/lit/ - Literature

>>23409541
Bruh, you're not actually supposed to read Vonnegut, you're supposed to take a picture of the book framed with a wine glass and a bottle of your anti-depressants and post it on social media to look cultured (throwing the book in the trash afterwards obviously). Jokes aside, I was looking for Cold War era fiction books and this one seems interesting, Theodore Sturgeon praised it as well so I'm pretty sure it's good stuff.

>>23350930
oh yeah it's around 10 bucks. Probably worth the pickup. Was also thinking of also picking up the either a book by Alfred Bester (The Stars my Destination/Demolished Man) or Heinlein (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress). I'm rotating my reading between scifi-fantasy-classics. (The list right now is Elric Saga Vol. 1 to see if I like Elric, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Crime & Punishment).

I made a decent haul at a used library bookstore today that let me fill a big bag for 5 bucks. Picked up a fuckton of shitty old paperbacks of scifi/fantasy writers from the '40s-70s that I recognized like du camp and saberhagen. The big prizes were a copy of The Once and Future King, A Theodore Sturgeon's "Sturgeon is Alive and Well", and Lovecraft's Dream Cycle (which I've read long ago on some etext.)

Is Frank Herbert's The White Plague any good? I'm intrigued by Herbert but my list has a while before I get around to Dune. I picked it up for pennies and it's a nice '70s era hardcover with a dust jacket.

Current, my reading list rotation cycle is

Fantasy-
Elric Saga Vol 1
Robert E Howard's works
Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar books
Chronicles of Amber COrwin Cycle

Sci Fi List-
PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Dangerous Visions+ sequel
Probably flowers for algernon or Jack Vance's Dying Earth (Which I hear is more of a fantasy?)

I'll probably knock off this batch and continue to thrift and sample other books. I'll keep an eye out for Asimov's two famous trilogies and Heinlein's famous works. Not sure where to start with Clarke, but I hear Rendevouz with Rama/2001 Space Odyssey are the places to start.

Considering other major sci-fi/fantasy writers of the mid-late 20th century that are on my list, I've also got a copy of I Am Legend and am looking at where to start with Ursula Le Guin. Left Hand of Darkness or Earthsea Vol 1? I go through books at a decent pace.

>>23266298

>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Delany
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Zelazny
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Sturgeon
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Disch
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=Guin
>>/lit/?task=search&search_text=LeGuin

>>23266268
>>23266262
It's pretty grim. Can't remember the last time I saw an earnest discussion here of authors like Le Guin, Delany, Zelazny, Sturgeon, Disch, etc. It's all lowest common denominator garbage (and tired circlejerking over Lem, Peake, Wolfe, Vance, Strugatskys). No aspiration to read anything bigger. Truly sad.

>>23254083
>The battle was an overwhelming reality not only for people, but also for birds flying through the smoke-filled air and for the fish in the Volga. Huge catfish, ancient pike, and giant sturgeon all kept close to the riverbed, trying to escape the deafening bombs, shells and torpedoes and the violent eruptions of the water itself. Ants, beetles, wasps, grasshoppers and spiders in the surrounding steppe were no less aware of the battle. Field mice, hares and ground squirrels slowly became used to the smell of burning, to the sky’s new colour, to the earth’s constant trembling. Even several metres below ground, lumps of clay kept falling from the walls and ceilings of their burrows.

>>23247798
I've read plenty of genre slop. What do you want to talk about? Harry Harrison? Theodore Sturgeon? One of those Doctor Who novels I read that was actually kind of okay?

Like, all of that stuff is fine, but Wolfe is better.

The more I struggle Sturgeon's Law by reading the 90%, the more it seems that I should stick to the 10% consensus

>>23163546
This is one of those rare news stories where each and every single person involved was a truly, terrible person.
The bill was being used by Sturgeon to provoke WM and she could use her political strategy of saying they would bat down devolved issues and challenge it in court. Then the story got picked up about the rapist and having spent public funds on the issue, it couldn't die, if she backed down it would appear weak to her separatist supporters and we now know the parties finances were being misrepresented as support for independence died down. I'd have to go back and watch the speeches given by her and Ross at the time but blimey were they bad.
Each and every politician involved and the charities using it as a political footbal, awful and it just fed and fed into Rowling's friendbase of TERFs.

In the end all Sturgeons "well meaning" bill did was weaken support for her own nationalist cause as she offended her working class votership and everyone else got up in arms over one thing or the other.

>>23121152
Seriously this shit looks great. Most cartoons these days look like ass and this one actually tries to have a real art style that looks nice.
Can't say the same for the writing, but Sturgeon's Law.

>>23099869
>all of the bad things from Ashkenazis came from Western Europeans originally
Such as?
>Most Western literature is garbage anyways.
Same applies to everything (Sturgeon's law)

>>23074937
that twitter post brings to mind Sturgeon's Law

One hundred monsters to identify. (More or less one hundred. Sometimes they come in pairs.) Non-human (with a couple of borderline cases). Menacing/antagonistic (or at least considered so by the characters). A few curveballs (‘THE REAL MONSTER, BOYS AND GIRLS, WAS OUR OWN FEAR AND HATRED OF THE UNKNOWN’), but mostly they're good solid monsters who need killing. Obviously we're spending more time than usual in the sleazier districts of the canon, but it's not my fault that e.g. Jane Austen considered monsters beneath her.

Translations marked [*]. Where the original author(s) are unknown, the translator is credited.

Hints on request.


Authors:

Douglas Adams, Richard Adams, A. Afanasyev, Dante Alighieri, Poul Anderson

Clive Barker, J. M. Barrie, Charles Beaumont, Peter Benchley, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Jorge Luis Borges, Ray Bradbury, Joseph Brennan, Flann O'Brien, Fredric Brown, Mikhail Bulgakov, John Bunyan, Robert Burns, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Richard Burton

James Branch Cabell, John W. Campbell, Lewis Carroll, Miguel Cervantes, Michael Crichton

Roald Dahl, Philip K. Dick, Arthur Conan Doyle

Harlan Ellison, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, William Faulkner, Ian Fleming, Neil Gaiman, John Gardener, William Golding, Arthur Gordon, Ursula Le Guin

Thomas Harris, Seamus Heaney, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Herbert, Hesiod, Russell Hoban, William Hope Hodgson, E. T. A. Hoffman, James Hogg, Homer, Horace, Clemence Houseman, Robert E. Howard, Ted Hughes

Washington Irving, Isodore of Seville, Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Tove Jansson, John the Divine, Robert Jordan

Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, R. A. Lafferty, Laurie Lee, Stanislaw Lem, C. S. Lewis, Barry B. Longyear, H. P. Lovecraft

Richard Matheson, Cormac McCarthy, Herman Melville, Walter Miller, A. A. Milne, John Milton

Ovid

Edgar Allan Poe, Beatrix Potter, Terry Pratchett

Rudolf Erich Raspe, Anne Rice, Patrick Rothfuss, J. K. Rowling

Saki, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Dan Simmons, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Theodore Sturgeon, Snorri Sturluson, Lord Tennyson, J. R. R. Tolkien

Jack Vance, Jules Verne, A. E. Van Vogt

H. G. Wells, E. B. White, Tad Williams, Gene Wolfe, John Wyndham

Roger Zelazny

>>22937928
If you don't hate men and women equally and notice Sturgeon's (have you read him? he's so goooooood) law applies to humanity as a whole then you haven't browsed 4channel (RIP) enough

>>22922573
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

>>22815860
>yes, herbert asimov k dick sturgeon vonnegut etc
lol

>>22815649
yes, herbert asimov k dick sturgeon vonnegut etc are all held in somewhat high regard. what does fantasy have? tolkien and nobody else

>>22730733
>Why is 99% of modern sci-fi trash?
As Mr. Sturgeon once said, "99% of EVERYTHING" is trash."
Also he literally said that in response to someone bitching how 99% of scifi was garbage back in the 50's. I will now explain why this is the case:
>Low barriers to entry in the medium itself
plus
>Little in the way of curation or (serious) obstacles to publishing
equals
>99% of output is dogshit.

You likely aren't seeing it since, for every generation of art, the public consciousness remembers the dozen or so quality, original, influential works and forgets about the legions of derivative garbage. It is absolutely not helped by what >>22730804 mentioned, and how you don't even need to jump through the hoops of the traditional publishing system anymore to get schlock out and into the world.

>>22715060
2. Also Theodore Sturgeon

/lit/ doesn't understand Sturgeon's law.

>>22612661
The answer to that I feel is that there are distinct eras of Sci-Fi that have interacted with the general attrition of time in different ways. If you go all the way back before what I'd call the beginning of the mid-century SF then pretty much everyone you can name from that time period I'd argue is worth reading if only for style. The science of Cordwainer Smith or Lovecraft or Jules Verne may not hold up but there's a verve and adventure to them that held fast. That's not to say that all the old influential stuff from that era maintained its value. I think many of the Weird Tales and the pulps a la Flash Gordon are dreck and best left forgotten. In a service of convenience for the modern reader we have already had those authors purged from common knowledge for us. You still have some lesser knowns who one would now call "your favorite authors favorite author" like Henry Kuttner or Manly Wade Wellman, and those are worth reading. Time has given us the twin gifts of the river Lethe and the convictions of men nearer our time to shave off the fat.

Moving past that you go to the technologists, the writers from the tech boom of the second world war that hurtled science fiction from novelty to in some ways a birth right. Technology and science are here and transforming us, and so our cultural output changes with it. Asimov was one of these slide ruler men, Arthur C. Clarke and Theodore Sturgeon were too. The science is now much more likely to become outdated and incredibly so. Pulp sci-fi may feel kitschy, but shamefully I find Asimov's Three Laws more quaint and outdated than Captain Blastall and his laser phaser. You have some derring-do still: Alfred Bester hits his peak in the mid century. There's still a lot of influential Science Fiction from this era but it does somehow seem the most dated of all from a technical standpoint.

You then have the realm of the artiste and the counter revolution. The moon landing came and went and we were still at war down below. The Triple Revolution was chugging along and Science Fiction in America became something dedicated to talking about the triad of Civil Rights, Arms, and Cybernetics that were driving the zeitgeist. This might seem parochial, but I define that era by Dangerous Visions if for no other reason than it was the first collection from that era that made a case for what science fiction had become of the time. Harlan Ellison came into play here and by God he remains a hell of a read.

(cont.)

/lit/ is officially an anti-introduction board, and quite right too. Nineteen out of every twenty consist of literally-who academics trying to chew our food for us while telling us how good it's going to taste. Fortunately, this quiz is concerned with the other five percent. One hundred introductions, forewords, prefaces or other preliminary texts, written either by the author in question or some other person we might conceivably want to listen to.

Fiction and non-fiction represented. Translated works denoted [*]. A few curveballs (non-introductions labelled as introductions, introductions labelled as something else, introductions which appear half-way through the work, etc).

Hints on request.


The authors (the ones doing the introducing, rather than the ones being introduced):

King Alfred, Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden

J. G. Ballard, Hilaire Belloc, John Berryman, J. L. Borges, Ray Bradbury, Charlotte Bronte, Art Buchwald, Charles Bukowski, Anthony Burgess, Richard Burton

Truman Capote, Thomas Carlyle, Raymond Carver, William Caxton, Raymond Chandler, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Michael Crichton, e. e. cummings

James Dickey

T. S. Eliot, James Ellroy

William Faulkner, Shelby Foote

John Gardner, William H. Gass, Théophile Gautier, William Gibson, Robert Graves, Graham Greene

Thomas Hardy, Thomas Harris, Seamus Heaney, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Thomas Hobbes, Ted Hughes, Victor Hugo, Aldous Huxley

Henry James, Tove Jansson, Randall Jarrell, Jerome K. Jerome, Samuel Johnson

Jack Kerouac, Stephen King

Pierre Simon de Laplace, D. H. Lawrence, Elmore Leonard, C. S. Lewis, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Lowell

Herman Melville, H. L. Mencken, Yehudi Menuhin, John Milton, Michel de Montaigne, Yukio Mishima

Vladimir Nabokov, Isaac Newton, Friedrich Nietzsche

Camille Paglia, Walter Pater, Walker Percy, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett, Thomas Pynchon

Francois Rabelais, Bertrand Russell

Dorothy L. Sayers, Phyllis Schlafly, Walter Scott, Will Self, G. B. Shaw, C. P. Snow, Edmund Spenser, John Steinbeck, Laurence Sterne, Theodore Sturgeon, Jonathan Swift, A. C. Swinburne, J. M. Synge

W. M. Thackeray, Dylan Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Mark Twain

John Updike

Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut

Orson Welles, Eudora Welty, E. B. White, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, William Carlos Williams, P. G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth

>>22601024
Eh, the laws of historical dialectic do not supersede the Sturgeon’s Law.

>>22544612
“If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest animal in creation.” —Goldsmith, Nat. Hist.

“If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great whales.” —Goldsmith to Johnson.

“In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the whale, in order to avoid being seen by us.” —Cook’s Voyages.

“The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood, and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to terrify and prevent their too near approach.” —Uno Von Troil’s Letters on Banks’s and Solander’s Voyage to Iceland in 1772.

“The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.” —Thomas Jefferson’s Whale Memorial to the French minister in 1778.

“And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?” —Edmund Burke’s reference in Parliament to the Nantucket Whale-Fishery.

“Spain—a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.” —Edmund Burke. (somewhere.)

“A tenth branch of the king’s ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon. And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the property of the king.” —Blackstone.

no idea why this glorified ya is considered a classic
it's nothing compared to actual literature, yet this bloated pot boiler is held up as valuable as moby dick and ulysses are
sturgeon's law definitely applies to the canon and shit like this and balzac are certainly not worth the time