books?

[Flack]

When I was in my writing program I was working on a novel. It was a little out there. It was about this guy who was a gun for hire and basically he got killed and due to a glitch he got into heaven and ended up there with this magic rifle. This same glitch was letting demons and monsters into heaven and nobody in heaven had any weapons but this guy so he became really important. I had six or seven chapters done and my professor read it and said, "you gotta ditch the gun." I was like, the gun is the whole point! And yeah, the gun was gonna break toward the end and he was going to have to come up with a different solution, but she said no, the gun has to break in chapter two or three. It was the same problem you're talking about. My prof said a lot of novels started going that way after people who grew up on video games started writing books.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Wait, why did the prof want the gun ditched?

[Flack]

Because it made the protagonist too powerful. Even more so than in movies, protagonists in books have to have constant conflict. It's all that "no, but" and "yes, and" stuff. It's all about hitting your protagonist with conflict and challenges around every corner. That's not to say they can't succeed at anything (that's where "yes, but" comes in) but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

[pinback]

but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has left the chat.

[Tdarcos]

That's not to say they can't succeed at anything (that's where "yes, but" comes in) but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

He never read Spacehounds of IPC by E. E. "Doc" Smith. The protagonist can do everything, including advanced mathematics, spaceship piloting, and when stranded on a planet, starting from virgin wilderness and a damaged ship along with a lady friend, single-handedly creates a hydro generator for power, mines the iron ore and other elements to make steel, builds the spaceship replacement parts, flies it into space, travels to a comet, mines the comet for certain ores, brings it back to his smelter to turn it into that element...

[AArdvark]

I turned a Doc Smith story in The Polar Treasure. It was a difficult read

[AArdvark]

"The Science of Discworld"

At first I thought it was going to be like the physics of Star Trek or how stuff works in the Predator universe but it turns out to be actual real physics with funny stuff added in. Terry Pratchett teamed up with a couple cosmologists and they wrote a three volume set about our world. Really good stuff


(Edit: four books, not three)

[AArdvark]

Back when I was a kid one of my friends had the Navarone playset from Marx. It was the cooolest thing I ever saw.


There were so many vehicles and green army guys you could have waged war for days!

At the time I didn't know it was from a movie and before that a book by Alistar MacLean. I think I must have seen the movie at some point but I don't remember anything about it.

Recently I decided that I need to read more and stop browsing YouTube videos every spare minute, like I used to do before teh Internet ruined my attention span. I downloaded a couple three gigs of books as text files, more than I could ever read for the rest of my life. Most of these I put on my Nook (gasp!) and a slew of them went on a flash drive for reading during lunch breaks. Don't worry, I'll get back to Lunkenstein and Miss Marble eventually.
One of the folders contains the works of Alistair Maclean so I was pleasantly surprised to see The Guns Of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra finally available. I always wanted to read Ice Station Zebra because I heard it was Howard Hughes' favorite movie. All I can remember about that movie is Ernie Borgnine looking down a hatch into a bright light.

Anyway, I'm reading both those books now and if they work for me I'll read the rest of the folder.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

When COVID hit, I just couldn't do fiction books for some reason.

One of my favorite authors wrote this book.



22-Murders-Madison-May

I started it the other day. I may just block off a few hours and finish it. He is at the top of his craft with this one, just the way he writes sentences is so far beyond anything else I have read in years, it's shocking to me.

[Jizaboz]

All I see if an A icon I can’t hit. What is the book?!

[Tdarcos]

Because it made the protagonist too powerful. Even more so than in movies, protagonists in books have to have constant conflict. It's all that "no, but" and "yes, and" stuff. It's all about hitting your protagonist with conflict and challenges around every corner.

"I got a story ain't got no moral
With the bad guy winning every once in a while."
- Billy Preston, Will it Go 'Round in Circles?

[AArdvark]

Ready Player One

This is the third time I read it. Actually, I listened to it as an audiobook, partly so I wouldn't skip over long paragraphs of description, which I have a bad habit of doing. Also I can listen while I work on boring production jobs at work.

When you strip away all the 80s nostalgia the book becomes pretty depressing. There's a line about not voting in the real world because it's only rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, which was timely. Everyone is just using the Oasis sim as an escape, giving up as opposed to working to make reality better. Not a great theme

[AArdvark]

Ice Station Zebra

I'm thinking the movie is actually better than the book. There's a bunch of polar scientists trapped way up in the far north and an American nuclear sub has to go rescue them. There's also a murderer among the polar scientists because the Russians dropped a macguffin nearby. So not only is it a rescue adventure it's also a murder mystery that Agatha Christie would be proud of. There's a lot of jolly back slapping dialog because that's how Maclain thinks Americans sound and act all the time. Maybe they did during the Cold War, I dunno. I do know it takes a lot more than some glue in a torpedo tube to disable a whole nuclear sub, but that's what happened. It's a good fast read but with too many cliffhangers and implausible situations. You can spot the murderer right off even though he's trying to hide in plain sight. I give it....

3 out of 5 arctic blasts

[AArdvark]

The Guns of Navarone

It's about a commando raid on a Greek island in order to disable a gun fortress that the Nazis have built. the allies are planning a naval assault against the Nazi occupation of Greece and these big guns on Navarone are the Germans' main defense. They tried scrubbing them out, they tried soaking them out but got nowhere. So they got five or six guys to sneak in at night, scale the sheer cliffs and skulk around, avoiding the German patrols and guards for a while until they can plant the explosives and get away before the allied fleet shows up. Also there's a spy in their midst, someone keeps tipping off the Nazis so the commandos have to keep running and hiding all over the island. It gets kind of repetitious after a while. Hole up someplace, sleep for a few hours, find out the Germans are coming, get away. Hole up someplace, sleep for a few hours, find out the Germans are coming, ect, ect. Theres' too much brave English patriotism. One of the guys has a seriously broken leg but he keeps going with stiff upper lip and brave words, even when the gas gangrene is killing him he still gives it all for bloody old England and the cause. At one point they do get captured but because the Nazi sergeant isn't all that bad a guy they can trick him and escape. IF you like WW2 action with cardboard archetypes and no graphic killing this is your book. You already know how it ends.

THE
2 OUT OF 5
CLIMBING SPIKES
AARDVARK