Science Fiction versus Space Opera, Part 1/5: Opening Remarks

[jade_sabre_301]

So three things.

1) I went to Barnes and Noble today because I have a $35 gift card to spend and left feeling extremely discouraged, in part because they didn’t have the one book I was looking for (WP has requested Catholicism for Dummies because he is a darling dear) and mostly because there’s such a narrow selection of books available there. I

Comments

[fabricalchemist]

I'm so settling in to read all parts of this post :333

I have developed an almost crippling case of new-book wariness.

Sister, I hear ya. If it has fairies (sadly), vampires, or apostrophed names, it is slapped back on the shelf. The covers help ZILCH since they almost all have jumped on the "mysterious girl photo from DeviantArt with some PS filters and crappy font" bandwagon. I am really into Sally Gardnier's Red Necklace and Silver Blade right now, but there was definitely a bias (read: hot audiobook narrator) that assisted.

Also, we should keep some perspective here and remember that we were truly spoiled with discovering books like DWJ and MWT in our teens, and now those have more or less been exhausted. They can't all be gold.

[jade_sabre_301]

omg guuuuuuuuurl I luve ur comments

I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN ABOUT THE COVERS. Everything I look at is like "oh man this looks like a Twilight ripoff." But I will look into the books you recommend! once I'm all married and gots a piece of mail at my new address I'm getting a library card so hard. SO HARD.

aw man poop on perspective why can't publishers just publish good books. :-b you are wise to speak these words.

[fabricalchemist]

guuuuuuuuuuurl, guurl, if all books were that good then

1) we'd never get anything done
2) we'd never have emergency toilet papers handy
3) we'd probably just not even appreciate the absolute GEMS said books are

but omg as a graphic designer, to say nothing of being an avid reader, this new style of cover art hurts. If I have to see a Jellyka, Porcelain, Cowboy, or Zephyr-fonted title many more times (may Papyrus rest in hell) I think I will just barf. Back in my day we had legit lushly-illustrated covers that actually gave some teasy insight as to what kind of story you were hopping into. Oh, this is about moonlit shoulders of a purple-eyed sultry girl with an "edgy" tattoo in shadow? Hm, pass. She barely looks old enough to know what that look she's giving implies, much less be an actual werewolf/fey/vampire/magical girl with powers who was abandoned at birth/latent witch/I could go on but I'm just eating up text here

[fabricalchemist]

ALSO will report back on if I find anything good in my library travels and spare you some "guh, AWFUL" books

Just checked out some Fitzgerald; trust me when I say you can pass on the Kerouac

[rosaleeluann]

I AM ALSO HAVING A HARD TIME PICKING UP NEW BOOKS. Its just so hard to trust new ones. Sometimes its easier to trust an old one. Which is what I did--I just finished re-reading The Curse of Chalion. It was so good--again! You need to read it! It was so awesome! And then I found myself in a LMB mood so I grabbed the only other book by her that I own with is Komarr which isn't exactly what I'm in the mood for but it almost is so I'm continuing with it

[jade_sabre_301]

SO HARD because I've been burned by what's popular and people are trying to be edgy or twisty at the expense of telling a good, well-written story. I REALLY need to get my hands on Curse of Chalion--Quark quoted tons of the beginning of it to me and then somehow it never got into my hands. :( The only one of the Vorkosgian books I've read is the bundle of the first two--Cordelia's Honor and another one? And I had serious issues with Cordelia's...I don't remember what all it was, but the whole way in which she chose to have a child. The whole attitude towards it/the way it was treated in the book bothered me (I don't remember what exactly it was, but I remember feeling like it seriously violated my personal morals to the point where I was extremely morally opposed to her actions and didn't really like her because she was being selfish and evil. Or something), so it's been hard for me to go for any of the other books. But maybe the later books avoid this troubling issue

[keestone]

Okay, I'm just finding these posts because BusyBusyNoTimeToReadFLIST, so I'm going to read through and see how much agreeing and/or ranting/pontificating and recs I'll end up with by the end. :)

But, just to say at the beginning . . . Space Opera is still Science Fiction, it's just a particular sub-category of the genre (that often gets paired with Military Sci-Fi, which I tend to be less than fond of). There are lots of sub-genres in the Science Fiction and Fantasy continuum. It's a big and varied genre.

[jade_sabre_301]

oh man I knew someone who knew a lot more about this than I would would come jumping in and be like YOU ARE WRONG. /settles back for the reading

I will grant your point about Space Opera being a sub-genre (and I'm sure you noticed that I got to the military sci-fi)--I was trying to do some differentiating with labels for the sake of "well, what are you actually reading?" And now I would like to do some fun playing around with calling the hardcore stuff "science fiction" and the softcore stuff "sci-fi" and wondering how much of what's out there now is even just "syfy" but I suspect there's some inherent snobbery in those labels. :-b

[keestone]

Oh hai! Apparently I wasn't signed in and just replied as anonymous. :/

(and I can't spell)