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PaperclipPerfector
10mo ago
(text post)
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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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I've been reading a lot lately. Largely because I'm taking two weeks off from work, and I don't just want to be reading on my phone all the time in front of my daughter. Yay paper books.
Read the first of Blaine Lee Pardoe's Land&Sea series. I think it's specifically typeset as Land&Sea and not Land & Sea or Land and Sea. Go figure. I thought I'd give it a try after Catalyst Game Labs did him dirty, and he was one of the last active Battletech authors I still enjoyed. Victor Milan having died, and Michael Stackpole, Robert Thurston and William H Keith having moved on, rarely to return.
It's OK. His schtick worked better in a more alien setting of Battletech. In a near future Earth, his characters just don't act like people I'd expect on this Earth to act. It's also front loaded with like 8 character introductions, with about 10 pages each, back to back to back (to back to back to back to back to back). With little in the way of overall plot happening, and none of the characters nor the world being interesting enough to carry it. That said, by the time I finished it, I immediately ordered the sequel. So I suppose it redeemed itself by the end.
Then I read Vermis II. I didn't enjoy it as much as Vermis, which was almost entirely world building in the format of a Nintendo Power style game guide for an CRPG that never actually existed. The sequel actually has a main character of sorts, which made it a far more ordinary, if still unorthodox in it's presentation, graphic novel of sorts. More akin to a hint guide, like for Pool of Radiance, that is written in character as a PC's journal. Still, it lacked many of the made up random encounter tables, primitive maps, or character stats that the original had, and fired my imagination far less.
Having finished that, and not wanting to read Berserk in front of my child, nor the last volume of The Cimmerian, I plucked Manifold: Space off my bookshelf. It had been sitting there since probably 2007 unread. There is actually a funny story about this one. In the 90's I read this magazine called Science Fiction Age, and several of the stories it published were quite memorable to me. Among them was this "Saddlepoint" series. I forgot all the details over the years, and at one point began executing some google-fu as best I was able to piece the fragments I did remember into something actionable. Anyways, I eventually found out the author of those stories was Stephen Baxter and ordered three of his books. Manifold: Time, Manifold: Origin and Manifold: Space. I read Space last, and as it turns out, it's actually the novelization of those short stories I remember.
It's fucking wild, and takes place from the "future" of 2020, written in 2000, and extends until about 8000 AD I think? It gets fuzzy towards the end. I actually had no idea it would cover that much ground. It starts with Humanity discovering alien activity in the asteroid belt, and going out to meet them. I expected that meeting to be the climax of the story, 2001: A Space Odyssey style. Instead it's about the first 50 pages, and after that it's off to the races. Very high concept, and frankly rather depressing seeing humanity's imagined ups and downs over about 6000 years. The narrative pops in every few hundred years. Sometimes the things that happened during the last narrative chunk mattered. Sometimes the implacable march of time and entropy wiped them away. I have about 40 pages left and I highly recommend it. I miss when speculative fiction was this straight forward, instead of shoving current year nonsense into very nook and cranny.
I was going to claim that nobody would read something written like that, but evidently you are haha.
God knows I would love to dump my undirected worldbuilding, but I had to take pains to gussy it up as a novel. I suppose if you're famous-lite with an existing audience, you can get away with it.
I have no idea who the artist for Vermis is. A buddy of mine turned me onto the first one, and it hit all the right notes for me. Dark, retro, a unique horror-Nintendo-vaporwave art style. I have no idea how he found out about it, but he floats though all sorts of TTRPG communities I only hear about when they fuck up.
Summoning up the faux anger...
Why didn't you post about Vermis when my wife was pestering me for Christmas present ideas?!?
Bookmarked for when Hollow Press gets back to the office.
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Ah.. It's got pretty pictures in it. That's pretty much a pre-requisite for general worldbuilding/lore dumps to be taken seriously, at least in /r/Worldbuilding.
Well, I sprinkle plenty of AI generated illustrations into mine, though that's more because I think the very idea that I can afford to do so on a budget of $0 is cool enough as is, not to mention the tech.
Where do you do free ai image gen nowadays?
Bing/Copilot image generation does it, with weekly limits. You can get around it by asking the Copilot chat to make them for you, just tell it to make an image according to your prompt. No limits on that, yet!
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