded in an incredibly harsh environment, have to survive through extreme improvisation, and you can tell the author put a lot of effort into trying to make the science check out. Bonus points if it involves near-future space travel. More bonus points if there’s a good audiobook for it.
I’m imagining something with similar vibes to “Signs” or “Tales from the Loop”, but open to interpretation. I’m reading Way Station by Simak right now and craving more rural sci-fi.
Edit: By the way, I’m loving Way Station and absolutely intend to read more Simak, was just curious what else was out there. Thanks for the responses so far!
Can anyone recommend good, hard-ish space opera about societies that span several star systems despite having realistic constraints on interstellar travel?
So much space opera is about replicating, say, 19th century maritime empires or WWII era nation-state conflict on an interstellar scale. Inevitably this requires magic FTL propulsion, bending reality to the breaking point for the sake of re-creating scenarios we’re already familiar with.
Fine, if the story’s good. However, I just finished A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge, and I was fascinated by the near-impossible struggle to unite humanity in a slower-than-light universe. Imagining the unprecedented adaptations an interstellar humanity would need in a realistic universe is far more interesting than reproducing Earthly civilizations in space. What other works try to do this with the depth of Vinge’s Queng Ho and Emergents?
Let’s disregard lightspeed work-arounds like wormholes or jumpgates, or …
i miss going to the movie theater.
i miss the crowds and the popcorn. i miss planning my weekend around what movies were coming out. i miss the laughs and the hype. i miss the disappointment and the sadness. i miss the 10 PM thursday night showings with no one else in the room. i miss not caring about anything else for 2 hours.
i really miss going to the movie theater.