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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1064 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 21, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The Lord of the Rings is more accessible to children than I'd thought it would be; IIRC I waited until my youngest was 8 or 9, but probably didn't need to. The biggest limitation for me was that I wanted to let my kids all watch the movies shortly after we finished with the books, but I wanted to start with the Hobbit movies (because that way you get LotR second as a climax rather than the Hobbit trilogy second as a disappointment), and aside from quality concerns, those movies are more graphic and gory about the violence than I'm happy with. But if you just stick with the books, the main issue with LotR for kids is that it demands a level of attention and patience that younger kids might not have yet, especially if yours just got to the point where the Hobbit wasn't too much for her. IIRC my youngest was fine with the meat of the books, but perhaps just barely, because both she and her (then 10 or 11) brother decided to skip most of the history/sociology/geography prologue. Maybe that's a good touchstone? If your daughter is so interested in hobbits that she can make it past "Concerning Pipeweed" then the rest of the books should be a breeze.

The sequel to Mote is probably worth reading, but "worth reading" is a big letdown from "one of the best science fiction books in history", so go into it with tempered expectations if you don't want to be disappointed. There are no other Niven/Pournelle collaborations as good as "Mote"; IMHO the only ones that are close in limited ways are "Footfall" (first contact, with a psychological gulf), "Lucifer's Hammer" (civilization as a character), "Inferno" (wild plot), and "Legacy of Heorot" (page turning suspense+action), but they're all more flawed in other ways.

I was given LotR (in a Russian translation) around age 5 or so, and seemingly read the whole thing, though it's hard to say how much of it I understood or whether I skipped around, especially since the movies and finally rereading it in English could have implanted any number of false memories. I did remember the maps, the copperplate etchings of barrels that the particular print version used as chapter separators, and being mildly irritated when the movies came out much later because I seemed to have had formed a very particular mental image of one segment (the rocky area that Frodo and Sam traversed before the swamp with the dead elves) and it looked different in the film, so it was probably not zero (and whatever I was doing with it, I am told that I was so absorbed that my parents got to enjoy many months of relative peace).

(We also had a comic book version of the Hobbit, which I probably was given earlier, but couldn't get into because I found the pictures confusing. I still struggle with comics/manga visual storytelling now.)

"one of the best science fiction books in history"

So, I hit the 200 page mark where things take a pretty hard turn, and I've been incapable of stopping until my eyes no longer want to focus tonight. 180 pages later, 80 pages left, and I think I have to put it down for the night. But I know what I'm doing ASAP tomorrow morning.

I don't think I've read a novel this compelling in a long, long time. I'm not sure "reads it nearly cover to cover in one sitting compulsively" is the utmost criteria for a science fiction novel. But it's not nothing.

Good idea putting it down for the night. You probably will have enjoyed the extended denouement more over breakfast coffee than you would have last night.

Any idea what caused the issues with their writing collabs? I read mote as a kid, and even in that it was obvious they had weird conflicts with each other's... OCs, I guess we'd call it now.

Honestly, in my opinion their collaborations were purely win-win. If you look at the novels Pournelle wrote on his own, they were relatively dry and often a little hard to maintain interest in. If you look at the novels Niven wrote on his own, they were relatively fantastical and (except for the fantasies, where you know what you're getting into) sometimes a little hard to take seriously. Their collaborations don't all thread the needle between those SFF extremes perfectly, but they do better than either alone. There was definitely always conflict between their characters, or between their characters and the worlds/universes they built, but that's a good thing. "Inferno" in particular worked well for me solely because (spoiler alert, albeit such an extremely vague spoiler it's probably fine) they took a clash between one of Niven's major styles vs one of Pournelle's influences and really leaned into it and wrapped the whole book around it.

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