What Have I Been Reading? (2021 batch #1)
Feb. 2nd, 2021 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe Martian by Andy Weir - Near-future hard sci-fi written by a geek for geeks. It’s really a delight, if you like watching someone methodically work through absurd science solutions to life-threatening problems. Also credit for a very rare, well-used smash cut in prose form. (The Aquaman reference, specifically.)
How to Fracture a Fairy Tale by Jane Yolen – A short story collection, and some of them are better than others (and some of them fit better into the theme than others). I found it front-loaded with the best stories, honestly, and slowed down as my interest waned. Still, there are interesting ideas and none of the stories were particularly bad. A warning that the Holocaust figures into several of them and a pogrom in another.
The Fartherall Companion by Matt Vancil - Apparently in fantasy writing, “world-builders disease” is a thing where you get so caught up in the history, geography and magic/science of your world that you forget to actually add a plot. In the circles I run in, this is typically solved by bolting on some rules and calling the whole thing a core rulebook for an rpg system. As this was by the author of the Gamers movies and related media, that was what I was expecting…but he apparently forgot to bolt on the rules system. Instead, we have hundreds of pages of world-building lore (that, to be fair, you could tack some D&D rules onto and it’d work mostly fine) that I have to wonder if every game Matt Vancil ever ran figures into. But the other thing that’s weird, because Fartherall is supposed to be the realm that the fantasy portions of The Gamers and all of JourneyQuest take place in, is that the book makes very little effort to emphasize those known stories in the history. (The end of the 4th Age is blanked out to avoid spoiling JourneyQuest, but it doesn’t really reference that story. Buried in the 5th Age are the events of the second and then first Gamers movies. The Shadow apparently breached the dimensions and let a Lovecraftian dragon into Fartherall, but vanished in the process. The characters don’t even appear in the lists of notable figures. Countermay, world of the card game from the third movie, also periodically appears in the early ages as the other-dimensional ancestral home of the elves.) If you want a giant fantasy history book to base games in, there’s a ton of stuff here, but I was disappointed by how little ties into the preexisting media.
Axiom's End: A Novel by Lindsay Ellis - An exploration of first contact with aliens, which is extremely time-bound to 2007 and both shockingly prescient (a demagogue wins the public trust with conspiracy theories) and not (it’s made clear that the sitting POTUS—Bush, at the time—lied to the public, and he opts to resign). Ellis clearly has a much more complicated relationship with government secrecy than she does with alien-human romantic relations. I thought it was interesting, but that it also somewhat failed at the attempt to make the aliens as alien as intended.
How to Fracture a Fairy Tale by Jane Yolen – A short story collection, and some of them are better than others (and some of them fit better into the theme than others). I found it front-loaded with the best stories, honestly, and slowed down as my interest waned. Still, there are interesting ideas and none of the stories were particularly bad. A warning that the Holocaust figures into several of them and a pogrom in another.
The Fartherall Companion by Matt Vancil - Apparently in fantasy writing, “world-builders disease” is a thing where you get so caught up in the history, geography and magic/science of your world that you forget to actually add a plot. In the circles I run in, this is typically solved by bolting on some rules and calling the whole thing a core rulebook for an rpg system. As this was by the author of the Gamers movies and related media, that was what I was expecting…but he apparently forgot to bolt on the rules system. Instead, we have hundreds of pages of world-building lore (that, to be fair, you could tack some D&D rules onto and it’d work mostly fine) that I have to wonder if every game Matt Vancil ever ran figures into. But the other thing that’s weird, because Fartherall is supposed to be the realm that the fantasy portions of The Gamers and all of JourneyQuest take place in, is that the book makes very little effort to emphasize those known stories in the history. (The end of the 4th Age is blanked out to avoid spoiling JourneyQuest, but it doesn’t really reference that story. Buried in the 5th Age are the events of the second and then first Gamers movies. The Shadow apparently breached the dimensions and let a Lovecraftian dragon into Fartherall, but vanished in the process. The characters don’t even appear in the lists of notable figures. Countermay, world of the card game from the third movie, also periodically appears in the early ages as the other-dimensional ancestral home of the elves.) If you want a giant fantasy history book to base games in, there’s a ton of stuff here, but I was disappointed by how little ties into the preexisting media.
Axiom's End: A Novel by Lindsay Ellis - An exploration of first contact with aliens, which is extremely time-bound to 2007 and both shockingly prescient (a demagogue wins the public trust with conspiracy theories) and not (it’s made clear that the sitting POTUS—Bush, at the time—lied to the public, and he opts to resign). Ellis clearly has a much more complicated relationship with government secrecy than she does with alien-human romantic relations. I thought it was interesting, but that it also somewhat failed at the attempt to make the aliens as alien as intended.
