/lit/ - Literature

>>10286893
Zahn's writing is on the Asimov/Sanderson tier plain but he can spin out a darn good yarn and tend to have Doyle elements. It definitely helps that Thrawn and Pellaeon (also Car'das and Eli) are likeable people.

I don't generally read SW novels but Thrawn is the kind of archetype that I like in a character - strategic, honourable and calculating.

There's a kind of morality that Zahn introduces to the SW universe that doesn't exist in the movies or in whatever the fuck Rebels is supposed to be.

I tried Luceno's stuff and he is basically a third rate worldbuilder who writes characters autistically so I've decided not to read any SW stories that aren't written Zahn, unless I'm really out of books.

>>9643673
>Is this from Slaughterhouse 5
Yes. It's so fucking good.

>>9594143
>“Angela was twenty-two then. She had been the real head of the family since she was sixteen, since Mother died, since I was born. She used to talk about how she had three children—me, Frank, and Father. She wasn’t exaggerating, either. I can remember cold mornings when Frank, Father, and I would be all in a line in the front hall, and Angela would be bundling us up, treating us exactly the same. Only I was going to kindergarten; Frank was going to junior high; and Father was going to work on the atom bomb. I remember one morning like that when the oil burner had quit, the pipes were frozen, and the car wouldn’t start. We all sat there in the car while Angela kept pushing the starter until the battery was dead. And then Father spoke up. You know what he said? He said, ‘I wonder about turtles.’ ‘What do you wonder about turtles?’ Angela asked him. ‘When they pull in their heads,’ he said, ‘do their spines buckle or contract?’
>“Angela was one of the unsung heroines of the atom bomb, incidentally, and I don’t think the story has ever been told. Maybe you can use it. After the turtle incident, Father got so interested in turtles that he stopped working on the atom bomb. Some people from the Manhattan Project finally came out to the house to ask Angela what to do. She told them to take away Father’s turtles. So one night they went into his laboratory and stole the turtles and the aquarium. Father never said a word about the disappearance of the turtles. He just came to work the next day and looked for things to play with and think about, and everything there was to play with and think about had something to do with the bomb.
>(...)
>“Will that do? Is that any help to your book? Of course, you’ve really tied me down, asking me to stick to the day of the bomb. There are lots of other good anecdotes about the bomb and Father, from other days. For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamogordo? After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?’
The best books are the ones that are self aware.

I have to say in Star Wars every time I see ysalamiri mentioned somehow I automatically think of pic related. RIP Thrawn he didn't fucking deserve to die like that, and neither did poor Pellaeon ;_;. Zahn doesn't especially include too many plot twists (unlike Asimov, master of plot twists) and his characters tend to follow more predictable train tracks but they are thoroughly characters that I can empathise with. Upon reflection it strongly feels to me that a good portion of Pierce Brown’s ‘Obsidian Class’ – a race bred for war – was completely plagiarised from Zahn’s Noghri race, just as the extremely predictable Hunger Games setup was quite clearly ripped from Hunger Games for mass demographic appeal.

Onwards to Prelude and the Foundation.
RIP Mule-sama you will be missed ;_: It features a qt Seldon who loves to smile at everyone. So far he seems to be far less confident than his appearances in the original trilogy.

Part of what I enjoy about Asimov's works so much is his focus on dialogue. Dialogue reveals the plot, dialogue is the plot. Gone is the often hackneyed exposition of 9 million things happening in jargon that the reader is supposed to fill in themselves and somehow this guy manages to consistently pull out plot twists out of plot twists, chapter after chapter, book after book. He's clearly cut down on the extraneous information and only focussed on the parts that are important.

I had a brief recently read of one of Ted Chiang's stories. Unfortunately, he tends to write in very short paragraph/two paragraph long snippets, almost as if he cannot picture what is happening between these events, which suggests that he is an amateur writer. He heavily relies on the pattern of ‘two paragraphs’, ‘insert fact paraphrased from wikipedia’, ‘two paragraphs’ and so on and so forth. His characters are not especially interesting and cannot be connected well with and he heavily tells not shows the intelligence of the characters. For example, one of his characters is a mathematician and this character never once shows that they are capable of doing any math – the entire story consists of the character referring to the paper they are about to publish and how they somehow found that 1=2 without any information about how they actually came across this result other than they somehow did. It does not seem to me that Ted Chiang knows anything about mathematics other than what he is regurgitating from Wikipedia.