Bad books, bad books...

[CmdrWilkens]

Veg, what part of "bad BOOKS" don't you understand? Sure, internet primitivists are endlessly amusing, and great for killing braincells and whatever else you wish to kill, but unless they put this stuff into a book, it's not allowed.

Or, as they say in the eloquent language of smileys,

Sorry

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Except that they DID put it in a book. That's the whole point of the Ishmael trilogy: We need to revert to Anarcho-Primitivism because we are creating a species bound to destroy itself right now.

[Norseman]

Except that they DID put it in a book. That's the whole point of the Ishmael trilogy: We need to revert to Anarcho-Primitivism because we are creating a species bound to destroy itself right now.

Exactly! That is why I insist, why positively *insist* on a proper review!

Then again maybe a split thread is a good idea? You know one for laughing at anarcho-primitivists the other for talking about bad books.

[Norseman]

By the way though I do read Victorian books for pleasure, even pre-Victorian books like Zofloya, or the Moor (by the way that's an amazing read), I sometimes run into a book where the writing is so grating that it's hard to read. For instance The White Company by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in fact I was positively unable to continue reading that one. The book was very popular when it was published, but has since faded into insignificance, and I think I know why; the faux medieval writing style, even if you know what cozened means the writing gets annoying. Something similar is true of William Morris' The House of the Wolfings though it's not quite as grating.

In short books where the author tries to write in an archaic style, or in a very different style from what comes natural, tend to rub me the wrong way, even if I am familiar with the style in its original setting. I think it's very hard to write in a style different from your genuine one, and when you do so the results are usually unpleasant in some way. A lot of bad books are bad precisely because the author tried to affect a different style, even a good author has trouble with that, and if an inexperienced one does it the result is often very purple.

[Darth Hoth]

At least Turtledove does not go as Southern apologist as pre-Civil War propaganda, i.e., portraying the slaves as better off than freemen (specifically, factory workers in the North). And portraying the CSA as a wannabe Nazi Germany is portraying the slavers just the way they were.

Oh, no.

Hell, no.

Fucking Hell fuck, no.

That series is just so stupid on so many levels, even for AH, but that, I believe, takes the prize. Just consider it: Nation meaningfully engaged in total war against hated (and stronger) neighbour that wants to annihilate them utterly goes batshit and starts Holocausting 1/3 of its population for no good reason!!!

I mean. . . just wow. I know Turtledove is a hack and all of his books (well, major series) are wank and/or mindless rehash of @ events in anachronistic settings with Nazis tacked on, but in this story, he shows his complete and utter lack of any knowledge whatsoever of the topic. First, the Slavocrates were not genocidal, he gets that completely fucking wrong. I can buy the Jim Crow/South Africa stuff, but the rest is as stupid as Draka. Second, no fucking country will try to exterminate 1/3 of its population (and workforce) in the direst state of war, not even the ones that are parodies of themselves (like North Korea) would be that stupid. Turtledove needs to make the Confederates Nazis, but he is either more fucking ignorant than Stirling or the Freehold guy, or he just does not bother. Does he have any idea whatsoever where an analogy is totally inappropriate? If he has an analogue in his 'verse, like just about everyone does, that guy will write a thirteen-book series about a militantly Protestant Germany that tries to Holocaust all German Catholics. Or perhaps an uber Imperialist Britain that sets up gas chambers for the Oirish, Welsh and Scots. That is the level of absurdity that he is working on.

And that is not going into his various other problems, both with writing style and facts/logic. . .

[Raxmei]

The problem with Turtledove is he figured out it's more profitable to spend his time churning out pages of half-baked generalizations and forced analogies than to do proper research or editing. This likely happened shortly after he switched from writing about Byzantium to the more lucrative American Civil War and World Wars periods.

[Samuel]

Exactly! That is why I insist, why positively *insist* on a proper review!

Then again maybe a split thread is a good idea? You know one for laughing at anarcho-primitivists the other for talking about bad books.

It will return once they come in- local library doesn't have them

http://anthropik.com/2005/10/5-common-o ... yre-wrong/

I nominate Harry Turtledoves interminable Derlavai series.

Let me guess- good idea, horrific execution? Why not make the commies hive minders and the facists dedicated to "improving" people with magic? Oh yeah- than you couldn't rip off history.

[Norseman]

Exactly! That is why I insist, why positively *insist* on a proper review!

Then again maybe a split thread is a good idea? You know one for laughing at anarcho-primitivists the other for talking about bad books.

It will return once they come in- local library doesn't have them

That's both good and bad isn't it? By the way have you tried reading the Amazon reviews?

http://anthropik.com/2005/10/5-common-o ... yre-wrong/

I know it's something really special isn't it?

[Aranfan]

http://anthropik.com/2005/10/5-common-o ... yre-wrong/

I know it's something really special isn't it?

Reading just the first one and half of the second felt like being hit with the stupid stick. I probably shouldn't have read it while studying for finals.

[TheKwas]

I like how they work backwards and assume hunter-gatherers must have had effective birth control, as opposed to their populations simply expanding and contracting in a boom and bust cycle with available food.

Not to defend the nonsense in that article, but many foraging groups did in fact have stable populations that rarely exceeded the carrying capacity of their environment in bad times. The Ju/'hoansi in the Kalahari normally manged to accomplish this by breast feeding their young until nearly puberty, which of course reduces the mother's fertility. The introduction of pastoralism and agriculture to their environment actually reduced the region's carrying for humans by lowering the water-table (the pastoralists dug deep wells for their herds) and thus eliminating much of the wildlife that could support the foragers.

Although it's obvious that some point in history in some part of the world foragers populations started to go up (or climate change made their current population unsustainable) and adopted new survival strategies.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Also remember the IUD is the oldest form of birth control, don't ask me when someone got the funky idea to put a piece of metyal or stone in there.

[Venator]

Also remember the IUD is the oldest form of birth control, don't ask me when someone got the funky idea to put a piece of metyal or stone in there.

Or crocodile shit, in the case of ancient Egypt. Seriously, how desperate do you have to be for that to seem like a good idea ?

[The Yosemite Bear]

Well Celopatra's vinegar and honey rescipe is actually somewhat effective....

beats the mild overdose of belladonna mentioned in one of my mom's herbology books. Reminds me along with Darth Wong's discussion of rape in lit, there's a stone age story by Anthony Burgess (yes, the Clockwork Orange guy), where he created his own langauage for stonage Britons, and has a lot of wierd pharmacology and rape, and ritualized quasi-rape in it.

can't remember the name of it, I barrowed it from my grandfather's collection once.
Spoiler

considering the amount of wartime rape stuff he read, I sometimes wonder if I have cousins in Japan or Korea...

[Mayabird]

This is so off topic, and really I'd recommend this entire tangent get split off, but the earliest effective birth control was silphium, a wild plant, now extinct (probably from over-harvesting). It got rather expensive as the supply got scarce (sold for its weight in silver) and poor women (think forced into prostitution to survive) would've been forced to try to improvise something.

[K. A. Pital]

Turtledove's AH is bad.

Not Tom Clancy level bad, but far worse. I'll agree with Darth Hoth, it's a caricature of reality, gross impossibility and bad writing at the same time. Oh, and while we're at it, Stirling is also deplorable.

The only suitable AH I read was Stuart's TBO, Anisimov's Variant Bis and a few other books. None of them, incidentally, included aliens, technically progressive slavocrats or some other nonsense.

[Norseman]

It depends: Turtledove's WWII analogues are awful, any series he writes are hideously bad, but the individual books he's written (like "Ruled Britannia", "The Guns of the South," or even the Basil Argyros series) are entertaining if not good. The problem is that his publisher seems to be pushing him into churning out ginormous heptasectologies since that's where the money is.

[Thanas]

Also remember the IUD is the oldest form of birth control, don't ask me when someone got the funky idea to put a piece of metyal or stone in there.

Wrong. That is an urban legend told at science gatherings to entertain people. It has no historical basis as far as I know.

The oldest birth control method is the condom, which was even available 15.000 BC and widely spread and used during antiquity.

This is so off topic, and really I'd recommend this entire tangent get split off, but the earliest effective birth control was silphium, a wild plant, now extinct (probably from over-harvesting). It got rather expensive as the supply got scarce (sold for its weight in silver) and poor women (think forced into prostitution to survive) would've been forced to try to improvise something.

No. The earliest recorded use of Silphium was 2500 years ago AFAIK, whereas condoms beat it by over 12000 years.

Turtledove's AH is bad.

Not Tom Clancy level bad, but far worse. I'll agree with Darth Hoth, it's a caricature of reality, gross impossibility and bad writing at the same time. Oh, and while we're at it, Stirling is also deplorable.

The only suitable AH I read was Stuart's TBO, Anisimov's Variant Bis and a few other books. None of them, incidentally, included aliens, technically progressive slavocrats or some other nonsense.

From a cultural viewpoint, the Germanicus saga by Kirk Mitchell is very nice reading. It is about the only AH I would recommend, mainly because it does not romanticize the Roman Empire and is brutally honest in the character choices. Example: A high bodycount of likable characters. Only two surivive throughout the series and none of them are what one would call real heroes.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Strangely that's what they told us in high school, guess I should have looked deeper then what was reported in my textbooks twenty years ago.

[Mayabird]

The oldest birth control method is the condom, which was even available 15.000 BC and widely spread and used during antiquity.

That's either pre-agriculture or the very start of it with everything that implies. Dang, how do they know? Did the archeologists find condoms in old trash piles or something?

[Thanas]

The oldest birth control method is the condom, which was even available 15.000 BC and widely spread and used during antiquity.

That's either pre-agriculture or the very start of it with everything that implies. Dang, how do they know? Did the archeologists find condoms in old trash piles or something?

French cave paintings show men with condoms of that period, with regards to the earliest date.

[Mayabird]

Ah, cool. I'd only heard about condoms going back to ancient Egypt (and I thought silphium was used earlier) but there being some controversy about if they were really used for contraception or were some sort of ritual item.

By any chance are there any pictures of these cave paintings?

[Thanas]

I have never seen them, honestly.

The cite usually given is: Parisot, Jeannette. (1987). Johnny Come Lately: A Short History of the Condom. London, UK: The Journeyman Press Ltd. Note that after checking it appears that this viewpoint is not entirely unopposed, however I have been unable to find more about this on short notice.

[Darth Hoth]

Turtledove's AH is bad.

Not Tom Clancy level bad, but far worse. I'll agree with Darth Hoth, it's a caricature of reality, gross impossibility and bad writing at the same time. Oh, and while we're at it, Stirling is also deplorable.

The only suitable AH I read was Stuart's TBO, Anisimov's Variant Bis and a few other books. None of them, incidentally, included aliens, technically progressive slavocrats or some other nonsense.

The Draka books do have their merits, in spite of their insane wank and less than stellar storytelling, in that they (well, the first two at least) give something of an inkling as to what life under the Nazis was like in the East (reflecting the sad fact that the most 99 % of all Westerners learn in school is "6 million Jews. Oh dear. Now, for next chapter. . . "). Of course, most readers probably miss the analogy . . .

Who is Anisimov? Never heard of him; anything that has been published in English?

It depends: Turtledove's WWII analogues are awful, any series he writes are hideously bad, but the individual books he's written (like "Ruled Britannia", "The Guns of the South," or even the Basil Argyros series) are entertaining if not good. The problem is that his publisher seems to be pushing him into churning out ginormous heptasectologies since that's where the money is.

Meh; Ruled Britannia was hardly a worthy read. Though Guns does tend to get good reviews; I have not read that one myself.

From a cultural viewpoint, the Germanicus saga by Kirk Mitchell is very nice reading. It is about the only AH I would recommend, mainly because it does not romanticize the Roman Empire and is brutally honest in the character choices. Example: A high bodycount of likable characters. Only two surivive throughout the series and none of them are what one would call real heroes.

That actually sounds like it has promise. I shall have to pick up a couple.

[Thanas]

From a cultural viewpoint, the Germanicus saga by Kirk Mitchell is very nice reading. It is about the only AH I would recommend, mainly because it does not romanticize the Roman Empire and is brutally honest in the character choices. Example: A high bodycount of likable characters. Only two surivive throughout the series and none of them are what one would call real heroes.

That actually sounds like it has promise. I shall have to pick up a couple.

Do so. It makes some questionable points of divergence and has a fair share of supernatural occurences, but it always painted a fascinating picture of what a modern rome would look like, especially with the terminology. For example, a train is called a "rail galley".

[Stark]

Ugh. Faux-historical constructions like that are 50% of the reason AH sucks shit - the only 50% of course being the hilariously oversimplistic view of history and events shared by all AH authors, whereby they change some things, wave a magic wand to create a fantasy world where everything happens the way they want, and then write a fantasy story that is 'bolstered' by the inclusion of 'real' (nb not real) 'historical' 'personages' in 'different' situations where they do 'realistic' (nb, actually what the writer thinks) things to push the fantasy story along.

The AH genre would be a lot better if more authors just admitted they were spinning shit instead of the intellectual snobbery of it being 'HISTORICAL'. So historical... they made it up!

[CmdrWilkens]

Turtledove's AH is bad.

Not Tom Clancy level bad, but far worse. I'll agree with Darth Hoth, it's a caricature of reality, gross impossibility and bad writing at the same time. Oh, and while we're at it, Stirling is also deplorable.

The only suitable AH I read was Stuart's TBO, Anisimov's Variant Bis and a few other books. None of them, incidentally, included aliens, technically progressive slavocrats or some other nonsense.

From a cultural viewpoint, the Germanicus saga by Kirk Mitchell is very nice reading. It is about the only AH I would recommend, mainly because it does not romanticize the Roman Empire and is brutally honest in the character choices. Example: A high bodycount of likable characters. Only two surivive throughout the series and none of them are what one would call real heroes.

Have either of you guys worked through the 163x series by Flint et al? While the first book was really a bit wanktastic from there on it has started to settle into a truly interesting AH panorama complete with hundreds of little stories that dot the landscape below the wider arc of the series.