Jlawrence’s Comments (group member since Mar 08, 2010)

Jlawrence’s comments from the The Sword and Laser group.

aldenoneil wrote: "Jlawrence wrote: "I've held off on reading Feast of Crows until there's some definite sign of Dance with Dragons."

I'm sort of doing the same thing. At least, that's the excuse I'll adopt from here on out. ..."

It's sitting in a prominent place on top of a stack of books in my living room, but I'm RESISTING, I tell you, RESISTING!

Maybe if Tom should record a audio version of it using his favorite Russian accent, Veronica would finish that faster?

I've held off on reading Feast of Crows until there's some definite sign of Dance with Dragons.

Goatee-sporting evil Spock and leather-clad evil Willow would make an *awesome* team!

3 a month seems to my average. It'd probably be less if it weren't for my daily commute on a train. I haven't been bit by audiobook bug yet, so I'm not consuming books while multi-tasking, and I'm skilled at rapidly conking out when I read in bed, so the commute is my main reading time.

Argh, I'm excited all over again...

http://www.hbo.com/game-of-thrones/in...

Lepton wrote: "It's pretty simple actually. From the first, nothing is required in fiction. If authors chooses to manifest violence, cruelty, and suffering, that is entirely of their choosing. In a world entirely of their creation, they chose to manifest something awful and morally objectionable. Therefore, I say they choose to support the notion that violence, suffering, and cruelty are acceptable by creating it at their own choosing."

OK, by that criteria, you should never read the following authors because they "support violence": Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Milton, Orwell, H.G. Wells, Tolkien, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Frank Herbert, Joseph Heller, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson... the list of great works to avoid would be endless.

I think there's always room to critique *how* an author has depicted violence and suffering -- is it exploitative? Gratuitous? Ridiculously overblown? Those are fair questions. But to demand that violence and suffering be absolutely excluded would reduce all the richness of fiction to two allowable forms: depictions of utopia & fairy tales. It sounds like you might want to restrict your reading to those forms, instead of fiction at large, which at its best shows *both* the best and worst sides of human nature in all its messiness, not some prim, censored depiction of what we "should be."

Jenny wrote: "terpkristin wrote: "Well this probably means you got all the references that I was missing, but knew I was missing, since he seemed to be writing about them in a self-congratulatory "look at how smart I am" tone. It was the tone that bothered me, not the plot or the characters. Funny how such a little thing can drive a reader crazy!"

You know what, I liked Anathem, Snow Crash and plan to read the Baroque Cycle, but I actually did not finish Cryptonomicon, even though I was very close to the end, because the lead character in the present-day plotline was writing this *long* email in a totally grating, self-congratulatory "look how smart I am" tone that drove me crazy enough to close the book. ;) (Actually, I also felt the present-day plotline wasn't achieving the engaging connection between abstract-math and important historical events that the past plotline was, so that was part of it, too.)

Just finished Macroscope by Piers Anthony, which was flawed but interesting and ambitious science fiction - I mostly knew him from his light-hearted Xanth series before.

About to dive into either The Name of the Wind or House of Suns.

Interestingly, the project has a job opening for a game programmer!

I still need to dig into the content of the Mongoliad site, I really like the idea.

Sean wrote: "The new Kirk was raised by an entirely different man, didn't survive Kodos the Executioner's reign of terror, isn't haunted by the dikironium cloud that attacked the USS Farragut..."

Are these (other than the surrogate father) things that are covered in the actual original series episodes or movies, or do they come from Star Trek novels, etc? I just don't remember them, but I've only rewatched some of the original eps recently.

I grew up watching re-runs of the original series and *loved* them, both for the geeky content, which was more cerebral than any other sci-fi fare being offered on tv at the time, and for the interplay between the characters, especially the trio of Kirk-Spock-McCoy.

When I re-watch now, I see more plot-holes, clumsiness, cheesiness, etc. than I did as a kid, but I still can enjoy them quite a bit.

Hi, I'm Josh. HTML-slinger by occupation, science-fiction-reader/gaming nerd/sloppy musician by inclination. Thanks to this bookclub I now appreciate the sword as well as the laser.

Favorite authors include Frank Herbert, Gene Wolfe, William Gibson, George R.R. Martin, Douglas Adams. I also made the opening music for the S&L podcast, and with my music partner-in-crime Karl Eifrig, a version of Clive Royal's open-source Sword & Laser song (you can see the video here).

There's an annotated version of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep that includes his notes to himself when revising his initial drafts of the novel. A large part of them relate to the world-building of the novel's universe. It's not a polished presentation like the Rivan Codex sounds like, or even fully-fleshed out background notes (Vinge makes clear how messy and sometimes contradictory the notes can be), but they do allow you to see the process or world-building and world-refining in action. I've only dipped into this annotated version a little bit, but it's pretty darn interesting.

Mike was my favorite character from this book, and I was sad to seem him fall silent, but it made sense to me. Partly because of the 'superhuman overseer' problem Dylan mentions (though, even without Mike, the Loonie political body emerging from the revolution doesn't fit the Professor's pure libertarian ideal anyway, which was interesting). It'd also seem a little too fairy-tale-ish, for our main characters to all emerge unscathed from a dangerous revolution (yes, the Professor passes, but at a perfectly timed moment, after declaring victory).

On the technical side, I bought Mannie's speculation that enough of Mike's physical components had been hit to possibly cause Mike to fall beneath the threshold for consciousness. It doesn't explain why Mike wouldn't 'wake up' once those components were repaired or replaced, but maybe his previous emergence depended on some serendipity of combined elements, not just the amount of hardware.

Advice I've often heard:

1) Write, write, write

Write everyday. Carve out some time for it, and stick with it. It can just be a character sketch, an individual scene, or part of something bigger, but get something down. Don't obsess about re-reading it and working it over immediately - a *lot* of what you initially write you will likely end up throwing out. But keep at it, it's the only way to get the 'garbage' out of your system and hone your craft. Let what you've written sit for awhile before returning to it, so your take on it will be fresh, and you can decide then what should be thrown out, and what can be kept and improved.

2) Read, read read (I think you're doing this already ;))

Read as much as you can and pay attention to how your favorite authors hook you, how they express the personalities of their characters, how they pace and structure their narratives.

3) Read your dialogue out loud

Helps detect where your dialogue may be wooden or out-of-character.

4) Write about something that excites you

If you're not interested in what you're writing, the chances are the reader won't be either.

5) Feedback

It's also important to get feedback on your writing from people who can give you honest but constructive criticism. It can be hard to have a clear perspective on something you've been working on and feel attached to, so outside opinions can be essential. Don't take criticism personally, but decide what changes are worth considering, and what to ignore. (All those people authors thank in their acknowledgments are often friends who read the work-in-progress and said, "Hey, why don't you do this...")

Those tips apply to all writing - for some genre-specific ones, there's a number of books and online resources with advice on science fiction and fantasy world-building, etc. I don't know which are best, though.

I've been thinking about writing some science fiction as well - I have several story ideas, but I have not succeeded in following the discipline advice #1 yet! ;) (This was a problem for me even when I was in some creative writing workshops haha!)

One of the obsessions of the thief in The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is 'acquiring' rare books named in the Modern Library's List of the 100 Best Novels. So I decided to check out this list online.

The Modern Library's official list is about what you'd expect. The companion Reader's List (based on online votes) had some surprises, though. For instance, Heinlein kicks serious ass all over it. Sure, Tolkien, Herbert and (ugh) L. Ron Hubbard beat him for some of the juiciest, highest rankings, but Heinlein books take up SEVEN of the 100 slots, with our current pick The Moon is a Harsh Mistress at #15. The only other author close to that many titles on the Reader's List is Ayn Rand with 4 titles. (Stephen King gets a paltry 2 titles!)

Of course, it's obviously an older poll, because there's no Harry Potter, no Da Vinci Code, etc on it. But for a poll that wasn't even targeting a sci-fi audience, I still find Heinlein's dominance pretty amazing, even given his known popularity.

The site says the reader poll "opened on July 20, 1998 and closed on October 20, 1998, with 217,520 votes cast." Knowing the dates made Heinlein's prominence make a little more sense to me. In 1998 the Internet was not the mainstream, everyday thoroughfare it is today, and the set of people who both be online and interested in voting in an online poll would likely tend toward a more tech-savvy, science-fiction-reading crowd. My theory is libertarian sentiments (of various stripes, coherent or not) would also be strong in a fair part of that crowd, which could drive a championing of Heinlein who seems to hold some similar sentiments. That would also explain Ayn Rand ruling the top 10.

I'm not disputing that Heinlein would be popular to that crowd for his entertainment value, but an identification with his ideas could be a big driver as well. It'd be pretty interesting to see The Modern Library repeat the poll now, and compare the results.

What do you think?

Released in 2006 in Japan, Studio Ghibli's animated film version of Ursula K Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea had its US premier last Friday (the 13th - dun dun dunnnn!).

Called Tales from Earthsea and distributed in the US by Disney, the film apparently takes some major liberties with the Earthsea plot and mood that Le Guin was not happy with.

I love Ghibili (Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro and Porco Rosso are still some of my favorite animated films), but what I've read about the plot changes makes me a bit nervous about this film. It's also worth noting that it's not directed by Hayao Miyazaki who's helmed most Ghibli films, but instead is the feature film debut of his son Gorō Miyazaki as director, a passing of the baton of sorts.

Despite some misgivings, I'll probably still give it a try.

I've started Infinite Jest twice and put it down about a sixth of the way through both times, but I AM determined to finish it someday. There are many great flashes of brilliance and humor in it (the footnotes on imaginary filmography of the avant-garde-director father are worth the price of admission alone), but the breadth and totally wandering nature of narrative made it hard to stay focused.

Yes, those classics Moby-Dick, Ulysses, and Gravity's Rainbow are on my mammoth books to-read list as well. At least with Ulysses I have a companion volume that annotates all the references Joyce stuffed in there. Maybe if Infinite Jest had a similar companion guide...

Sword & Laser-ish mighty tomes I want to tackle include the The Gormenghast Novels: Titus Groan/Gormenghast/Titus Alone and Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Just finished The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession (pretty interesting), and am starting Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (get em, Abe!).