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ArisKatsaris comments on June 2013 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: ArisKatsaris 01 June 2013 11:37PM

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Comment author: ArisKatsaris 01 June 2013 11:38:01PM 0 points [-]

Fiction Books Thread

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 June 2013 07:50:53PM 2 points [-]

The Eyre Affair, the first Thursday Next book, is pretty good so far.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Eyre-Affair-ebook/dp/B000OCXHC2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370202635&sr=8-1&keywords=eyre+affair

Comment author: [deleted] 05 June 2013 05:36:24PM 0 points [-]

That's my current read! Hey! I'm reading the same EY is!

(Yeah, that actually did make me feel "cool" and "hip" and "with it"...:P )

Comment author: shminux 05 June 2013 06:07:49PM *  2 points [-]

One of the reviewers is quite discouraged by the overuse of the Deus Ex Machina/Diabolus Ex Machina tropes:

We start out in an alternate reality which is, well, alternate, but seems pretty reasonable. Then, all of a sudden, surprise! People can travel through time! Okay, alternate reality with time travel. Then, all of a sudden, surprise! You can go into a book! Well, that wasn't much of a surprise, since I'd read the back cover, so we'll let it go. Then, all of a sudden, surprise! There are werewolves and vampires in this world! Oooo... kay. Then, all of a sudden, surprise! The characters go through a black hole! At that point I just rolled my eyes and stopped caring-- if the whole thing was completely random, then there was basically no point to the book. No matter what mess the author got the protagonist into, he could just come up with a "oh yeah, I didn't tell you this before but they can teleport from place to place by wiggling their nose!" type of thing to save the day.

Comment author: philh 05 June 2013 07:03:34PM 0 points [-]

I don't recommend that book, which makes me feel suitably contrarian.

(For roughly the same reasons as shminux's quote. I felt like the universe was interesting on the surface, but didn't have any depth.)

Comment author: arundelo 05 June 2013 05:53:35PM 0 points [-]

"As" "the" "kids" "say".

Comment author: [deleted] 07 June 2013 04:07:49AM *  1 point [-]

"Relevant".

Comment author: arundelo 07 June 2013 05:53:38AM 1 point [-]

I (like) that site.

Comment author: David_Gerard 03 June 2013 10:58:29AM *  -1 points [-]

Calumet "K" by Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster, from 1904. A very Analog/Astounding piece of engineer-fiction about an unstoppable can-do kind of fellow. Despite being completely contemporary, if you'd read this in Analog or Astounding in the '50s-'80s you wouldn't have batted an eyelid. I'm quite surprised it hasn't been taken up by the business literature field.

It's unfortunately most famous as a major influence on -yn R-nd, who appears only to have obtained from it the idea of the hero-engineer, which she then added as flavour to her own weirdness. (Compare the actual influence of You Can't Win by Jack Black on William S. Burroughs - the Black book is very readable and was a best-seller at the time.) Don't let that taint it for you, it's a cracking good read.

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