I think the heavy emphasis on beautiful prose in isolation that I've seen in some modern lit-fic criticism may perhaps be misplaced, at least if you're talking about novels.  I'm not saying that it's not worth mentioning, because it certainly is - prose quality has a strong effect on the reading experience - but it's not the measure of whether a ( Read more... )

I want more Vorkosigan Saga/Marvel crossovers ( Read more... )

It's interesting that the Vorkosigan saga touches on a lot of potentially triggering/sinking /otherwise upsetting subject matter (including some issues that even Game of Thrones doesn't get into), and yet it's not considered a grimdark series. I guess it's a matter of tone and mood.

Sometimes I wonder if LMB created the Ghem Estif Arqua family after someone brought up that the cast of the Vorkosiverse was disproportionately monochrome. So she decided to write about a family with five brown kids and six technicolor kids.

I want Cordelia to meet Joan Watson.

I'm beginning to suspect that Mark Vorkosigan is one of those characters who merits his own trigger warning. (Although in this case it's not really his fault.)

It's a really good book, don't get me wrong, and not gratuitously grimdark overall. There were just a fair number of "ouch, that's messed up..." moments.

I keep imagining "His Majesty's Dragon" as a video game. It starts out as a dragon-rearing sim, with the additional element of building Social Links with other dragons and officers once you get into formal training, and then you get a midstream genre shift into aerial combat. And you can unlock different dragons to raise if you replay the game. ( Read more... )

I recently started reading House of Leaves. So far, it has a high ominousness-to-gore ratio, which I appreciate. I'm not a splatterpunk fan at all, so if I read horror it's going to be for mind-screwiness ( Read more... )

I think this is the first time some commentators at f!s are telling me I'm doing it wrong. Oddly enough, it's for a secret that I thought was fairly innocuous. You never know what people are going to react to, I guess ( Read more... )

I generally enjoy the Flashman novels, but sometimes I think GMF's history-fu is not quite what it's been praised as. For instance, Flashman once (I believe it was in Flash for Freedom) mentions a lady dressed up but not wearing anything underneath it, and as far as I know that just wouldn't work with 1840s-1850s women's clothes. I think you'd ( Read more... )