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San Francisco, 6:05 AM
Mon Nov 9
12 posts in the last 24 hours
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04/27/09
04/27/09
04/27/09
04/27/09
Not a troll. Just don't respect those awards. Seriously, compare the Nebulas to a list of winners of the Hugo Awards.
04/27/09
"Embed images. While we're not sure if this is a bug or a feature, you can embed images that live out on the web into your comment-but the process is a little wonky. Use the
But of course we no longer have "preview comment" ability.
04/27/09
04/27/09
No, the Troll wasn't appropriate ... since that was posted at 9:26, and the comment you find disagreeable wasn't posted until more than an hour later (10:44).
To boot, if a book is bad (and Powers is really bad), there's no shame in offering an honest negative assessment.
It isn't an ad hominem attack, or rude, to say that it's a teenage alienation/empowerment fantasy or to compare it to Harry Potter.
04/27/09
04/27/09
Maybe you just don't care for fantasy, or for LeGuin's fantasy? But you were rude.
"Four Ways to Forgiveness" is set in the same Ekumen universe as LHOD/Dispossessed/TWFWIF, so I'm not sure why you hated that.
04/27/09
04/27/09
I'm going to make an educated guess: you've not read "Powers."
'Cause, for serious, it's top-notch, vastly superior to anything on the (pretty solid) Hugo shortlist.
Everyone should read "The Knife of Never Letting Go," incidentally. In a just world it would have swept every major SF award.
04/27/09
Powers is not good SF, it's not good YA writing, it's just another alienation/empowerment self-indulgent fantasy aimed at the Harry-Potter-loving Mary Sues of the world.
LeGuin was awesome at one point (Disposessed, Lathe of Heaven), but the last couple of decades, her books have been flat-out awful.
04/27/09
04/27/09
The thing is that I was a *huge* fan of her work in the early-to-mid 1970s.
I must admit that I haven't read The Telling, so I can't say for certain on that one. However, every couple of years someone hands me one of her recent books and says that it's as good as L.H.O.D. And every time, I read what is given to me and am enormously disappointed.
There has not been a book of hers that I have enjoyed since The Word for World is Forest.
Powers, in particular, strikes me as being an all-time low.
04/27/09
"Lavinia" was AWESOME (it's not SF). It's the only hardback I've purchased in the past year, I think.
04/17/09
04/17/09
04/20/09
Going Postal might be my all-time favorite, and works as a stand-alone.
04/17/09
He does Captain Carrot as kind of Welsh, though. Not sure I would've gone that way.
04/17/09
04/17/09
04/17/09
This man is a genius.
04/17/09
04/17/09
Pratchett is awesome. The discworld series is one of the best I have read, now if only Vetinari was president of the US....
04/17/09
@SF_iris: CRIVENS!
04/17/09
04/17/09
It's not inappropriate at all... I just have to wonder about the age gap.
04/17/09
04/18/09
Oh I realize you might be old enough, but the real question here is this: How old is vetinari?
04/18/09
04/02/09
I'm in.
04/02/09
I can't concentrate on audiobooks (though I can with someone reading IRL), and readings of stories take me much much longer to listen to than if I read it myself.
Come up with a link to the written versions of these and I'm all over it.
03/30/09
[en.wikipedia.org])
03/30/09
Superpowers hints similar stuff but juuust barely. This book was much more down-to-earth, which would have been fine if the writing wasn't so muddled. Schwartz could do a sequel but then it would seem just like Heroes etc.
There was potential here, but he should start from scratch. Find a unique voice for the superhero story that avoids the faults of this first novel.
03/30/09
03/30/09
03/30/09
03/30/09
I'll go out on a limb and say that I liked the book more than some of you seem to have. And, in fact, I thought the end had some of the best stuff: when some prices have to be paid (physically and morally).
03/30/09
03/30/09
Heroe's at least had Claire multilating herself in various amusing ways, but apart from that not much.
Xmen just babble, but nothing.
4400, again, nothing.
I get the fact that real science is too slow to make a good story out of, but that shouldnt stop the charecters in the story being curious.
I can fly?! Do I exert a force downwards? Is it somehow magnetic based? If I block gravitons, can things very nearme float too? etc.
I stretch myself...what do I look like under x-ray? does everything stretch preportional? Or do I turn to an Odo-like mush? Does my density stay uniform?
I can turn invisible? What If I eat something after? (ok, memmoirs of the invisible man covered this).
I think not only would the charecters being curious to how their abilitys work make the storys more realistic, but it would also help inspire the writters to think more completely about the implications and possible negative side effects of abilitys.
03/30/09
ah MiracleMan...is there nothing you haven't already done better?
03/30/09
03/30/09
03/30/09
03/30/09