/lit/ - Literature

>>8695

I personally was very disappointed by Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti. His later stuff is probably more mature and original (my first story from him was Purity, which was very interesting), but his earlier writings are just kind of bland and mundane horror. None of it succeeded in scaring me at all, and the prose really wasn't enough to hold up in a sober mindset.

>>8698

Oh, also The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. It probably isn't even worth the title of mediocre, as I couldn't get past the first few pages due to the horrible writing.

>>8704

Also, the Turner Diaries. The author is a heartless bastard, and it shows. I'm not even talking about the day of the rope as a whole here; the particular events I'm thinking about are the protagonist contemplating how executing innocents as traitors to make a point was alright, and how little of a fuck the author seemed to give about the romance, writing what felt like "I am sad. Very sad. :( " after the protagonists beloved died.

Great military action, if you look past the Mary Sue-ishness of the whole thing - and trust me, this is one of the few works of original fiction I apply this label to -, but on a human level, it's a pile of shit.

>>8695

>Hunger Games

>mediocre

>not outright awful

>>8695

The r/books favorites (for lack of a better name): The Martian and Ready Player One. You could also throw in some other ones that get mentioned a lot, but I think those two are the best examples of the difference between a good book and a bad one. They're both so fucking bland, and a lot of that comes from the fact that they treat world building and nerd service (in the form of gushing about NASA or making terrible references) as a substitute for actual plot and character.

Another example of a weak book (that isn't such an easy target) is Ransom by David Malouf, which retells the story of Priam's embassy to Achilles with some changes. It's a point that sometimes flies under the radar, but a book doesn't just have to be good, but has to have something to make it worth reading as opposed to its competitors. Ransom just horrible fails on that account, because it does absolutely nothing new with Homer's story, and the cost of creating the newer, smaller story is cutting out a lot of the strength of Homer.

>>8713

RPO didn't have worldbuilding. The bad guy runs a generic evil corporation, and the game it's set in is >muh kitchen sink.

>>8714

I suppose world building isn't the best term to apply to those two books in particular, but I think it gets to a more general version of the problem. I'm not sure what the generic term for this syndrome should be called, but "Let me tell you about all 12 dialects of elvish on this continent" and [Insert 80's reference here] and "I'm gonna science the shit out of this" are all basically texture to a work, rather than substance. And they aren't even the good kind of texture that becomes substance, the way that legitimately great writing works.

>>8705

turner diaries is not mediocre. it's bad.

and it's funny that you mention the death of the romantic interest.

i understood he sucked at that when he described the first time they have sex and consequently fall in love like, if i remember correctly "…and then nature took its course".

but what do you expect from a guy that ordered his last wives from hungary?

>>8712

In OP's defense the first book was decent-ish.

Until, that is, I watched Battle Royale, of course, then I saw it for the shameless ripoff it is.

>>8717

I call not "not knowing what you're talking about." In Ready Player One, Cline doesn't mention the significance of WarGames, and he thinks that the appeal of Zork was the puzzle, not the quality of the parser.

Including romance where it doesn't belong is similar.

Halting State did the "science the shit out of this" type of joke well, with "Traceroute''s my bitch," but it worked because the others thought it was stupid and because it was made only once.

>>8712

>>8723

I know all the obvious problems with the first book (one dimensional villains, whiny and unlikable protagonist, forced love triangle, edgy violence), but what are the problems with the others since I haven't read them?

>>8724

I think there's also an issue of not thinking about why something ought to be in a story. Not every writer needs to have a Hemingway-style economy of writing, but there are a number of writers who don't seem to be thinking critically enough about opportunity cost in their writing. To use an example from the list, the second half on the Martian is mostly about how Watney isn't getting enough calories every day. Now, when real people are surviving on 15,000 or 12,000 calories a day, their whole mental state starts to change. They get depressed and grouchy and small minded ebcause their body basically switches into "need to find food" mode and isn't going to waste energy thinking about anything less critical than that. Unfortunately in the actual story, while the reader gets told about how hard it is on Watney, there's really no sense of the change in his mental state, partly because the writing stays on the quippy, nerd attraction tone that it has had for the entire book. Anyway, that may well have been an intentional decision to make the book more accessible to a large audience, but for me it really sealed the deal on the absolute blandness of the story.

>>8734

I hear the later ones are even worse. I know that the second one is just the first again (or at least, the movie is). And I know that my girlfriend and my little sister both said that they hated the third book after really liking the first one.

>>8740

Weir invalidates some of his gushing for the real NASA by presenting an obviously fake situation. Then what to do about folklore characters, or Shakespeare's, or Tolkien's? Are they not made fake by the arbitrariness or weirdness of their worlds?

>>8764

I think that the Shakespeare or Tolkien connection shows how the issue with arbitrariness isn't so much that it exists, but the fact that some writers don't know how to deal with it. Ultimately a fake situation can be a vehicle for real, meaningful experience. To use the Shakespeare example, part of why Macbeth works as a story is because the story isn't really concerned with how the witches work. It's Macbeth's story, and it's about how he deals with the position that he's been put in. To go back to the example of the Martian, I think that had Weir decided to focus on the way that Watney's mental state would deteriorate without enough food, that would have covered up a lot of the weakness of the rest of the story, because it would have given the story something compelling to focus on.

>>8770

Yes, a fake situation can have meaning, if it resembles the world at all. Magic is something completely alien to everyone. A character who encounters it could still have meaningful orcish, angelic, or personal experiences, but these would be nothing like human ones. They would not necessarily be worthless, but they must stand on their own, without help from any similarities to the real world.

>>8714

>>8713

>>8717

There is one small bit of world building in RPO, where the main character is taken into a prison bus and they had cheap plastic gloves that didn't served any purpose but to only give a small and cheap amount of comfort. The rest of the book was kind of trash everywhere else though.

>>8695

anything by micheal stackpole