lydamorehouse | (Reply)

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I should say that GAME OF THRONES did come up. I haven't read it, but when a panelist mentioned it, the audience cheered. Apparently, you're VERY NOT ALONE in disliking that "beloved" book. I wonder, though, if some of that is overexposure. We didn't even bother to go down the list of the other usual suspects who kind of got a lot of hate because of overexposure and not being well written. (No one even bothered to mention 50 SHADES OF GRAY or TWILIGHT, for instance. I think we assumed no one in the audience of hard-core SF readers ever loved those books.)

NAME OF THE WIND by Pat Rothfuss got a bit of hate from the audience, though I hadn't read it and the panelists seemed to feel it was "meh"-worthy rather than hate-able.

I also loved DRAGONRIDERS OF PERN the entire series. I drew my first fan art for it, and I admitted on the panel that it was also, for me, one of my first real loves. I can still tell you the first page F'lar is described (78.) But this isn't the first time that I've heard it argued that Anne McCaffery really maybe wasn't as much of a feminist that we all remembered and that the dragons mating scenes could be read as rape. This is actually why I've vowed to never re-read those books as an adult. I'm afraid I'll stop loving them and that would be a shame.

FAMILY MATTERS is the one (and I could have put this under a spoiler cut, but since it's in the comments I'll just say) where the heroes all turn out to be animals. That kind of switcheroo made a lot of readers get whiplash in less of a "oh, cool surprise!" way as "WTF, I quit!" I was intrigued to learn yesterday that Sheri S. Tepper has her own entry in TV tropes because SHE USES SO MANY OF THEM (and it is argued uses them badly).

And, yeah, all the SF classics are brilliant. I loved 1984 and Animal Farm, but I was never assigned them in class. No one on the panel or in the audience hated on any of those. (Though two people agreed that the FOUNDATION series by Asimov was a huge disappointment, though maybe not hate-worthy.) When I said "classics," I meant we were mostly discussing books like EMMA or GREAT EXPECTATIONS that are good, but didn't hit a lot of SF people because... well, not SF. I mean, no one was saying these weren't great books, just that, no surprise, for SF people, they didn't always make our heart soar the way they did for most other people.

Another thing I didn't mention that we discussed that I found really interesting was that sometimes a single detail can kill an entire book. I can't remember the books people had brought up that fit that category because most of them were ones I hadn't read. But, writer beware, eh?

(I also haven't read AMERICAN GODS, but Shawn had. She mostly left that book the way she leaves most of Gaiman's novel efforts, with a "meh" rather than strong feelings one way or another. She and I were a huge fans of Gaiman's comic books, however, and sometimes I think that it's hard to read a different format, you know? I didn't like Chris Claremont's books much either, but I loved his run at the helm of X-Men.)