Bobby’s Comments (group member since Mar 15, 2013)

Bobby’s comments from the Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy group.

Right?

Sometimes, you're in your head and you're speaking in short hand. If the other person is in sync, that's okay.

Amelia wrote: "Thanks for the prompting, Bobby. I've been moving all of my old reviews from Librarything. I'm only on M at this point and I didn't review everything, but it has been an interesting process to look..."

Sheesh. My post above is practically incomprehensible. I was going to edit it but I wouldn't know where to begin. Sorry about that. I understand what I was getting at but I can't see how anybody else would.

Amelia wrote: "Apparently I blocked out a lot, as I thought the book had three sections rather than 5. And, my review wasn't as revealing as I had hoped. It seems that I simply hated the character of MVS, for the..."

I just read your review. For the first time I'm pretty sure.

Yeah, I recently re-read it because my nephew was reading it and some of that was like wow, wow, wow. I'm like, "Are you freaking kidding me?" And I'm not a guy to excuse stuff because "that was the time period". Sure, Heinlein was comfortable putting that (and the rest of the drivel when Jill is stripping) in a book because a lot of people were thinking the same way but holy smokes. Take responsibility for your own choices or not. I will say, I didn't even notice it when I was a kid so there's an extent to where, that's just what was in the ether. Every step along the way it's been women who have taught me to see better.

Or like, there's all this free love -- as long as it's men with several women. You don't see too much of women with several men and man on man is still a definite and unqualified no no. Stranger in a Strange Land pushed out a lot of boundaries -- but all in one direction. It was for Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler -- among others I'm sure, to push the other boundaries out.

Amelia wrote: "You already know I did. Cheeky!

Still makes me shudder...all those pages, and in the end: Utter Hate!"

I already know you did. But what don't you like about it? Or did we already have that discussion somewhere and I'm forgetting(senility)?

Amelia wrote: "I loathed this book. I was actually thrilled with the ending, and if you knew me at all you would know that I don't deal well when my characters are [spoilers removed]. I was hoping for that partic..."

Btw, why did you loathe Stranger in a Strange Land? (I have my suspicions but still I wonder).

Jim wrote: "Amelia wrote: I was just curious. I didn't read any of this stuff until my 20's and just because I decided to...."

My father was a huge fantasy, SF, & S&S fan. It was the covers on his Lancer edit..."

Ha! That's fantastic, Jim! I was a teen in the 80's but they L. Sprage de Camp edited and re-released Conan with those same covers and you're right, they were great. I actually ended up buying a bunch of books of just his art.

Sarah wrote: "One book may be like an old boyfriend. You meet him years later and wonder what you ever saw in the guy.

Another may be like a favorite teacher. You meet her years later and realize that she is ev..."

What she said.

Amelia wrote: "So, what I'm saying is I've got a LONG way to go. :)"

I just read A Canticle for Leibowitz on G33z's recommendation and it was magnificent. I was a little surprised because a lot of books, if you missed the moment, you missed the moment. Like, Stranger in a Strange Land, if you don't read it as a teen-ager, you have to have read it at least thirty years ago. Or both. (Ouch!)

Amelia wrote: "I didn't read any of this stuff in HS. Were you assigned it, or just read it for fun?"

Man, science fiction in particular totally seemed to hit me right in my hormones! Stranger in a Strange Land, I Will Fear No Evil and Friday were the first three books I read by Heinlein and all of them, on some level, were about what I cared about the most = sex. Throw in Dune, a book about a teen-age boy coming into his power (as the Messiah no less) and I was pretty well spoken for. The vast majority of the science fiction I've read was read in this time period, and the fact that (quiet as kept) so much of it is great writing led me on to my love of literature in general.

And you know what got me started on science fiction? Marvel Comics. At some point, in middle school, all of a sudden Conan the Barbarian (the comic book) was interesting -- whereas I hadn't been interested in him earlier. And then I was interested in reading the actual stories. And in a bunch of those books, you'd find a card/coupon in there for the Science Fiction Book Club. ("What if God was a computer?") Eventually, I broke down, like Sarah, with babysitting and newspaper delivery money. Hm. Wish I could remember what that first book I ordered was. Though, if I remember correctly, you got like, four books for a dollar just for signing up. Then you got sent the main selection every month unless you expressly told them not to send it.

Aaahhh...those were the days.

Phil wrote: "Bobby wrote: "Spooky1947 wrote: "all that stuff I read when I was 12 that don't hold up now....makes ya wish you could be 12 forever...."

Oof. I try not to think that."

I have a long dark past wi..."

I never read Piers Anthony! Don't know why, I just didn't. Any one you'd recommend?

Michele wrote: "I tried to read Ringworld about a year ago for a different book club and just couldn't - stopped after a couple of chapters. None of the characters appealed to me - Teela was like a caricature, off..."

Apparently, you read the same book I did.

Phil wrote: "I loved a lot of the books on this thread eventually, the the first was a picture book of Theseus and the Minotaur I found in the school library. I'll never forget the simple line drawings and spar..."

Greek myths were big for me in the beginning as well. For me, it was Icarus and Daedulus and the Twelve Labors of Hercules that really captured my imagination.

Hmmm...I wonder if a lot of collections of Greek myths have those simple line drawings. I seem to have read a few myself.

Brendan wrote: "I think Rendezvous with Rama is the best novel of the BDO genre, Clarke was a great writer and I've never read a novel that conveyed a sense of overwhelming scale so viscerally. Fountains is, in my..."

Blindsight

Michael wrote: "I gave nit reread and Niven recently, but I think the world building, sense of wonder was a big part of his appeal when u did read him. The ring world, the smoke ring, the mote system. I was just f..."

MICHAEL, NOOOOO!!! Don't do it! Read something else! Just go with your memory of how great they were!

Phil wrote: "Bobby wrote: "Phil wrote: "I've only read a few Niven books, and I get the feeling they would have been more impressive on publication than they are today. Leiber's The Wanderer falls..."

I'm definitely not Mr. Hard Science Guy. I'm more of a Magic Spell Guy. Generally, (and I think this is true of most art/audience interaction) the writer needs to catch me in his spell emotionally before my brain kicks into logic mode. So, say, James Bond is generally completely ridiculous if you think about it for half a second but the panache with which those movies are pulled off captured me and are more powerful for me than the part of me that says "This is stupidity."

Like Ray Bradbury doesn't actually care a lick about science. Though he's dazzled by it. But he just loves it because it sparks his imagination. I never think in a Bradbury story, "Well, that's just dumb." He's ALL story. And character. (Also, he writes great prose. Niven is as dry as they come, which Phil alluded to earlier.)

I don't even think BDO is bad. There's just no story here. The Ringworld is just out there. Why does Louis Wu have to go there? No reason. Why does Teela Brown's luck take her all the way to freaking Ringworld? To find true love? Really? I'd go on (again) but I've already gone on and the answers, apparently, are in the other (lesser) books. Weird.

Spooky1947 wrote: "all that stuff I read when I was 12 that don't hold up now....makes ya wish you could be 12 forever...."

Oof. I try not to think that.

Brendan wrote: "I've re-read Dune many times and always find it just as good, but Herbert is one of my enduring favourites. I also think Rendezvous with Rama is a legitimately excellent book, and that is not nosta..."

It was funny with Dune. I would say I read that book when I was between fourteen and sixteen. It's like the absolute perfect book for that age. I mean, you're the same age as Paul. When I read it again, the glossary (yes, the glossary) was like dropping into a warm bath. I was immediately hooked. But after a while, it felt like the hook was nostalgia. And I remembered all the reasons why I loved it, and they were still there. It just, well, I don't know what it is. I finished it and put it away and that was that. But like, it will stay among my all time favorites. Actually, of the ones I've gone back to, only The Martian Chronicles holds up for me, emotionally, the same way.

Brendan wrote: "The good: answers to all your questions are in other books in the series.

The bad: the other books in the series are much worse than this one.

If I was reading this book now for the first time, 2..."

Brother, you said a mouthful. I reread a bunch of my favorites from around that age period -- or in that era(my era, 12-18) and man, even Dune wasn't as interesting and I would've said that was not possible.

And this was my exact problem. I actually thought that about the other books (how many were there???). Heck, the next book is The Ringworld Engineers. You figure some answers have to be there. But -- and I realized that I must have thought this when I read the first one -- I just don't have the emotional momentum to move on to the next ones.

I'm scared to go back and read Rendezvous with Rama because I'm afraid the same experience will happen.

Oh well, there's always new stuff. (Sorry Geez!)

Phil wrote: "I've only read a few Niven books, and I get the feeling they would have been more impressive on publication than they are today. Leiber's The Wanderer falls into that category, too.

..."

You know, it's one of those weird things where I feel like, generally, sci-fi readers are smart people. Heck, readers are generally smart people. And generally, when a work of art, any work of art, achieves a certain level of acclaim, I feel that, in general, it's deserved. That's just how I feel.

So, the concept is neat. But what action there is, from the initial travelling to the Ringworld in the first place, to everything else, feels totally contrived and, well, pointless. Why is Speaker-to-Animals a cat person? Why is Louis Wu two hundred years old? Why, why, why would someone who had the capability to build an incredibly massive and functioning and artificial planet, choose this method? (Cost effective it seems not.) And we never even meet the actual Ringworld engineers! (At least, in this book.) Probably because Niven actually had no idea why.

I know a writer who actually told me once, "A concept is a concept. It's not a story."

The more I think about this book, the less I like it.

Amelia wrote: "You had me on the movie thread, Miles, but here we differ. It's a classic, I'll grant you. The writing is obviously well done. But, the story was just okay for me. Not bad, but I'd have a hard time..."

The writing doesn't hold up unless you put yourself in the time period when it was written, if you're not living in a post-Frankenstein world. And, I mean, that's no reader's job. Have your own experience. But Mary Shelley changed the face of literature! At nineteen! Now it's hard to comprehend but before this book came along, no one else had written a story about a brilliant scientist making a new man out of the spare parts of dead bodies. No one else had written a story about a man using science to put himself in God's place and create life -- and then that goes terribly wrong. And Shelley could have just made the monster, well, a monster. But instead she made it complex, conflicted, tragic hero/villain. And she wasn't old enough to drink! Incredible.

I recommend reading or buying the version that has the incomparable Bernie Wrightson illustrating it. Wrightson perfectly captures the mood and aesthetic of Shelley's epic fable. This one: