/lit/ - Literature

Anything by J. G. Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, M. John Harrison and China Miéville that counts as science fiction. Dan Simmons and Iain M. Banks are also alright, kind of.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein. The narrator's slang and the way the fictional culture influence his voice is really jarring at first. I was shocked by how quickly it became natural to read and process, and how well it helped establish the tone of the story.

>>5849343
Is anything on that Cyberpunk list besides Neuromancer actually good?

>>5849351
In terms of what? Prose?

>>5849354
Not just prose, but if it doesn't have good prose I probably wouldn't want to bother with it tbh.

>>5849351
Snow Crash is the only other really good one. I'd say Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but I don't consider it cyberpunk, I feel like it's in that genre because of Blade Runner.

>>5849387
Snow Crash has one good infodump and some alright worldbuilding. That's about it.

>Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
>Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.

>really good

>>5849343
most of these have shit prose.

>>5849343
The Diamond Age is not cyberpunk.

Bud is specifically introduced and killed to show that cyberpunk is over.

>>5849343
war of the worlds
forever war
cryptonomicon
diamond age

Man, i just took a quick glance at the list and i already see some fucking godawful titles. I guess its safe to assume that list must be truly terrible, but what to expect /lit/ is full of plebs,
I still cant fucking forgive whoever recommended me that edgy turd Shadow of the torturer, my personal candidate for the worst book i read since that Eragon sequel,

>>5849408
Snow Crash isn't about astounding character development. But the writing style is great, memorable, cinematic in a way. It's tongue-in-cheek as well.

The Diamond Age is the superior book.

>>584920
but Neuromancer has horrendous writing

the story and atmosphere is the only thing going for it

>>5849969
>Not a single suggestion
>Trying to be elitist about pew pew layz0rz genre fiction

And anon was confirmed to be a faggot on that day

>>5849408
I like that quote, I now remember why I liked snow crash even though it combines some of the worst most edgy fucking things s-f authors thought cyberpunk should have.

Also the ending was ass, Stephenson never learned how to end a book.

>>5849990
>>5849969
The books you mentioned aren't awful, and genre fiction isn't barred from being serious.

This is a world where technology has attained the status religion once held, science fiction is the equivalent of religious fiction in the past. Unless you'd dismiss the Divine Comedy as genre fiction trash, you can just shut up.

>it goes in a special section in the book store so it's bad

the void captain's tale

>>5850004
>Still not a single reccomendation
>AND I BET YOU EVEN *reference to epic poem you haven't read*

lmao why haven't you killed yourself yet

>>5849989
>the story
A guy is so cool and so fucking badass that he drowns in pussy and adventure while haxing the web with his penis.

Wearing sunglasses over sunglasses, ta night, in a building still cracks me up, someone actually thought that sounds cool.

Atmosphere is the only thing I can give it.

>>5849998
Snow Crash is not some psychological story about a French pedophile. But the writing has some serious style, and that's enough sometimes.

>>5850011
If you watch the X-Files episodes Gibson wrote (i.e., Invisigoth! A female genius hacker who wears all goth makeup and lives in a shipping container, because government), you'll realize that what you described used to be "cool". It's just that most of Gibson's writing aged badly.

>>5849209
Obligatory Dune rec

Obligatory Book of the New Sun rec

>>5850022
Gibson wrote for x-files ?
Man, that explains a lot.

>>5850009
I just told you that I'd recommend those books you clearly dislike. Especially The Diamond Age, a serious mixture of interesting ideas and style.

It still has the most interesting singularist/transcendentalist idea I've yet scene in the form of the Dramatis Personae. People in a large network of information constituted of their individual dream-like sequences.

And fuck you, I've totally read the Divine Comedy, my favorite part is when he met that dead Italian politician.

SF as a "genre" is rarely about the quality of prose, more about the ideas contained in the story and worldbuilding.

For example, PKD's writing is far from "flowing", same goes for Gibson. There are many writers with beautiful prose who people usually don't put into SF, but who use SF elements, at the moment David Mitchell comes to mind.

To me, a huge exemption is Zelazny - Lord Of Light sometimes flows like an old religious text but is still an SF story. I also believe that A Canticle For Leibowitz was well-written, but it has been a while so I may be wrong.

>>5850040
He wrote two episodes, both hilarious.

You may remember the later episode in which Mulder and Scully have to play a Virtual Reality shooter (they both wore Alien-like weapons and uniforms) in order to stop a murdering AI. It made no sense.

>>5850044
It also has an orgy of zombies with glowing penises as its main plot point, and an incest loved to cure viruses.

Interesting is one way to describe the book, you need a bag of weed to enjoy is another.

>>5850044
Are you really so retarded you somehow think I'm the guy who I quoted to make fun of for whining with no recommendations? Wow. Amazing how many people here believe they are well read yet remain totally unable to follow a simple exchange on this terrible *country* *hobby* *style of website*

>>5850049
Ha, I do remember that.
They were horrible, Gibson must have been taking the piss.

Also it was kind off weird since x-files were supposed to take place in modern times and here you get those futuristic games out of nowhere.

>>5849209

I'm a fan of Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, etc. He's entertaining.

Arthur C. Clarke is cool. So is John Varley.

>>5849527
Not really, Bud just represents a particular narrow view of cyberpunk which had more to do with 80s action movies (which had already been established when Neuromancer was written and thus can't really be called cyberpunk) than anything Gibson ever wrote.
The Diamond Age is about a ordinary girl growing up in a cyberpunk world. Similar characters and themes can be found in Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Cyberpunk is about hackers, not cyborg assassins. Anybody can be a hacker.

>>5850055
>I quoted two people
>I assume you were the other one
>Guess I'm a mongoloid idiot, now

Damn, 4chan, you hostile

>>5850011
>Atmosphere is the only thing I can give it.
That's a bingo

Currently reading Neuromancer, and it gets so bogged down in technological/digital descriptions I lose track of what's going on

>>5850157
>too stupid too look at the nickname
>surprised he gets called an idiot

>>5850157
Well you retard I continued to mock you for not suggesting anything before you revealed your mistake so yes, you are an asian idiot, now. I'd like to add how adorable it is that you are the same sort of pretentious know-nothing who believes using a word like "mongoloid" on 4chan makes you look like anything other than a laughable, tryhard faggot.

>>5850311
>using a word like "mongoloid" on 4chan makes you look like anything other than a laughable, tryhard faggot

No, it makes you look like a fan of DEVO. Or Millionaire.

>>5850232
I'm reading it too, three fourths in, and what I'm having problem with is how trite it all is. Must've been revolutionary when the book came out, but all of this has been done in better and more creative ways countless of times since.

>>5850046

My niggah.

I would also add that Gibson was a visionary. This whole cyberspace thing didn't exist until he made it. If his work has aged it's because the world has finally built itself to emulate the madness he imagined, but not perfectly.

If we're talking old SF that won a hugo, we should also mention Stand on Zanzibar, or potentially The Road.

>>5850023
>Dune
>good prose
How?

>>5850011
you're a giant fagmo
>>5850232
you too

"if i hate everything and am overly critical of all works posted people will think i have exemplary taste"

-anon

M John Harrison's Light is pretty great.
Zelazny's Lord of LIght is fantastic.

Not a fan of China Mieville but some people seem to like Perdido Street Station

>>5850399
>you
>above the age of 18
How?

nice dubs though

>>5849343
>Slan

Why is this even on here? Slan was pretty awful. The characters were the flattest I've seen outside of fan fiction.

I get WHY Slan is a classic - the ideas it introduced were genuinely novel at a time - but now that many of its ideas have become standard sci-fi tropes, without that novelty to prop it up, the book falls flatter than graphene.

>>5852563
>New Ideas stop being good when other people copy them.

>>5852556
I recently read dune myself, what a fucking disappointment.
Truly you must be at lest 50 with the best nostalgia glasses around to call it good.

Its a painfully mediocre title.
And im not a big fan of such obvious mary sue characters.

>>5852687
Oh, the idea is still good. But Slan rested entirely on the novelty and shock of that idea; neither the prose, nor the characters, nor the plot are actually very good. If it had not been for the originality of its concept, it would never have been remembered.

And now that the shock and novelty is gone, there's nothing left.

>>5850466
Perdido Street Station's prose is ... odd. I don't know if it's good or bad.

On the one hand, it created a definite air of strangeness and a bizarre, not-quite-alien world.

On the other hand, it also deftly created a feel of the author's smug fucking face hovering constantly just out of punching distance. Still, I got over that after the first few chapters.

The prose is definitely not for everybody.

>>5849343
Of the ones I've read from here, the only authors with what I'd call "good prose" are Le Guin, Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, and McCarthy.

Lot's of authors--Vinge, Gibson, Dick, Herbert, even Asimov and Wells and Bradbury--have great ideas but sloppy or stupid prose.

I'm not setting the bar super high either, I like SF but even the "greats" are often not very good prose artists.

>>5850023
>"Aaaaaaaaah..."
>good prose

>>5852731
>On the other hand, it also deftly created a feel of the author's smug fucking face hovering constantly just out of punching distance.
It's not Miéville's fault he's everything you aspire to be but never won't.

>>5849336
Same here.

>>5852801
Populist sentiment in stories often feels written from the ivory tower, so to speak, especially in sci-fi, and the writing and narration in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress really effectively avoids that, providing a grass roots perspective that doesn't feel patronizing either, which is a pretty big accomplishment when you consider how pretentious and ivory tower Heinlein actually is as a person.

Professor de la Paz is clearly the surrogate for Heinlein's more academic thoughts on the matter, but he is kept secondary from the narration and style, thankfully.

>>5852771
Read Sturgeon at all? or much of the New Wave / relatively immediate post-New Wave guys?

Those are the people I find to be concerned with artistic goals, and hence those with some of the better styles. In particular people like Disch or Delaney.

>>5849209
Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos

>>5850232
>and it gets so bogged down in technological/digital descriptions I lose track of what's going on

isn't that the point?

>>5849209
But gibson's prose is overcooked shit

>>5852885
I haven't read Sturgeon or Delaney, but I've been meaning to for a while! Dhalgren seems like the kind of thing I would really like so I would try that one. What would you recommend by Sturgeon or Disch?

Alfred Bester.

Not the later books though, except The Computer Connection.

>>5849209

Hyperion
Canticle for Leiobowitz
Book of the New Sun
Some of Harlan Ellison's stories (he's really hit or miss)
I may get crucified for this, but Metro 2033 is actually written well for "what it is"

Okay cool, I thought only my writings were hard to actually wrap my head around. Turns out it's everything in general, like my reading comprehension is actually getting worse the more I read. That's not good. Help? Someone?

>>5849209
I think most of PKD's works have pretty good prose.
I just finished "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said". Great book, enjoyable prose.

>>5849351
Snow Crash.

>M-muh prose

>>5853847
>Snow Crash
Yes, if you're a ten year old weeaboo and identify as a "geek"

>>5854334
Oh come on, Snow Crash is great. It's goofy as hell, but that's why it's fun

>>5854348
he's too srs to derive any fun from books

>>5849209
Maybe Bradbury? The Illustrated Man?

Don't read Something Wicked This Way Comes.

>>5853258
For Sturgeon I think much of his best work is in his short fiction, so it's hard to give specific recommendations.

For Disch, Camp Concentration and 334.

>>5854334
Snow Crash fucking owns, even if it's not much good from a literary point of view

>>5852692
Thank you
I totally agree