When I was a kid I loved Heinlein, Asimov, Piers Anthony, Howard, Lovecraft, among dozens of other then popular scifi and fantasy authors
Heinlein is some weirdo libertarian fascist
Asimov hates women and was a notorious sex creep
Zanthony is a pedophile and his books are full of creepy shit
Howard was staggeringly racist
Lovecraft is also famously racist.
And that's just the ones off the top of my head.
At some point I learned that all these guys were creeps, came to terms with it, and moved on with my life. Like an adult.
So all these people whining that "oh no I can't let go of my childhood!!!!" fill me with contempt. Many of the great shit-head scifi/fantasy writers of the 20th century made great contributions to the field of fantasy and sci fi. Our conception of robots wouldn't be the same without Asimov. Heinlein changed military sci-fi forever. Howard's Conan had a lasting impact on fantasy fiction far beyond what was merited by his mediocre writing. Lovecraft introduced the notion of Cosmic Horror that continues to push back the borders of science fiction today.
Rowling can claim none of that. Her wizard books are extremely mediocre with poor plots, flat characters, and no new ideas. Their popularity is the result of a then unprecedented marketing campaign, not any particular artistic merit. They're entirely pedestrian and forgettable and there's no reason to read them except as a historical curiosity or a case study in successful marketing of children's literature.
I gave up many genuinely influential and talented writers when I realized that they were jackasses. There was nothing riding on it. No one is using Lovecraft to justify violence against Inuit people or something. I just found out they were jerks and said "Well shit. Guess I won't recommend these to kids anymore".
And all these jackasses have the audacity to say that we should respect their love of the mid wizard book beause it's so important to them?
The best thing about problematic dead writers is that theyre dead and don't benefit from you critically enjoying their work
Ok Harry Potter fans, here's how you can enjoy you're new game...
I still recommend some of Lovecraft's work, and Asimov's, and other shitty people's. But always with warnings, with the intent to discuss their flaws and the way those flaws creep into their work (or, sometimes, take over the work wholly) and the way that those works can still be valuable and cool and worth looking at despite those flaws in author and work.
The problem with Harry Potter is it doesn't really have any redeeming qualities. It is, as you say, worth nothing more than good marketing. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone mostly just because they're not very good, even with Rowling completely out of consideration.
If they were good? I don't know, it'd be a different story.
With Lovecraft particularly, i'd argue that at least for me, his works were worth reading because they are so infected with his perverse ideas that it just derails and jumps from disgustingly racist into plain ridiculous. I mean, come on, the guy is literally afraid of trees and soap bubbles and star constellations. He lives in a constant state of dread and disgust, and that's what all reactionaries are like deep inside. Lovecraft lays bare the soft, vulnerable underbelly of the reaction. Cosmic horror is the inability to handle the world as it is, without mythological, purpose-simulating blinders on your eyes, the utter failure to see the beauty in life's sprawling chaos, the common L of the Appolonian. Lovecraft shows us the reactionary mind at its most miserable, when these people cannot pretend to be the violent, muscular Herrenmenschen they dream themselves to be, but when we see them for what they actually are: terrified little men who have to roll for sanity loss when they see me walking down the street and can't decrypt my gender.
I'm not saying this because i want to recommend the guy, i'd particularly advise anybody who's been racialized against getting too deep into this shitshow. Being able to do a close reading of reactionary material without distress is always privilege, i know from personal experience how much of a difference it makes when all that hate and terror is aimed at people like yourself. I can't even begin to describe the damage transphobic narratives in mainstream media did to me, and i'm dead certain that for a lot of black & brown comrades, the same applies to the demonization of racialized and indigenous communities in works like Lovecraft's. But for the time being, this material is out there, it has shaped how our culture conceptualizes certain tropes, and when you know it already and can stomach to bring it up again, it's absolutely worth reflecting on and understanding the thought process and especially the emotional state behind it, because it's a good way of knowing your enemy.
I should also add that i never gained the same insight from JKR's work as i did from HPL's. Looking at her writing with the knowledge of its not-that-hidden-bigottries didn't teach me anything new, i just saw into the mind of somebody who is incredibly plain and petty and has never had an original thought in their entire life.
Strong agree with that last bit. Lovecraft remains useful because he's smart and insightful and creative in the way he conveys his bigotry and terror and prejudices on to the page. Rowling isn't smart enough or reflective enough to do any of that. You can learn something from Lovecraft that can be applied to understanding how bigots think about the world, but Rowling never really had anything to say.
Call of Cthulu, Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, and At the Mountains of Madness are probably the three most influential ones. The Colour out of Space is probably the most legitimately worthwhile story. In a rare Lovecraft win he accidentally wrote a story that can be read as anti-racist.
Your favorite sci fi and fantasy authors probably have a blog post somewhere talking about how Lovecraft influenced them. that might give you some suggestions on what to read to understand his influence.
Also the fact that people like Asimov and Lovecraft aren't collecting royalties and donating them to harmful groups/causes.
Yes and the TERFS were fought off when they tried to co-opt him due to his Monstrous Regiment piece (a very well written story on the perceptions of gender norms in society, also there's a lesbian couple). Snuff is also a damn good piece by him.
I hear an anecdote that after introducing Cherry a trans person met him at a signing and asked if Cherry was trans. Pterry said "I don't know what that means, could you explain it?" and so they did and Pterry said something like "Well I didn't mean for her to be but now that you explain it to me I see she is." and I always thought that was really charming. I don't know if it's true at all, but Pterry seems like someone who would occasionally find themselves tied up in fighting against an oppression before he even understood what it was.
Yup, overall I just think Terry Pratchett was good as he wrote from a humanistic perspective compared to how a lot of sci fi writers give off creepy libertarian brained vibes and takes (looking at you Heinlein).
The young witch novels are also spoken fondly of by a lot of people. Tiffany Aching is a young woman who has adventures, and unlike Harry she's clever, kind, courageous, and benefits from the mentorship of capable elders. Kind of everything that sucks about Harry is done well with Tiffany.
Pterry also introduces one of the most beloved version of DEATH and I know a lot of people facing death and hardship have been comforted by the idea that someone like Pterry's DEATH might be there to shepherd them to their end.
Speaking of, Granny Weatherwax's death scene hit me hard. As an author-insert, her perspective on her life and imminent death had me choking up
I honestly loved his version of death and reading the 'Reaper Man' was a treat.
We need more communist sci-fi creators with a good grasp of historical materialism. I try to be that, though I'm more of a game writer than a prose writer.
There's Ursula K Le Guin, good example of discussing a sci fi post scarcity commune and how it influences cultural vocabulary (written in the perspective of a character from a shitty capitalist mining world).
Monstrous Regiment also features an older trans man and towards the end he has a really moving moment where he has to actually sit down and think about what being a man means to him, and he comes to a really wholesome conclusion and it's great. The whole book is a lot of fun. It also manages to embrace the fine British tradition of war-time crossdressing with more verve and daring than most examples.
Lovecraft is definitely problematic, but he repudiated his former views and became a Socialist towards the end of his life. Impressive, given he came from a background so reactionary his aunts thought the KKK were a bunch of overly progressive jacobin radicals.
You still have to decide if you want to forgive a life of racism or not, especially when it pervades his pre 1930 work, but that's a different question I think. I think reading his work can be useful, because you can see his insular racism, the confusion and contradictions caused by his New York experiences, and then his friends and experiences helping him to resolve the contradictions in the end, to the point where his final works have subtle anti-racist and anti-fascist themes most notably in Shadow out of Time.
Lovecraft 1920s Twitter racist to 1920s breadtuber redemption arc storyline
He's got one where a character is literally their own mother and father, so it's both incesty and pro trans rights. Critical support.
Unfortunately the wild sci fi premise flying in the face of all concepts of time travel paradoxes is used to create some libertarian allegory about being "self made".
Unfortunately for him, I insist in this case that the curtains are blue :cool-bean: what's an allegory :blob-no-thoughts:
That one is actually ok. All you zombies its called.
There is much wierder shit in his lomg form.
It's a bit more complex. Basically he had whatever ideology his current wife did. So he started a new deal DemSoc in his juviniles up to "Moon" then took a hard fash turn, and then became a lib with some wierd libertarian fetishes.
HG Wells and Arthur C Clark gang here. Just dunking all day long on Heinlein stans. Yeah, we're cool.
:comfy-cool:
It was pretty neat reading "The Time Machine" last year and then going "oh, that's where every time travel media got their basic tropes and imagery from."
Stranger from a Strange Land is fucking awful. I have no idea how that shit survived a publisher.
Plenty of absolute trash makes it on to book store shelves every day. If the shelves are empty no one makes money
Trash rarely has legs. Nobody is going to be watching Morbius now that the memes are done.
When it does survive, it tends to take on a life of its own - Prequel memes, for instance.
I feel like it blew up for a couple of years, then died out.
HPs been a thing for decades
Not a Heinlein stan but damn if the "specialization is for insects" ethos doesn't speak to me.
Lovecraft's racism is so unhinged and old-timey I have trouble relating it to the real world and taking it seriously
It also helps he was never really held in high esteem and was always pretty much a nobody during his lifetime
Rowling's first book felt like a straight Roahl Dahl knock off (also, incidentally, highly problematic). Orphan boy escapes his shitty pedestrian life with magical powers and goes on an adventure in a fantasy land both that is both romantic and dangerous. That's textbook Dahl.
I get why people like Rowling. I loved James and the Giant Peach, growing up. I didn't care about Dahl's politics then and I'd still probably read the story to my kids now.
The idea doesn't have to be original. You don't need to be the first person to ever think of a robot or a wizard in order to write a compelling story. Rowling's marriage of the mundane and the fantastic - the suicidally depressing and ecstatically exhilarating - gives HP legs and draws readers on to the next books.
That's good enough on its own merits to read the first few books (although I'd just stop at 4, because they drop off quick after that).
Similarly, I'm still going to read The Color From Outer Space and I, Robot without a pang of guilt. If I find out Brian Sanderson writes all his first editions in baby blood, I'm not going to stop enjoying Mistborn or the back end of Wheel of Time, either.
I don't think Rowling is anything special. But if I did, I would simply pirate the video game.
Rowling’s marriage of the mundane and the fantastic - the suicidally depressing and ecstatically exhilarating - gives HP legs and draws readers on to the next books.
That is not how I remember Harry Potter, but it has been several decades. I always assumed people liked it so much because they hadn't read anything else, and because the massive marketing push reached people who weren't previously interested in fantasy.
I mean it depends on when are you looking at Harry Potter, because I originally remembered it being marketed not on the merits of its story, but practically as a quasi-pedagogical tool, finally a panacea to sooth the children who cannot click the book. You had to see it to believe it, kids reading books instead of playing Nintendos. And HP probably single-handedly opened the floodgates for YA literature, so there was probably some truth to it. Hell, probably the lord of the rings renaissance and movie adaptations owe something to HP's success. And for what is worth, I do remember them being pageturners when I was like 12, all the way to the fifth book where Harry Potter became too whiny an adolescent for me to want to keep up. I dunno, marketing alone can get you so far.
I think people here like to undersell a cultural artifact so big that it's only comparable to stuff like Pokemon. And they have no reason to, despite whatever qualities HP may have it remains, objectively, a book series meant for children. And their adult consumers remain perpetually arrested to their childhoods, and that's pathetic enough.
I think it was more a cultural artifact of the book publishing industry marrying itself into the entertainment industry successfully and was the pilot for it and what followed (all the post apoc YA stuff, Twilight, etc) was an indication that it was a successful full market campaign. People forget how Harry Potter was fucking EVERYWHERE, news, tv special, radio shows (positive press and negative crazed christian press), and one aspect people forget was the internet via AOL which was owned by Time Warner (oh wow who owns the HP license again???). Just damn insidious and impressive.
It spread like wildfire because of the aggressive advertisements.
But the early installments were generally good storytelling. The characters were compelling. The mystery was intriguing. The setting was fun.
The material sold itself. You didn't need to work hard to get kids to turn the next page.
Until Rowling got in bed with Warner Bros and the books started getting written by committee, because she was too busy doing junkets and tours to actually do it herself. Then she was just a brand.
Similarly, the movies get worse as their budgets go up. Disnefication, more than anything, ruined the franchise.
Honestly it was up until the third book at which point the quality fuckin plummeted for me. In all honesty the movies did far better and cutting down on the useless fluff of the books and other problematic issues (the removal of SPEW which was just a chunk punching down on Hermoine advocating house elf liberation). All in all though Rowling really did nothing with her setting when it came to the idea of "new age magic" or "urban magic" i.e. the separation of the mundane from the magical (i.e. Dresden Files stuff).
She kinda flirted with technomagic, via Ron's dad, then just forgot about it.
(ie, Dresden stuff)
Ugh, another great early series that just kinda flopped midway through. Haven't even bothered with the latest books. They read like a bunch of Redditors did the copy editing.
Orwell is probably the closest comparison I have to Rowling. It took me quite a while to realize how utterly full of shit he was. It's still very funny to me that the dreary future-Stalinism he envisioned ended up just being the capitalist UK anyway,.
He was never in the USSR to have any actual experience of Stalinism anyway, hell his actual personal experience of propaganda was producing it for British occupied India during the war.
His experience is more based on his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, in which he is the most clueless fucker alive, and also wrong about half the things he states (the Anarchists, for example, made the first move in the Barcelona May Day fuckup.)
No one comes out of the Spanish Civil War looking good, especially not the MLs, but POUM and the CNT/FAI aren't the martyrs to truth and freedom Orwell makes them out to be.
For sure that's where his hatred of MLs comes from, I just meant that all the minitrue propaganda stuff is based on the BBC
It’s still very funny to me that the dreary future-Stalinism he envisioned ended up just being the capitalist UK anyway,.
Well, as they say, write what you know.
I wonder how many artists, musicians, directors, actors, and authors I haven't turned away from simply because I haven't heard about any bad things they have done. Not having Twitter helps!
I didn't find out about that until I was a few books into Foundation. The sex scenes grew more and more frequent as the series went on, but they were painful to read
Eventually, as the terribly written sex scenes kept coming, I had to look him up on the grounds of, "What's this guy's deal?"
The best story in foundation is the belisarus one. Then when the mule comes along it deviated from the original concept of the imortal science of sorts.
It was still good and i get it probably was capbell messing around but then again the original idea was also campbell.
Here's more info for anyone who wants specifics
He was a serial harasser and his personal perspective on women definitely comes through in his books
I was a huge Terry Goodkind fan as a teen, didn’t take too long into my political wakening to realize it’s just high fantasy Ayn Rand.
Terry Goodkind
They raced out from the long shadows of the buildings and poured around the corner. The people off at the end of the street all turned when they spotted Richard's force coming. More people--men and women from the city--surged into the street in front of the compound of buildings the soldiers had taken out as barracks and a command post. The people looked like a scraggly lot.
"No war! No war! No war!" The people shouted as Richard led the men up the street at a dead run.
"Out of the way!" Richard yelled as he closed the distance. This was no time for subtlety or discussions: the success of their attack depended in large part on speed. "Get out of the way! This is your only warning! Get out of the way or die!"
"Stop the hate! Stop the hate!" the people chanted as they locked arms.
They had no idea how much hate was raging through Richard. He drew the Sword of Truth. The wrath of its magic didn't come out with it, but he had enough of his own. He slowed to a trot.
"Move!" Richard called as he bore down on the people.
A plump, curly-haired woman took a step out from the others. Her round face was red with anger as she screamed. "Stop the hate! No war! Stop the hate! No war!"
"Move or die!" Richard yelled as he picked up speed.
The red-faced woman shook her fleshy fist at Richard and his men, leading an angry chant. "Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!" On his way past her, gritting his teeth as he screamed with the fury of the attack begun, Richard took a powerful swing, lopping off the woman's head and upraised arm. Strings of blood and gore splashed across the faces behind her even as some still chanted their empty words. The head and loose arm tumbled through the crowd. A man mad the mistake of reaching for Richard's weapon, and took the full weight of a charging thrust.
Men behind Richard hit the line of evil's guardians with unrestrained violence. People armed only with their hatred for moral clarity fell bloodied, terribly injured, and dead. The line of people collapsed before the merciless charge. Some of the people, screaming their contempt, used their fists to attack Richard's men. They were met with swift and deadly steel.
At the realization that their defense of the Imperial Order's brutality would actually result in consequences to themselves, the crowd began scattering in fright, screaming curses back at Richard and his men.
Totally normal and fine good guys doing normal and fine good things.
What reaĺy pissed me was that he adds huge parts of the world without anyyforeshadowing after book 3 or so. This shows he does not have any respect for his audience. That offended me and i stop reading.
Then there is the endles melodrama. It gets tiersome after the nth time khalam is about to get raped. Cant they think of a new plotline?
Then there is the endles melodrama. It gets tiersome after the nth time khalam is about to get raped. Cant they think of a new plotline?
I haven't read them since I was a teen, but this is super accurate. Most the characters were kinda shit people for most of the series, and all the SA and R is super fucked up now that you say it outright.
It's been like 20 years since I read those books but Richard Rahl basically takes control of the Nazi government to fight the overwhelming might of the communist army, right?
I’d have to reread it to sus out of the good guys were coded nazis, but yeah, communism bad was clear as day. Also, another user posted an excerpt, (I wanna say from faith of the fallen) that’s pretty fucking yikes, so yeah.
At the beginning of the series their country is at war with the good magic people and has death squads comprised of ubermensch roaming the country side. I'm not sure if there were any genocides going on but it was basically he reformed the bad but proud nationalist nation.
Piers Anthony
How dare you insult my favorite British/Floridamalian writer! :angery:
He is or was a pedo and open about it.
That being said his adaptation of hassan is one of the best adaptations from fairy tale o long form. Most lose their fary tale quality along the way.
