Martha Wells, Network Effect - novel-length continuation of the Murderbot Diaries series. Not only is there a reasonable amount of murdering, there’s room for some really quite complex relationships. Superb.
I had cleaned off all the blood and fluid with the hygiene unit but was too angry to take a shower. (Showers are nice and I wanted to stay angry.)
Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade - I bounced hard off God’s War but this one worked really well for me. It has things to say about Starship Troopers without being a direct attack on it the way The Forever War was. (Actually it reminds me rather more of Forever Peace, but in a good way.) It’s a book with a message without being a Message Book.
Have you ever heard Haldeman’s story about that? He had just won the Hugo for The Forever War, and someone took him over and introduced him to Heinlein, him shaking in his boots at what Heinlein was going to say. And Heinlein told him what a great book it was . . .
I thought Anathem was a marvelously funny book, with all its allusions to major philosophers and mathematicians from Socrates to Leibniz. The use of portmanteau coinages like the title put me off at first, but some of them were quite clever, actually.
When I finally got around to reading my copy of Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism, I was pausing over and over and saying to myself, “So that’s where Stephenson got that bit!”
Hah, well, Stephenson is one of the authors I dislike for almost the same reason Marx described: he espouses his political and philosophical views by having “smarter” characters “educate” “stupid” characters who put up strawmen for the “smart” characters to destroy.
I’m an astrophysicist. I used to do a lot of work with NASA and ESA (ironically, almost no work with the CSA, despite being Canadian and a Canadian company…), so it was kind of neat to see somebody’s interpretation of the work done by scientists and engineers. But give me Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut” series over anything I’ve read or seen of Weir: she obviously understands the science, but doesn’t have the chip on her shoulder that Weir seems to in which he desperately needs you to know he’s smarter than you. Kowal’s just confidently intelligent. A lot of very good writers are (Scalzi, Brin, Pratchett, Gaiman, etc…).
Maybe it’s just me. Also, my heckles got way up at the mention of Pratchett as “enjoyable but trash”. Man was a super genius. Some of the most insightful, brilliant social commentary ever written. I think he may have been the best writer of the 20th century… tragically taken from us far too soon. If not the best, then definitely top 5. Anyway. I get he’s not for everyone.
I’m the same with Stephenson! I loved most of “Snow Crash”, but the end where it just kinda devolves into philosophical rambling drove me nuts. Ditto for “Diamond Age”, although in that case is was probably a full third of the book instead of just the ending. And Stephenson does tend to be just the teeniest bit sexist in his writing of female characters. There are worse, but he’s pretty bad.
Pity, too. “Snow Crash” is enormously quotable. “I’m sure they’ll listen to Reason.”
Edit: For clarity, and because I messed up a to/too.
If his early books annoyed you, Anathem and Cryptonomicon are worse on both counts.
I do find it interesting though, that I tend to perceive authors whose political leanings broadly align with my own as being more intelligent than authors whose don’t. So, for example, I think Stephenson is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, while Gaiman, Le Guin, Wolfe, Mieville are exactly as smart as they appear to be.
I have noticed the opposite tendency from at least one friend who has a very different view of the world to me.
I wouldn’t consider that at all surprising. It really seems to be, as Nietzsche put it, “human, all too human.”
I’m surprised to see Wolfe on your list, if that is Gene Wolfe. As far as I can ascertain, his views were Catholic, conservative, and semilibertarian, which is not like the other three, I think. (See his essay “The Best Introduction to the Mountains,” as republished by John C. Wright.)
Well, in that case, I guess he just doesn’t force his views onto his characters, which is fine by me. I respect libertarian ideals, just not the common American version (I won’t say more, this isn’t the Thunderdome).
I do want to say that “intelligence” isn’t quite the measure I intended to use. It goes much deeper than that. There’s an author, who I won’t name, whose books I picked up in a job lot of second-hand books, and had never heard of. I read his book, and thought it awful: plot holes a mile wide, trite, unrealistic dialogue, paper-thin characters… just bad on every level. I thought no more of it, and gave away the books. Later, I heard a couple of people I know recommending his books! I was honestly shocked. It turns out he’s quite popular. Anyway, one of those guys later made some scathing remarks about a book I like a lot, citing some of the same criticisms I had regarding that other author. I thought those criticisms weren’t at all valid in this case, but it got me thinking about the lenses through which we view the world.
Let me start by saying that I was hesitant to push @Marx for reasons behind the hatred for The Martian because I’ve always found which books you love, and which you hate to be surprisingly personal. You can say to someone ‘I know you adore Kickpuncher 2, but it’s the worst film ever!’ and they’ll probably still be your friend. However if you say something like ‘I know you love Benny Russell but he’s the worst 50s SF writer of all time’ they may never speak to you again. It reminds me of the O Henry’s story ‘Cosmopolite in a Cafe’. (That reference probably makes me sound much wider read that I actually am).
So with that in mind…
Like @GeeBizzle I appreciate @Marx reasons but they didn’t get to me in the same way. I was actually reminded of Asimov while I was reading the book but I grew up with that style of author so maybe I have a higher tolerance. I can also live with the issues around scientific accuracy; the biggest coming right at the front of the book with the Martian dust storm that causes havoc. Finally I found Mark Watney to be an engaging character and worth spending time with. I think that there are enough hints that he’s actually a fairly unreliable narrators when it comes to his situation and physical state.
With regard to Neal Stephenson’s work I liked Zodiac and loved Snow Crash and then The Diamond Age. However when I got to Cryptonomicon I couldn’t finish it. I think I reached about page 600 and then realised that I had no idea what the plot was and gave up. I seem to remember a particularly inaccurate description of Magic: The Gathering which didn’t help. I haven’t tried any of his books since.
With regard to Ready Player One, I enjoyed the film but I’ve never read the book so I can’t comment.
That isn't quite true...
I bought the book cheap from Amazon and had just started it when I ended up in the emergency observation department at the local Hospital when the Doctors thought I was having a heart attack (I wasn’t). I found myself on a bed with a Cannula in one arm, a heart monitor attached to the other hand and the wrong glasses to be able to read at the only distance I could hold a book at. As an experience I wouldn’t recommend it and that rubbed off on the book which got left in the bag when I got home.
Finally this interview with Neil Gaiman gives the only excuse I can think of that would allow you to describe Terry Pratchett work as trash.
Even then I’m not sure I agree but I’m not going to disagree with Neil Gaiman . Oh and when you finished watching the clip go back and watch the whole documentary if you haven’t seen it before and you’re a fan. Its very sad but also very good.
It seems to me that there are a lot of possible dimensions here. For a start, there’s the writer’s intelligence; there’s whether I share their worldview; there’s whether I enjoy reading them; and then there’s Quality, aesthetic merit, which I consider different from all three of the preceding. I think any two of them are distinct from me, if not necessarily orthogonal. For example, I consider Gene Wolfe intelligent and an aesthetically good writer; I disagree with both his Catholicism and his conservatism, while I’m a harder core libertarian than I think he is; but I don’t enjoy his writing and have no impulse to read any of his books for pleasure. I feel somewhat similarly about Tolkien (I’m not sure he was as intelligent as Gene Wolfe), but I do enjoy his major works and reread them regularly. I don’t find Eric Flight more than moderately intelligent, I don’t think the Quality of his books is high, and I disagree with him politically in a lot of ways, but I can still read his Ring of Fire novels with pleasure, and there are some I’ve read several times. I could multiply examples but I think you get the idea.
Some people get intense about films. I remember when I was running an RPG session at a friend’s house, and I happened to mention casually that I liked Inception. He got really angry, denounced the very idea that it could have any merit as a film, and stamped out to the kitchen, and it was five or ten minutes before he cooled down enough for us to resume the game. It was kind of scary.
My point is simply that what I regard as my assessment of the intelligence of the author, and my assessments of quality and aesthetic merit are not necessarily distinct from how much our worldviews overlap or each other. I like to think they are, and for most of my life I was sure they were, but I’m willing to explore the idea that I am mostly mistaken in that assumption.
Characters that appear shallow and poorly written to me are not necessarily so to someone else, and vice-versa. My assessment of an author’s intelligence is impacted when they present arguments that I have long since discarded as irredeemably flawed, while someone persuaded by or open to those same arguments is not likely to see things the same way. And so on and so forth.
Still, it’s nice to have a ready example of Gene Wolfe as someone who I would probably disagree with on just about everything, but who nevertheless wrote the Five Heads of Cerberus, which I think is great on every level. So, it can be done, I’m just not sure whether this is an exception or generally true.
Thank you for your respectful caution: let me state three things for the record:
I am a writer, but at my core I am also a scientist. Good scientists are built on a foundation of being wrong all the f&#king time. Constantly. You take a position, you defend it until better evidence comes along, and then you discard your old position because you were wrong. As a result, I am wrong all the time and it doesn’t bother me. This isn’t the same thing as saying I don’t think I’m right… I often am… but it is to say that being wrong holds no venom. I had bad information, or I made a mistake, or I didn’t have complete information, or whatever. Learn, move on.
As a result, I will argue passionately and enthusiastically about just about anything. I’m not a big fan of “Devil’s Advocate” arguments because there’s no point in discussing something you don’t actually agree with, and I generally refuse to discuss anything with fundamentalists (in this context meaning anyone who is convinced they are correct absolutely and without any possibility of error or analysis), but with those two exceptions aside I will happily discuss, argue, debate, and converse about just about any topic at the drop of a hat.
Nobody has the right to an opinion. Everybody has the right to a defensible position. You do not have the “right” to believe the world is flat. That’s idiotic and wrong. You do have the right to believe that Communism is a viable system of government despite overwhelming real-world evidence to the contrary because you can make a defensible argument that maybe it’s just always been done wrong or whatever.
Also, Kickpuncher 2 (The Punch-Kickening) is a work of genius and everyone who says otherwise is a troglodyte.
All joking aside, I respect that people will like work that I don’t like, and I like some really awful media. There’s nothing wrong with that! There is something wrong with believing that a specific piece of media you enjoy is intrinsically “good” because you enjoy it (ie: I loved the “Photon: The Ultimate Game on Planet Earth” series with a passion, but gods they were awful books). Just because you love something doesn’t make it good: just because you hate something doesn’t make it bad.
But I’m a weirdo, and a lot of people would disagree with me on that point. But yeah, feel free to question everything and anything I state because I really don’t mind.
Watney was funny. Weir was funny as Watney. Also, for a long time my favourite archetype of character was the “A-hole that knows everything but is a jerk” (Sherlock, House, Patrick Jane, Bones, Jim Longworth, etc…), but for some reason Weir just really bugged me. Maybe he’s too Asimov-esque? I used to love Asimov, but I feel out of that pretty hard, so maybe Weir caught fragmentation from that? Anyway.
I have a signed copy of Pratchett’s “The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld”, which I haven’t read because it’s a signed copy. An enormously thoughtful gift, and I will treasure it forever even if this is the second time I’ve ever taken the protective bubble wrap (no, I’m not joking) off of it since I received it a week after Pratchett’s passing from an enormously thoughtful friend.
I’ve heard of lady astronauts and will give it a check out. Thanks.
I was definitely being overly glib and general with reference to Pratchett. Apologies, I didn’t say it to cause a rise/offend. I have enjoyed his books immensely and been frustrated to the point of giving up on his books also.
I recently read John Sandford’s Rules of Prey, first of a long and highly successful series of police procedurals occupying a space somewhere between mystery and thriller (in that one at least, the audience knows who the serial killer is and the tension is in how the police will catch him) and found it so thoroughly full of problems that I don’t plan to read anything else by him; in particular there was a leering enthusiasm for the killer’s activities that left a very bad taste (“look, this is a bad person doing these bad things, so that’s OK we’re a moral example, now look a little closer”). I’d be mildly worried if someone said this was one of their favourite books.
And I wrote a long ranty review about Connie Willis’ Hugo- and Nebula-winning Blackout/All Clear, which I found almost entirely without merit. If you love it, I don’t think we’re going to agree on much as far as tastes in reading go.
But even I weren’t naturally fairly easy going, I have boardgames as another example. There are many boardgames which are widely liked by lots of people but which leave me cold; in several cases I know and like people who enthuse about them. So with books as with games: “I do/don’t enjoy this because X” is not a usefully arguable statement, so I don’t. Does X overcome the Y pointing in the opposite direction? For me it does, for you it doesn’t. Laying out the Xs and Ys is part of what a good reviewer does, so that a reader can apply their own weights to those things: I often disagree with SU&SD, but when I watch or read one of their reviews I end up with a pretty solid idea of whether or not this is something that’ll interest me.
I have a somewhat guilty feeling that I derailed the conversation.
In a bid to right the discourse. I’m still Plowing slowly through Last Argument of Kings. I feel like having spent so much time with these characters i’m reluctant to finish their story.
Do other people do this? Put off finishing a book just to Artificially prolong the story.
Yes. I may well never finish Jo Walton’s Among Others, because the next bit is clearly going to be tragic, and I enjoy the memory of the protagonist’s state of mind so much.
There are also books I will probably never read, because that they’re the only thing by that author I have not read, and while I have an unread book by them, they aren’t quite as dead as they would be once I’d read it.
I don’t think of “presenting arguments” as something that writers of fiction are doing. An argument may turn up in a novel, just as a description of a landscape or a building may do so; but in either case, if it’s not subordinated to the author’s literary purpose as a novelist, it’s a defect. And even if it is, it’s not what I’m reading the novel for.
What I read for arguments is, for example, philosophy. But even in philosophy, I can offer the example of David Hume as someone who wrote really well, and who was highly intelligent, but whose philosophy I think to be in error nearly all the way through. Or John Stuart Mill, not such a good writer, but a brilliant man, and one whose political conclusions I often agree with, but also one whose views on ethics I find perverse at best.
As for characterization, that gets us to the basic question of whether there is such a thing as aesthetic Quality independent of personal likes and dislikes. My own belief is that there is, and that whether I like or dislike a novel doesn’t exhaust the question of whether it’s a good novel, and indeed may not even be particularly relevant to it.
In my case, for example, I like Ayn Rand’s writing and can reread her with pleasure; and I agree with more of her basic views than I do with almost anyone else’s (which is not to say either that I think her arguments are always sound or that I think all of her specific positions are right). On the other hand, I disagree strongly with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Roman Catholic worldview. But if I were choosing a single “desert island” book, it would be The Lord of the Rings, not one of Rand’s; it speaks to me on more levels and in more depth.
. Oh and when you finished watching the clip go back and watch the whole documentary if you haven’t seen it before and you’re a fan. Its very sad but also very good.