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Post by Jesse on Aug 5, 2017 16:09:55 GMT -5
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?by Philip K. Dick I've been meaning to read this for awhile now and am glad I finally got around to doing so. Once I started reading it I had a hard time putting it down and ending up binge reading it over the last few days. Initially I wanted to judge it on its own and not compare it to the film but I found that virtually impossible. While there are obviously similarities I thought the book was different in many ways and I was able to really enjoy reading it. I think one of the main differences was the concept of Mercerism and using empathy boxes I don't think that made it into the film in any form.
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Post by codystarbuck on Aug 5, 2017 21:15:03 GMT -5
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?by Philip K. Dick I've been meaning to read this for awhile now and am glad I finally got around to doing so. Once I started reading it I had a hard time putting it down and ending up binge reading it over the last few days. Initially I wanted to judge it on its own and not compare it to the film but I found that virtually impossible. While there are obviously similarities I thought the book was different in many ways and I was able to really enjoy reading it. I think one of the main differences was the concept of Mercerism and using empathy boxes I don't think that made it into the film in any form. To me, the film always felt like a sequel to the book. Deckard is an active detective, has a wife, neighbors, hunts for androids. In the film, Deckard is pulled back in, looks like he had a wife who is gone, hunts replicants but falls for one. The book is why I don't like Scott's conceit that Deckard is a replicant, full stop. I prefer the ambiguity, as the search helps him find his lost humanity (and Scott wasn't that good about conveying the premise that Deckard is a replicant (the eye thing never seemed deliberate and the unicorn dream wasn't there in early cuts). The book establishes Deckard's humanity, by the end. Also, the whole idea of Deckard being a replicant/android comes from the part of the book where Deckard runs into another detective, from an unknown precinct.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 5, 2017 21:21:54 GMT -5
Finished David Gerrold's Worlds of Wonder last night, which is nominally a how to book for writing sci-fi and fantasy but is much more a wonderful treatise on language, technique and the art of communication than anything else. Yes there's some coaching on writing sci-fi and fantasy and a couple of very useful workshop type exercises, but moreso it's an exploration on how we use and perceive language and techniques for using language to express and understand better. Well worth a read through even if you are not interested in writing sci-fi or fantasy.
-M
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Post by codystarbuck on Aug 5, 2017 21:29:47 GMT -5
Finished reading the First Saint Omnibus, collecting pre-WW2 stories from leslie Charteris. Lot of fun and very much the template for so many crime fighting figures that followed, especially the more stylish ones.
I'm now about halfway through the Complete Brigadier Gerard stories, from Arthur Conan Doyle. This lesser known character is Etienne Gerard, a brigade commander of the Hussars, in Napoleon's armies. He's a braggart and a knuckle-head, but filled with devotion to his duty and his Emperor, carrying out his missions in suitable swashbuckling fashion, even if they don't always turn out as planned. In one, he escapes from an English prison, steals a greatcoat to hide his uniform, runs around in circles on unfamiliar terrain, and ends up back near the prison, where he is captured. he then learns that the man whose coat he stole had his letter of parole, exchanging him back to the French for an English officer. The stories are always told by Gerard, as an old retired soldier, telling tales of his grand adventures in the war, to younger ears who buy him drinks. Great satire and a little less stuffy, than Sherlock Holmes.
Sad thing is, my copy, from the Barnes & Noble Classics line, features a painting of a Napoleonic French soldier; but, it is of a enlisted soldier of the Imperial Guard, not an officer of the Hussars (light cavalry). I used to have the Oxford edition (which I gave away in a move, before I had read it) that featured a hussar on the cover.
I first picked up the book back when the Sharpe series, with Sean bean, was being shown on Masterpiece Theater. I picked up all of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books and this was the same territory, though less serious. However, Doyle did his homework, though not to Cornwell's degree of obsession.
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Post by Jesse on Aug 5, 2017 22:14:59 GMT -5
To me, the film always felt like a sequel to the book. Deckard is an active detective, has a wife, neighbors, hunts for androids. In the film, Deckard is pulled back in, looks like he had a wife who is gone, hunts replicants but falls for one. The book is why I don't like Scott's conceit that Deckard is a replicant, full stop. I prefer the ambiguity, as the search helps him find his lost humanity (and Scott wasn't that good about conveying the premise that Deckard is a replicant (the eye thing never seemed deliberate and the unicorn dream wasn't there in early cuts). The book establishes Deckard's humanity, by the end. Also, the whole idea of Deckard being a replicant/android comes from the part of the book where Deckard runs into another detective, from an unknown precinct. That's an interesting way to look at it and I'll have to keep that in mind next time I rewatch the film. The scenes with the other bounty hunter Phil Resch and the android Garland definitely had me wondering whether or not Decker was an android and how far androids had infiltrated society for that matter. The later scenes with Deckard using the empathy box as well as having remorse for having to kill the Nexus 6 androids gave me the impression that Deckard was indeed human. As did the TV personality who was possibly an android revealing Mercerism as a hoax. I felt PKD was drawing a very clear line using Mercerism to tell the difference between humans and androids. The scene where Pris is cutting the legs off of the spider made me cringe. I thought that was really effective. The whole Mercerism being revealed as a hoax but also Deckard and Isidore both having these religious experiences was interesting but sort of confused me though. By the end I was almost wondering if Deckard could be turning into a special. One of the reasons I feel this is such a great book is it gave me so much to think about the next time I reread it.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 6, 2017 10:06:21 GMT -5
I first picked up the book back when the Sharpe series, with Sean bean, was being shown on Masterpiece Theater. I picked up all of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books and this was the same territory, though less serious. However, Doyle did his homework, though not to Cornwell's degree of obsession. Have you read Cornwell's Saxon Stories? I have really enjoyed the first four that I've read. For me he hits the sweet spot between historical research/authenticity and story-telling. I'll get around to Sharpe eventually (if I live long enough), but I find the Viking era more interesting than the Napoleonic era.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 6, 2017 10:19:06 GMT -5
Death Has Many Doors by Fredric Brown. Ed and Am Hunter are back and they've started their own detective agency. They're mostly getting by on small stuff sent to them by their former employer The Starling Agency. Then in walks a red-headed young lady who is firmly convinced she will be killed by Martians. And Ed and Am are drawn into two deaths that appear to be natural, but they are convinced are murders. This was the last in the classic series by Brown before he went off to work on other things. He would come back for two more books about a decade later. This is a decent entry in the series. Brown plays pretty fair about what is going on and how it all adds up. For the most part it's pretty obvious who the guilty party is and why. And the second murder is pretty easy to figure out. The first one...not so much. A decent entry. My understanding is that the two later books (particularly the last entry) aren't really up to snuff. But I guess I'll go ahead and give them a shot. I will say that Brown flirted with sex in a pretty progressive way for the time, without getting into it in an exploitative manner.
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Post by codystarbuck on Aug 6, 2017 20:36:48 GMT -5
I first picked up the book back when the Sharpe series, with Sean bean, was being shown on Masterpiece Theater. I picked up all of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books and this was the same territory, though less serious. However, Doyle did his homework, though not to Cornwell's degree of obsession. Have you read Cornwell's Saxon Stories? I have really enjoyed the first four that I've read. For me he hits the sweet spot between historical research/authenticity and story-telling. I'll get around to Sharpe eventually (if I live long enough), but I find the Viking era more interesting than the Napoleonic era. Haven't gotten around to reading them or the Arthurian ones he did (or the Civil War-based Starbuck Chronicles). Cornwell's good with characters, does his research, and works out how to insert the character into real history. With Sharpe, he had to move him about a bit, to get him involved in specific battles, and created a fictional regiment to which he was attached, to allow them to be where needed. Otherwise, Sharpe would have been limited to the battles which involved the 95th Rifles, without major explaining. As it was, early on, he and his men act as sort of troubleshooters for the Duke of Wellington, via his spymaster, carrying out special missions. Most of them came upon major battles in the Peninsular Campaign, in Portugal and Spain. The tv series adapts the novels, though budget affected how they did it. Later episodes started departing entirely from the books, until they got up to Waterloo. Cornwell went back to the character's past to do more books, after taking him up through Waterloo and a reunion after. My dad read the Arthurian stuff and some of the Saxon ones and really enjoyed them. He loved historical adventure fiction, reading stuff like Cornwell, CS Forrester, Patrick O'Brian, Dorothy Dunnett and a few others.
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Post by berkley on Aug 6, 2017 22:56:52 GMT -5
I should be getting to those Brigadier Gerard stories myself sometime over the next few months along with a lot of other Conan Doyle stuff, including a re-reading of all the Holmes stories - just finished The Sign of [the] Four a couple weeks back (don't know why he removed that "the" from the title, it reads much better with it, IMO). I also plan to read one of his mediaeval romances, The White Company and if I can find a collection of his supernatural stories I'd like to try those as well. I've only read one up to now, and that was years ago, but it was a good one, Lot No. 249 - incidentally the only really good mummy story I've read.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 9, 2017 11:18:58 GMT -5
Murder's Shield (Destroyer #9) by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir Remo is back. But will he finally refuse to finish an assignment? The nation's police are organizing...into an organized assassination squad. And Remo is supposed to take out the head and stop the police take-over of the nation. But ex-cop Remo Williams is having a hard time with the idea of stopping his fellow lawmen from killing the "bad guys." The Remo Williams books are by no means great literature. But they are kind of an interesting window into the world of the early 70s.
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Post by brutalis on Aug 9, 2017 13:25:37 GMT -5
Must be history month at the CCF. Just finished the 1st 2 books of the Saxon Tales from Bernard Cornwell and before that read Tutankhamun: the Book of Shadows by Nick Drake. Starting tonight on William Dietrick's Ethan Gage Adventures: the Barbary Pirates. And waiting to receive the 1st 4 books of Sharpe's adventures by Cornwell to start digging into from a used book dealer. Love me some of the historical adventure novels.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 13, 2017 10:21:26 GMT -5
The Art of Nick Cardy by John Coates with Nick Cardy If you're familiar with the artist books published by Twomorrows then you can picture what this book is about. That said, this was published by Vanguard in 2001 before Twomorrows was publishing many books. It's essentially a long interview with Nick Cardy profusely illustrated with his artwork. And as such...what's not to like? Well...there are a couple of problems. One, which seems to be endemic to these types of books is that they lack depth of analysis of the work. The other is that this particular book isn't terribly well designed. The text kind of floats around the illustrations and it can be a bit of a chore to read. It's actually a bit odd because the book design was done by John B. Cooke, who is usually very good. I can only think this was pretty early work by him and he was still learning. That said, it's a very nice long interview with Cardy, who comes across as very likeable.
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Post by berkley on Aug 13, 2017 19:19:50 GMT -5
As always with art books I'd really like to have a good look at the interior before buying it but for Nick Cardy I might have to forego that.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 16, 2017 23:59:11 GMT -5
You guys are making me want to re-read some Cromwell... so many books, so little time. This one took me forever it seemed...
The Peripheral by William Gibson
There is really some unique stuff in this book... it shows a post-apocalyptic world that is actually pretty OK. The apocalypse isn't some Earth-shattering disease or World War... we just sort slide into to as a natural consequence of how humans interact with the world and each other. It makes alot more sense than most do.
The actual plot is a bit hard to follow, though. People in the 'present' (which seems to be a bit into our future, just on the edge of the slow descent into 'the jackpot', which ends up killing 80% of the world's population over 70 years or so) get visited by the future... but not really. In the 'future' the main form of entertainment is going into the past at a fixed point, and basically messing with it like it was a game of Civilization.. only once you do, it's not the past anymore, but an alternate time line.
It eventually all comes together and makes sense, but you have to have alot of patience with both seeming unrelated events (they ALL tie up nicely...eventually) and weird lingo that gets explained only after you've pretty much figured it out.
Definitely not for everyone, but thought provoking and unique if you're willing to stick through alot of confusion and weirdness.
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Post by berkley on Aug 17, 2017 1:00:11 GMT -5
That actually sounds more interesting than a lot of Gibson's books, which have never really clicked with me. I've only read a couple of the early ones, though, so it could be I'm missing out.
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