You know what was a hackneyed book? The Cabinet of Curiosities.
The protagonist was Batman mixed with Hannibal Lecter. Impossibly brilliant, impossibly cultured, impossibly boring. I've never gotten so tired of a character in my life
Honestly, who names a character "Aloysious XL Pendergast", gives him impossible powers and eyes that change color in the light, and expect us to take him seriously?
I actually liked that book, mainly for the fact that despite some of the more bizarre and improbable elements, one is still given every necessary clue to solve the underlying mystery. Furthermore, as excessive as Pendergast gets in some of the other books in that series, I thought that the character stayed reasonably believable as a human being in that one.
Now, Still Life with Crows, *that* is where they really started going overboard.
I have been on an old obscure weird fiction kick, and have been reading a Clark Ashton Smith anthology and I started reading The House on the Borderlands today.
i read swamplandia! by karen russell, a mostly good book
one thing i liked was how it was all like 'magic realism coming. you ready for some magic realism? oh wait gonna put a bit of ambiguity in. but it's coming. you feel it, right? the magic realism? you ready? here it is. here it comes. magic realism. its almost here HAHA NO FUCK U *incredibly horrifying scene*'
pulled the rug totally from under me in a convincing way
More people have said that and been killed than there are thorium decay products.
Warning: half-baked rambling ahead.
2/3 of the way done with this thing. It is a lot more sober than Gravity's Rainbow, for better or for worse, but being its successor of similar breadth, I draw comparisons. Mason & Dixon is a series of various misadventures, some quite bizarre and others grounded in real 18th-century history and most anywhere in between, that seem to veer off on wild tangents from a single historical line of events, that being the lives of Mason and Dixon, but the story has nonetheless followed this line, though framed by an unreliable narrator. I haven't reached the end yet, so I can't say for certain how this will all be wrapped up, but thus far, it has been mostly episodic, with a few plot threads becoming relevant here and there. GR was more dynamic and intense, following the rocket-arc-in-reverse motif of its title and taking me through its various stages of turmoil and paranoia and finally to its bleak but foreshadowed conclusion. GR was terrifying. The paranoia and uncertainty is present in M&D, but it's in a more subdued way, sometimes foreshadowing the present world, sometimes glimpsing cult esoterica and conspiracies, and sometimes dealing with the supernatural. The setting is a world full of such things lurking in the darkness, but ultimately these are just distractions from the protagonists' task, and they kind of glide from one off-kilter episode to the next. Anyway, it has been interesting, and even though this book is extremely long, I've stayed with it out of curiosity for how (or if?) everything comes together, and what sort of madness it may devolve into, this of course being Pynchon.
So I've been reading the Night Land: A Story Retold. It's a rewrite of the book The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. The original book is considered a classic of weird fiction and influential on people like Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, but not many people have read it because Hodgson wrote it in stilted fake 17th century purple prose and didn't edit it as much as he should have. Thus a guy named James Stoppard rewrote it in a serviceable style.
So anyway, the story concerns a world in a far-off future where the sun has gone out, and all of humanity lives in a giant pyramid drawing energy from the earth's core. Also monsters, half-humans, and weird ethereal forces roam the land and prevent the people inside the pyramid from going outside, or ever letting down their defenses. They find out that there's a whole other pyramid of people way out to the north, and the protagonist, Ardos sets out to find it. Also there's some stuff about him being a reincarnation of a 19th century nobleman and his wife having been reincarnated in the other pyramid which sort of makes this a love story, according to the blurb on the back of the book.
The setting is interesting and bleak, there's some cool monsters and stuff, but weirdly enough the most interesting thing to me is the pacing.
It's written in the way an unexperienced writer would keep a journal, where he goes "I walked for six hours, saw some monsters and hid for a while, then continued for three more hours until I reached a fire pit, where I slept and ate two wafers and some water" He's keeping track of his travel time and his eating habits constantly, which some people who read the original novel complained made it ungodly drawn out. I don't know how much has been edited in the rewrite, but you still kind of get a feel for every foot of Ardos's journey.
This reminds me of something I learned about recently. See, the director Gus Van Sant, while making his movie about the Columbine Shooting, sat down and played Tomb Raider to see what they were all about, and was struck by how, in opposition to film where you can have a character walk out the door and then cut to him at work, whereas in a videogame like Tomb Raider, you walk everywhere and you follow your character while walking. He tried to see what this was like in movie form with his next movie, Gerry. Gerry is an ungodly boring film, but it is interesting as an experiment in pacing.
Bringing us back to the Night Land, the book kind of reminds me of a videogame. I'm more immersed in the travels of Ardos because he's not skipping over the boring minutia, and it sort of makes me feel like I'm right there with him in a weird way. I think this is also what appeals to people about Lord of the Rings, where seeing so much stuff with Frodo, even when it's not important, lets you feel how weary he is towards the end, and even after. I sometimes think stuff that's boring can actually help a narrative as a whole, by providing sympathy, a sense of time passing, and catharsis when something does happen.
Yea but from what I've read it's very specifically a heroic adventure type story that is normally set in a medieval fantasy world, except set a very very long time after an apocalypse.
Yea but from what I've read it's very specifically a heroic adventure type story that is normally set in a medieval fantasy world, except set a very very long time after an apocalypse.
i don't know how sarcastic you're being... i don't think night land is medieval (haven't read it but i've read some of hodgson's other stuff) and like, that describes a canticle for leibowitz, nausicaa, and thundarr the barbarian.
Yea but from what I've read it's very specifically a heroic adventure type story that is normally set in a medieval fantasy world, except set a very very long time after an apocalypse.
i don't know how sarcastic you're being... i don't think night land is medieval (haven't read it but i've read some of hodgson's other stuff) and like, that describes a canticle for leibowitz, nausicaa, and thundarr the barbarian.
I have never read any of these and don't know much about any of them.
I am not seriously trying to claim that a man who died in WW1 somehow ripped me off retroactively if that's what you're getting at.
It's an interesting premise, even if not all that original these days. For one thing, it allows for an overall low power level in the world generally, but a few have access to items of great power from the past.
Also, it mirrors the medieval state of mind, in which the fall of Rome was a hugely significant event still, and considered a time of greatness that humanity had fallen from.
In some stories, the cataclysm is pretty strongly implied to have changed the world we know now into the fantasy world; in others, the Time Before was still another world, not ours.
Even Tolkien could be considered post-apocalyptic in a sense; the fall of Morgoth, the fall of Numenor and the associated sundering of the world, and the first fall of Sauron were all world-changing cataclysms in their ways.
Even Tolkien could be considered post-apocalyptic in a sense; the fall of Morgoth, the fall of Numenor and the associated sundering of the world, and the first fall of Sauron were all world-changing cataclysms in their ways.
A lot of post-apoc media (more games and such for me because I don't read much) kinda ticks me off because it boils down to "this big disaster happened so now I get to shoot people guilt-free!", which is like the least interesting kind of power fantasy possible.
I prefer the idea of stuff with fantastical or pseudo-fantastical elements.
Yes, it did. Instead of positing a future apocalypse, he posited past ones.
I'm kind of curious now, what Tolkien imagined pre-apocalypse Middle-Earth to be like, maybe more advanced than the medieval setting of The Lord of the Rings?
Comments
edit: those of you too lazy to click to the previous page will never know what I'm talking about
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I read his time-traveling book a few whiles ago. Hackneyed, but not to the point that it was uninteresting.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
The protagonist was Batman mixed with Hannibal Lecter. Impossibly brilliant, impossibly cultured, impossibly boring. I've never gotten so tired of a character in my life
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
one thing i liked was how it was all like 'magic realism coming. you ready for some magic realism? oh wait gonna put a bit of ambiguity in. but it's coming. you feel it, right? the magic realism? you ready? here it is. here it comes. magic realism. its almost here HAHA NO FUCK U *incredibly horrifying scene*'
pulled the rug totally from under me in a convincing way
2/3 of the way done with this thing. It is a lot more sober than Gravity's Rainbow, for better or for worse, but being its successor of similar breadth, I draw comparisons. Mason & Dixon is a series of various misadventures, some quite bizarre and others grounded in real 18th-century history and most anywhere in between, that seem to veer off on wild tangents from a single historical line of events, that being the lives of Mason and Dixon, but the story has nonetheless followed this line, though framed by an unreliable narrator. I haven't reached the end yet, so I can't say for certain how this will all be wrapped up, but thus far, it has been mostly episodic, with a few plot threads becoming relevant here and there. GR was more dynamic and intense, following the rocket-arc-in-reverse motif of its title and taking me through its various stages of turmoil and paranoia and finally to its bleak but foreshadowed conclusion. GR was terrifying. The paranoia and uncertainty is present in M&D, but it's in a more subdued way, sometimes foreshadowing the present world, sometimes glimpsing cult esoterica and conspiracies, and sometimes dealing with the supernatural. The setting is a world full of such things lurking in the darkness, but ultimately these are just distractions from the protagonists' task, and they kind of glide from one off-kilter episode to the next. Anyway, it has been interesting, and even though this book is extremely long, I've stayed with it out of curiosity for how (or if?) everything comes together, and what sort of madness it may devolve into, this of course being Pynchon.
One of my many failures is not having read M&D yet. I will have to do that.
Episodic stuff is cool.