/lit/ - Literature

No

No.

>Dune.jpg

I'll paraphrase a quote from a mountain man's diary that made me laugh.
"Squaw women are very useful,they'll chop your wood,cook your meals even if they are copper colored and not as elegant as a white man's women."
Copper colored women made me lose my shit.
I don't know why.

>>3576168
Shit,sorry guys I had copied and pasted a reply for another thread cause I was having connection issues. And now I can't delete my post for whatever reason.
Anyway,
Ender's game was a pretty good book until the end when I felt it got really sappy and 2deep4me. I think scifi can be good,why couldn't it be? I haven't read all that much of it but I really enjoyed I,Robot. And I know I'm not alone there.

A vast majority of it is shit most of the rest is rehashing of said shit but a few are worth your time.
Just like anything else

No, but if you're starting with Enders Game I can see how you can draw that conclusion. My advice, stay away from Orson Scott Card, his stuff is pure shit..

Try 1984, Dune, The Forever War and one of my personal favorites Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles... As far as I'm concerned it's a fucking masterpiece. Ringworld is also good.

>tfw you can't read books without magic, swords and castles

Orson Card is a sappy writer but I still enjoy him.

/lit/ won't tell you that all sci-fi is bad.
A better question is if all fantasy is bad.

>>3577713
branch out and find something different? you find everything else boring?

It isn't, pic unrelated

>>3577723
Can't i just like the setting, especially if its dark and gritty. Anything with magic in it though I'd be interested

>>3577719
All fantasy is bad only insofar as fantasy is Tolkien or RE Howard type crap, otherwise there is plenty of great fantasy

Ender's game is horrible. I wonder how many times that idiot author used "fart" as an insult. I imagine it was near forty or fifty

>>3577734
Tolkien and RE Howard aren't bad though.

>>3577740
They aren't nearly as bad as their spawn, anyways

I'm reading The Reality Dysfunction right now. Very classic sci fi. I like it.

Anyone who sets out to write "sci-fi" produces shit.

Stories that are about XYZ, which just happen to be set in the future -- that's where the good sci-fi lies.

>>3577842
>>3577842

You don't think Frank Herbert set out to write Sci-Fi?

>>3577709
How is his work shit? I read Ender's Game recently and really liked the writing style, but I will concur that the story was a bit bland and drawn out in some parts

don't try and stack up sci fi against literature. it's the same medium with two different agendas, different styles, mechanics, etc.

Buy it. Read it. Love it.

>>3577851
Yes I do.

>>3577811
>TRD
>sci-fi
It's Techno-Fantasy

Philip K Dick's later works, though they still maintain a connection to his earlier, cheesier work, veer pretty heavily into the surreal, paranoid, and metaphysical. In that way, Dick has an almost Kafkaesque sensibility to his work at times.

I personally really enjoy Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Also, /lit/'s tendency to dismiss genre fiction entirely is a childish flaw in their reading habits. They close themselves off to a whole world of analogy and parable that can only be done in genre.

Of course, a lot of genre fiction is also crap, so take my words with a grain of salt.

Baited but: No, though you could prevaricate just how important sci-fi is in Asmiov's books. To be clear though I love them

>>3578238

>calling dune shit

>>3578360

>that image

Telling.

Do you even Isaac Asimov?

>>3577842
Sci-fi is necessary for human advancement. You can't shape the future if you can't imagine it.

>>3578364

I've never literally 'laughed out loud' while using the internet until now. Holy shit. Thank you.

>>3578365
Could you explain why it's funny?

>ITT: Dune, Foundation, Shadow of the Torturer
William Gibson is amazing. Whether you like sci-fi or not, you have to appreciate his prose, And he's gotten better over the years.
>>3577732
>Dark and Gritty
Look into Cormac McCarthy. Start with No Country For Old Men. It's got action, violence, blood, and death.

>>3578364
Usually it seems more about avoid it though

>>3577719
>yfw all fiction ever is technically fantasy even your precious classics and literature

>>3578368
I suppose there is some futures we want to avoid.

>>3578193

A lot of people dislike Card because they disagree with his viewpoints on whatever and that hate bleeds into his work. I will admit that nothing I've read from Card has ever rivaled Ender's Game or Speaker For The Dead though.

>>3578373
Are there many books about ones we don't?

>>3578371

I don't even know where to begin. Seriously.

>>3578371
Not that guy, but . . .
He's saying that new ideas just pop out of thin air.
He's wrong and he's a fucking a moron.
For example, Heinlein (later Kubrick) popularized the idea of a space station and thirty years later we had one. Snow Crash inspired Second Life. William Gibson created most Internet jargon and shaped the way we view the Internet.
The problem is that he's probably thinking about absurd, techno-fantasy like Star Trek or Star Wars. Current Sci-Fi, which leans on the harder side, is anything by absurd. Take Daniel Suarez, who wrote Daemon. Everything in it is existing/completely possible technology, except he showed what that technology would be like in two decades.
Some Sci-Fi writers, as cheesy as it sounds, deserve to be called Futurologists.

Someone told me the mars trilogy was good

At first I read it, I was thought, this is neat

Then everyone turned into cultists and moralfags and trying to terraform was bad because the rocks would be harmed and mars was full of arabs

I like the rolling stones though, guy never thought we would have radio like we do today, also the writer might have invented the water bed

>>3578390

>he's saying that new ideas just pop out of thin air

Hardly.

>Heinlein or Kubrick in charge of inventing the idea of a 'space station'

>Second Life
>internet jargon

PROGRESS!

>Some Sci-Fi writers, as cheesy as it sounds, deserve to be called Futurologists.

Which, and what have they contributed to the sciences?

Get a larger sample size? There is tons of awesome scifi that is not repetitive shit. More short stories than novels, but...

Octavia Butler
Ray Bradbury
Karel Capek
Philip K. Dick
James Triptree Jr.
Harlan Ellison
J.G. Ballard
Daniel Keyes

that's just from a collection of short stories I have nearby, but there are many more. Sure a lot of it is shit, but there are some gems out there...

>>3578480
Are there any sci-fi stories of length that could be considered serious literature? Like an epic that isn't stupid?

>>3578460
I have one thing to say about the Mars Trilogy: ZERO-GRAVITY SEX.

>>3576154
i just finished this minutes ago and was wondering if you would be so kind as to supply a picture of yourself. i have an idea of what people who enjoyed this book look like and want to confirm my suspicions. make sure to get all the swords/maces you own in the picture please.

>>3578487

HAHAHAHA

>>3578484
The first book of the Hyperion series is close. It's based on the Canterbury Tales, and has a lot of references to Keats.
I can think of epics that were entertaining, but I don't know about serious literature... maybe Dune but I've only read the first so I can't really say.

>>3578466
>Hardly
Then what were you saying?
>Heinlein or Kubrick in charge of inventing the idea of a 'space station'
Are you illiterate? I said "popularized". I know goddamn well the idea had been around for decades prior, but they took that idea and molded it into something visible that inspired others.
>Which, and what have they contributed to the sciences?
They contributed an image of something, and the real scientific minds made it happen.

>>3578495

>what were you saying

That of all the models we have for visualizing the future, science fiction is easily the most laughable and least viable.

>Are you illiterate

You implied that the popularization of said idea in global culture had anything to do with it being realized by actual scientists doing actual work.

>an image of something

What?

>made it happen

When has science-fiction been directly involved in scientific progress?

>>3577715
Glad I'm not the only one who thought so.
>>3577713
Jeez anon. I find it hard to believe you aren't interested in anything else. Step up yo game.
>Archbishop ctiancat
Captcha says you should read about cats or bishops.

This wasn't bad.

90% of EVERYTHING is bad.

No one enjoys Hg2tg?
great read all around but 4rd is where is starts to go down hill

science fiction is a mixed bag, like everything.

you got "the road", "the postman" "lucifers hammer" "canticle for liebowitz" "riddley walker" all telling essentially similar stories based on the same premise. It all depends on the author..

>>3578487
>i have an idea of what people who enjoyed this book look like
You're wrong. It's an adult book for boring literary types who are 35 and older. Give it a rest, you're at least 20 years away from the target demographic.

>>3578487
I agree with the other poster; you're thinking of a different kind of story. Wolfe is the book the professor keeps in his desk drawer, to read when he's taking a break. You're thinking of Robert Jordan.

>>3578480
>Harlan Ellison
I only really liked "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." I think the fact that Ellison is such a fucking gargantuan asshole has left a sour taste in my mouth when it comes to his work.

>Is all Sci-Fi bad?
Nope, 'Infinite Jest' by DFW is pretty okay.

>>3578466

Arthur Clark - use of geostationary satellites as ideal telecommunications relays.

>>3580839
I've always felt like HE is just another of those things that you think is really cool when you're a teen and then grow out of. I read an interview with HE a few years ago in which he basically admits that his career as a writer ended in the early '80s and he's been supporting himself for last thirty years by doing a sort of performance art character called "Harlan Ellison." A viewing of his interview/biopic "Dreams With Sharp Teeth" seemed to bear this out.

>>3579394
I have three of those: The Road, The Postman, and A Canticle for Leibowitz.

I should really space them out, eh?

Well everything is shit so yes.

Art must relate to the human experience some how and sci-fi forces too much extraneous bullshit to be art.

I doubt that op knows what science fiction is
>stanislav lem
>strugatzki
>example etc etc

>>3578487
>implying Wolfe isn't the heir apparent to Borges

Seriously, did you miss like all of the subtext?

>>3581376
>Art must relate to the human experience some how and sci-fi forces too much extraneous bullshit to be art.
Would something like "The left hand of darkness" be called science fiction? It doesn't really care about the "science" part.

Anyhow, it's one of my favorite books.

>>3583503

>thinking he could ever be on the same level

I like Wolfe but you're fanboying a bit too hard..

>>3576143
Best Sci-Fi poses for futurology nowadays. Try reading some singularitarian preachings of Robo Jesus Future as if it were newest Tor gig. It's pretty entertaining.

>>3576143
Are all threads asking if science fiction is good bad made by illiterate retards?

There is one of these threads up all the time, how about thinking of something actually worthwhile to discuss.

For those interested here is a pretty massive archive of sci-fi short stories and some novel excerpts.

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/index.htm

I particularly recommend "Understand" by Ted Chiang

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm