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San Francisco, 9:26 PM
Sun Nov 8
12 posts in the last 24 hours
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06/17/09
06/17/09
06/17/09
Also she loves Mieville's work. She nice!
06/17/09
06/17/09
06/17/09
06/17/09
Also: Everyone Loves Arioch! Tuesdays on Nickelodeon, after SpongeBob!
06/17/09
06/17/09
I agree with you on HK, though, CJA.
06/17/09
06/17/09
06/17/09
But I'm sure you knew that.
06/17/09
There's no city that's like.... 35% cyborgs. I mean... You can only like certain things about cities. Are you really complaining? Or is this just a "I'm young, and old people SUCK! REVOLUTION!" kind of complaint.
06/17/09
As I'm not what you would consider young, that is certainly not it. As I said, I see the reasoning behind their choices, but they seem to lean to the scholarly and historical and less to the fantastical in my opinion. A city like HK, where you seem to be in a different world on each corner, is more to my way of thinking of a "fantastical city". That's all.
06/17/09
I guess it all comes down to what you consider the future to be. I mean, Leguin projects far far forward, looking at the degeneration of advanced societies, and their fight against sloughing down, so she'd obviously love Venice as a symbol.
06/17/09
Oh, yes. It's entirely a personal preference.
06/17/09
06/17/09
It just feels entirely different to me, and I've been to a lot of places -- Reykjavik is a place I return to a lot.
06/17/09
06/17/09
And to be utterly touristy, it's stunning to hang out in the Blue Lagoon, then climb that flight of stairs and look out on what appears to be a lunar landscape.
Of course, that's leaving out the recent trend of exploding Range Rovers for insurance money and everyone owing fishermen-Viking-bankers millions of kroner (does the kroner even exist anymore?)
01/09/09
01/09/09
The Hainish Cycle stories always seemed very well thought out and portrayed very different but totally believable worlds. Unless you are a rabid Hard SF fan who needs the physics of everything spelled out these stories will amaze and edify any reader who loves to think.
01/09/09
[www.viceland.com]
And I'm sure they also have unattractive hipsters starved for attention and getting naked.
01/09/09
01/09/09
hey, whadya know I was right.
[www.viceland.com]
@crashedpc: I actually rather love their Do's & Don'ts, it's like when you were a kid, Highlights magazine had it's ups and downs but you could always rely on Goofus and Gallant.
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11/24/08
And these categories go away when they no longer serve any purpose. I remember when my Big Public Library employer interfiled the westerns because no one read westerns anymore. And horror, too. It had a boom period as a genre and then not so much, so it melted into regular fiction and SF/fantasy. Romance is often only pulled-out into a separate category in paperback while the hardbacks and trade-sized books are interfiled in regular fiction -- because larger-format romances are more unselfconsciously-read by non-genre readers than paperback and category romances are, usually due to the less ghettoizing cover art.
As Ursula said, it's marketing, but marketing in response to demand.
11/24/08
commerce can bitch slap art all day long and that don't make that make sense neither. there are a million ways for marketers to respond to demand other than the way they do. that's the easy way too.
romances have less ghettoizing cover art...ehh. speaking of which, didja need to hyphenate pulled-out?
11/25/08
Dude, you're one step away from Godwining this whole thread. Also, you really aren't making much sense.
Oh, and HEAVEN FORBID marketers easily respond to demand! Next thing you know, they'll be stereotyping appliances by function and clothing by the gender of the wearer -- the lazy, bigotty bastards!
11/25/08
if there was a point, it was that generalizing is easier than being specific.
there are many different ways that marketers do respond to demand and they are not all easy. i think the goal of marketing is to have the biggest impact, and ease would be at most a secondary consideration.
11/25/08
I couldn't follow you, and your "judging by appearances" comment -- which is honestly irrelevant to categorizing books (cataloging is a career path whose practitioners take great pains to properly identify and categorize each book so it can be found and read or used by the people who might want or need it) -- smacked of some kind of hyperbole.
So, okay, I misread you, but I did say you weren't making much sense (at least I couldn't make sense of what you were saying).
And more generally to the whole thread:
Seriously. Genre is just a method to organize information so people can find what they want. And, again, OOOOO! People finding what they want! What lazy bastards. Let us judge them as evil because they know what they like.
11/25/08
If I can find the book I'm looking for, it doesn't matter to me whether it's "fiction" or "science fiction" or "literature".
11/25/08
But if you had to go find the book at Amazon's warehouse (or at a bookstore or at a library), you would need to know where they had it stored and would approach finding it differently (by whatever system they use). There has to be an organizational system in place in order for things to be findable by any number of approaches. Knowing the author and title would only be your first step, not the final one. Much of the time, people don't know what they want, so being able to narrow down to a subsection of all available possibilities helps enormously.
And "smart" search engines are just search engines that read and use all the metadata that -- hey, guess what! -- libraries pioneered in order to crossreference and make that *one thing* you want findable in the sea of all things that are available.
11/24/08
11/24/08
Also considering most libraries don't use the DDS fiction categories for anything but lit-crit editions because it's more friendly to browse by author last name than by where the author hails from...
11/24/08
A quick wikipedia search turns up that the term is older than the story I remember. The things you learn when you should be doing work.
11/24/08
11/24/08
Chabon decides to write an alternative history novel (not even sci-fi!) and wins tons of awards and has the Coen Brothers directing the adaption.
LeGuin, meanwhile, hasn't written an original work since the Nixon Administration, and her biggest recent accomplishment was refusing to be associated with a bastardized miniseries made by the network that brought us "Mansquito."
Sounds to me like someone is all jealous that Chabon gets literary respect when he slummed in her literary world while she hasn't been relevant for decades to anybody but Ren-Fair groupies. Boo, hoo.
Anyway, I'm all for the wall. Fantasy is sci-fi for writers too lazy to do research.
11/24/08
I actually *heard* the interview, and this was not a woman who was angry or jealous; she was thoughtful and interesting and gracious as she always is.
She's also widely respected and gets a lot of love from the non-genre literary world. Wizard of Earthsea was one of the 22 books promoted this year by the National Endowment for the Arts "Big Read" project for city-wide single book reading initiatives.
What you don't know about LeGuin is a lot. Check out the bibliography just to debunk your no "original work since the Nixon Administration." [en.wikipedia.org]
And LeGuin? Ren-Fair groupies? Do you even know who she is?