h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Xanatic, Cradle is the dogs poo of Arthur C. Clarke books, I think it is Gentry Lee's obsession with Eleanor of Aquitaine that does it, in the second Rama book he does much the same and that is almost as bad as Cradle. Arthur C. Clarke has written some great books. If you want to read something good by him, classics are Rendevouz with Rama (don't read the sequels ), Childhood's end and The City and the Stars (and 2001 of course, though I personally am not a big fan) in my opinion. Don't judge him on his worst book.

In the 50s and 60s there was a sub-genre of SF which was written by people who had good ideas but (frankly) couldn't write narratives to save the world from an invasion from outer space.

Their ideas were really challenging, their plots were usually ok, their characterisation was poor, and their dialogue sucked.

Arthur C Clarke, John Wyndham, Larry Niven, and Isaac Asimov to name four.

At the other end of the scale you have Anne McCaffrey, and (hush) Ursula Le Guin whose ideas are not nearly as challenging, but who wallow around in characterisation or political theories.

But read 'em all. They all have something great to offer.

a sf-fan called Ben

>I also never finished 'Interview with the Vampire'

I am a pretty big fan of the whole anne rice vampire chronicles, but I never finished that one either, it was just too boring

On the subject of Anne Rice. I hate that style of writing (a little TOO far fetched for me!), but due to pure boredom picked up a German translation of The Witching Hour while I was living in Germany and loved it. Picked up the sequel in English when I got home and didn't enjoy it half as much. Read the first page of the third one in the library recently and put it down - far too tedious.

-- violagirl

Wow! The translation is better than the original?
Cool!

agcB

Or maybe my German was at the stage where I missed the bad writing No, I actually think the translation was better.

-- violagirl

On Chaos by that Gleick bloke; I found it very interesting, but at the time I was stuck in the middle of the desert with nowt but Indian satelite TV for company, so that probably had something to do with it.
On Reality Dysfunction: I love all three books. However, it did take a while to get started on the first one, so I took it on a Glasgow-Exeter train journey. That got me past the opening
And Arthur C. Clarke's later stuff is a bit naff. I read all the Rama ones, but have no idea why, except for the original which is great.

I read it all the way to the end and it's not uninteresting but I do think "The Celestine Prophecy" is a load of old tosh.

BBS

Its an adventure story with New Age Nice Stuff as a leit motif instead of the usual plastic explosives and armalites.

Tosh but fun!

agcB

Oh yes agreed. As an adventure story it's great.

My criticism is aimed at the fact that it sold a whole philosophy to millions of people, that IMHO is tosh. I think it uses the 1st revelation *Everything happens for a reason* to get everybody to buy in. I dunno, maybe I should reread it and see if my views have changed. Just got to dig it out of the loft ....

BBS

re: 'Chaos' by James Gleick. My problem with Gleick is that he's not very good about structuring science books. I found it disjointed for this reason. His book on Richard Feynman suffered from the same flaw. Maybe he's just not a good writer. He could learn a lot from someone like Simon Singh ('Fermat's Last Theorem' and 'The Code Book').

I think Gleick's a decent enough writer, but he's not sure whether he wants to be a journalist, a novelist, or a writer of popular science. He seems to get his genres mixed up, and this is probably why his books seem disjointed. An example is the way he begins 'Chaos...' with that stereotypical stuff about the wild-eyed nonconformist young scientist-rebel, which is obviously meant to appeal to the more sensationalistic-minded reader. But then he starts getting into some fairly complicated scientific stuff - I couldn't understand it anyway - and I ended up wondering whether I was reading a cheap thriller or a physics textbook.

So overall I agree the book did a poor job of explaining complexity theory to the intelligent layperson. But commercially it was a great success, I believe - easy enough, then, to see why he writes like that...

Anything by Robert Heinlein and I'm still struggling with War and Peace.I hope to finish it by the time I'm 50(this October)but I guess I never will.

Someone told me to read a book called The Bible Code lat year some time (forget the author).
Basically, when the bible is written out in Hebrew, you can find words like Kennedy and Assassination written in a code in the text -or so it says (ie. The bible is supposed to predict the future). The whole thing is total and utter b****cks. The method they explain in the book (allegedly done by a maths professor at Tel Aviv university) can give an infinite number of combinations, therefore, if you look long enough, you can get it to spell out anything you want.

Oh, did I tell you I threw it away in digust at about chapter 2?

Maybe we should start a thread about books which are complete tosh?

For me, it is anything about Atlantis, and I have tried a couple.

And I got mightily p****d off with 'Zen and the Art of complete B******s' because he goes on and on about how Quality is the driving force of the universe (which is quite clearly tosh, hasn't he heard of entropy?) and then, in a footnote or an acknowledgement or some other piece of small print somewhere says that what he says about bikes and biking isn't accurate. Per-lease. Either do it or don't do it but don't rip me off for a fiver and then fail to deliver. I also suspect that the drive for Total Quality Management and Quality Circles and other corporate self-indulgences of the 80s came about because the guys who were in their 30s and 40s then had read Zen and the Art of Ripping off People when they were in their teens, and beleived that Quality Counts. B******s, as I said.

There was another one, but that little rant put it out of my mind - I'll re-post when I have thought of it.

agcB

Well, I have remembered another.

The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Casteneda. (The guy who wrote about the mexican Don Juan). Same rip-off. I thought it was about gaining conscious control of the un-conscious mind when dreaming. Turns out half way through that they are popping peyote every day, and they don't bother mentioning it because it is so normal to do it.

*sips tea - not that I would normally mention it*
*scratches nose*
*looks at CD player*
*posts to thread*

agcB

The most famous book that I couldn't finish was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I think I read about four pages and gave up.

Now I'll rarely throw away a book, but Jack L. Chalker's Well World series was utter crap. After reading the most recent book of that series (about six years ago) I gathered up all my Well World books, took them to the dumpster and threw them away. This wasn't so much my aggravation as it was for the protection of other readers.

As for Arthur C. Clarke - I read 2001, and loved it. Read 2010, and really liked it. Read half of 2061, and was really disappointed. Somebody mentioned Childhood's End - I've read it, and won't read it again. It's a good book, but it's too creepy and depressing for me.

Here's an interesting note - if you find a copy of 'Life Among the Tasaday' it's an anthropological fake. Evidently Noriega organized a group of people to live in the hunter-gatherer style in South America, then invited a group of anthropologists to come and study them. The imitation cavemen did their job very well, with a few inconsistencies - their hunter-gatherer culture should have had no concepts for cultivation. But study of the language revealed that there were words for 'seed' (as in plant this seed to grow another plant.)

Hmm... peyote. As I recall, Carlos Castenada wasn't having a normal time out there in the desert. I remember a vision of tiny bubbles that sounds very hallucinogenic.

Oh he was out of his cactus 90% of the time. And a good time it seems to have been too.

I think I may have tried another one of his books, and he specifies a particular date, and says it was a Tuesday. Now I was born on the date he specifies, and although I don't remember the event, I do know it was a Sunday.

If you are presenting a book as accurate anthropology then you should make it accurate. I dont have a problem with it being written in a complete hallucinegenic stupor, but if that is the case, it should be presented in that way.

I shouldn't be picky. But it was the fact that the book was about how to have lucid dreams, and they didn't mention the first step (pick the peyote buttons, eat the peyote buttons) untill over half way through. Besides, peyote buttons are a little difficult to get hold of here; I suppose I could try the deli counter at Waitrose...)



agcB

>I gathered up all my Well World books, took them to the dumpster and threw them away.

yes, I have to admit that the first (and only) book I ever threw away was William Burrough's Naked Lunch. It drove me bats**t, I couldn't even finish it. I honestly felt physically ill.

Maybe I shouldn't get so involved with my books

Me too with Angela's Ashes, it was just too depressing, I never made it through the first chapter.

Most recently, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, which I bought because everyone was raving about it. I read it all apart from the last couple of chapters (I always hope things will get better) but just wasn't motivated to find out what happened in the end.