I'm about half way through The Stand. The scope is unlike anything I could have predicted.
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I'm about half way through The Stand. The scope is unlike anything I could have predicted.
Did you finish this?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dukefrukem
Started reading Dune again this past week.
It might be the best book.
That's always been on my To Read list...
Not only is Golem 100 secretly Alfred Bester's best book, it just might be the best cyberpunk book ever written. This thing is absolutely wild. The audacity of it is off the charts. It is so bold, so unique, so inventive, and so absolutely gonzo in style and plot. To think that most Bester fans actively dislike it, and go out of their way to dismiss it from Bester's oeuvre is unimaginably. Just goes to show not to blindly trust the consensus.
Quote:
Originally Posted by D_Davis
Update to this. Unfortunately, Bester can't keep the momentum of the first 100 pages going through to the end. It's good. It's not the terrible disaster that everyone says it is, but it's not nearly as fantastic as I thought it was going to be, based on its opening parts.
Bummer.
"The lead guitar took a long solo, defining youth in the language of electricity."
From John Shirley's City Come A-Walkin'.
I just started re-reading this this morning, and it is still the single best, most punk-rock work of cyberpunk I know of. Shirley actually understood punk rock, urban youth culture, and the movements of the era. He lived it. He made music. He wrote about it. While all of the other cyberpunk authors were writing about the technology, focusing on the cyber-side of things, Shirley was writing about the music, the attitude, and the angst, the punk-side of things.
I wish the genre had followed Shirley's 1980 lead, rather than Gibson's later entry.
City Come A-Walkin' is, for me, the undisputed champion of cyberpunk. And like the sub-cultures that dwell within its pages, it is a book that is largely forgotten in favor of safer things.
I'm listening to Meat Beat Manifesto's album Answers Come in Dreams, while reading it, and it is absolute perfection.
"The band thundered on like a phalanx of armored tanks grinding across a battlefield. The melodies were precise and involved, but amplified and toned with an edge that, to the uninitiated, made them sound like a wall of noise. But like an armored vehicle which at first glance seems a bullish mass of metallic aggression and nothing more, the music, closely examined, was made up of many carefully-honed and securely interlocked parts. A great machine of sound."
Have started reading the first in a trilogy of books leant to me by a coworker - “Survival” by Julie E. Czerneda. The trilogy is called “Species Imperative”.
Enjoying it so far. Interesting set up for sure.
Contact.
Solid. Wonky explanations of heady scientific/mathematical concepts kept me more interested than the characters, as I suspect they did Sagan.
Saw Contact in theaters. I still love it. I put it on the same quality level as Arrival.
Just finished Dune. The way the power works gets too lost up in its own New Age mysticism just a tad. The Harkonnens are also a fun bunch but sometimes the Baron is so cackling in his villainy it is almost distracting from the nuanced moods of other characters elsewhere, and him being so stereotypical is a thought I had, before I actually got to the "young boys" snippets, which feel pretty unnecessary. But man, what a feat of world-building. The planet Arrakis may be one of the most tangible, real, and impressive sci-fi creations of all-time, and how we slowly come to learn all about it, the sandworms, the Fremen, and all these traditions/beliefs/religions through the Atreides clan is just masterful. Complicates its own chosen one narrative nicely by having its hero trying mightily hard to resist the path and its fall-out too. 4/5
I want meg to read posts #771 and 772 on page 31 of this thread and then drink a JägermeisterQuote:
Originally Posted by D_Davis
I...don't get it??