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MarvinAndroid said on November 30th, 2011 at 10:32 am

So, “Ready Player One” is basically XKCD: The Book, then?

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While I still enjoyed it, I felt like Vimes (and some of the other characters) voice was off throughout Snuff. Maybe it was just that the book was more directly focused on him directly than any of the other watch books (except maybe Night Watch), but he just seemed too talkative to me. Same with Drumknott.

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@Entertained Organizer

Or it could be because Pratchett is now dictating his works to somebody who writes them up, thus adding a mild filter.

I liked Snuff well enough, though I thought it suffered because Vimes never really feels that in danger. He is so hyper-competent, has so many resources to draw on, that the only time it’s really in question whether he will conquer his obstacles is during a certain boatride, and even then Vimes tackles the problem with such efficiency that you never really question that he’s going to win.

Still, I’s a solid book. Sometimes I find Discworld books to be a bit uneven, but Snuff maintains a consistent narrative flow that works well. I’d give it a slightly lower grade than MGK, maybe just B or even a B-. It’s not the best of the Watch books, but it’s also definitely not the worst.

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I happened to have read both of these and think these reviews are exactly right.

Snuff was good, but it violated the rule of “show don’t tell” in a lot of ways. It cohesive pacing, and maybe it’s me but the superhumanly good aspects of copper Vimes (and also Willikins) seem a little thin. Overall it was a good and uplifting read.

Ready Player One… yeah, cripes. I’m its target demographic in spades, I guess, and even I was embarrassed at the fictional cult of the 80s it portrayed, with everyone diving into minutiae of the time in hopes of finding the big cash hiddren treasure. Throw in a bit of Marty Stu and its awful. There’s a big fight w/ lots of big fictional characters at the end that comes a bit closer to redeeming the work via its sheer fun value, otherwise give it a miss.

MarvinAndroid, as much fun as it is to piss on XKCD and the way it targets and coddles and sometimes highfives its geek audience with fun shibboleths, it really feels NOTHING like this book, and your comment is heavily laden with ignorance.

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You might be on to something, Brendan. The dialogue in Snuff really grated on me – unusual for a Pratchett yarn – and I can see it being as a result of that layer of removal getting in the way of tightening it up as thoroughly as in the earlier books. Was he dictating for Unseen Academicals?

Ready Player One was recommended to me by my Boing Boing – loving girlfriend and just didn’t live up to the hype. Some of the puzzle-solving was engaging but for the most part it was a pile of warm fluff.

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highlyverbal said on November 30th, 2011 at 4:45 pm

“It’s a book that decides that the future will entirely be about looking backwards from where we are right now, and isn’t that kind of sad?”

“Decides”? Perhaps we could have a discussion about how prevalent nostalgia and recycled fashion are right now, out in the real world. Then we could discuss if this is trending up or down. I think you are blaming Cline for too much.

(FFS, you personally write a regular column about the gems among television reruns. Why isn’t that sad?!)

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Voodoo Ben said on November 30th, 2011 at 4:56 pm

Oh man. I picked up READY PLAYER ONE based on positive buzz, and couldn’t make it through the first chapter. The nerd pandering was just INSUFFERABLE. And I’d say I’m right in the crosshairs of the target market as well.

I’d also agree that SNUFF was uneven, but still solid overall.

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Any chance I could get you to read my novella? It’s nerd-friendly, but not really pandering. . .
Though, there is one reference to Zombies Ate My Neighbors.

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I wish that Cline had focused more on the real world instead of the virtual world. Also the main character is freaking DENSE. Case in point evil corporation kills someone Marty Stu gets told and must have the person’s murder explained to him almost five times. He pretty much hear the words killed in real life before it sinks in. That could be commentary on how people are becoming more disconnected from each other.

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I think Ready Player One is more palatable if you think of it as a young adult book. It’s a 21st century equivalent of something like Heinlein’s “Farmer in the Sky”–a boy develops the skills he needs to cope as a man. It’s a very different set of skills (cooperating with others, getting out of the house vs. rugged frontier independence), but it’s still a pretty straight forward plot that exists to prop up that basic message.

The obvious problem with writing in this rhetorical style, though, is the book’s content–it’s written for a coming-of-age audience, but its subject matter revolves around pop culture that happened before they were born. And as MGK mentioned, it’s also hard to sell the “growing up” message when you’ve got the undertone of saying that the 80s is the best time ever, and man does today suck.
To sum up, for me, the problem with the book is that its subject matter conflicts with its metanarrative.

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These days, thanks to Movember, only good people twirl moustaches. It’s very confusing.

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I really appreciate your Pratchett reviews, because you’re one of the few people not turning it into some kind of deathwatch. Too many people are letting their knowledge of his health color their reception of his recent work, like they’ve got a big clock and they move the hands a little closer to midnight with each book that doesn’t live up to their memory of every previous one.

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highlyverbal said on December 1st, 2011 at 5:26 am

@ PersonofCon “To sum up, for me, the problem with the book is that its subject matter conflicts with its metanarrative.”

That is a pretty good objection.

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Nickshogun said on December 1st, 2011 at 6:30 am

I thought it was interesting that you mentioned Cory Doctorow in your post, because as soon as you started describing Ready One I started thinking about For The Win. It also made me think about his earlier work, Little Brother. I’d really love to hear your thoughts on that novel, if you’ve read it.

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I had never heard of Ready Player One until I read this post. That sounds like the most singularly self-centered book, ever.

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“It’s a book that decides that the future will entirely be about looking backwards from where we are right now, and isn’t that kind of sad?”

This is unfortunately a lot of geek culture right now – we don’t want new things, we want updates of old things we know we liked. The problem is that a lot of these things weren’t actually very good, but were just new (to the audience, at least) and benefited from the perception of originality.

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@Brendan I really hope that’s not the case because I do agree with Chris Lowrance that I don’t like to think of everything off in his newer works as being a result of his illness.

I’m hopeful in the same way he kind of retired Rincewind because he didn’t have much more to do with him that it may just be time to retire (though not literally because he will never retire) Vimes. I’ve enjoyed both of the Moist books and maybe that’s the fresh take he needs to further his goals with city.

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dangermouse said on December 1st, 2011 at 4:18 pm

Snuff was really just not good. The underrated (highly rated, but still underrated) wit and charm of his dialogue and characterization (one of Pratchetts strenghts has always been the way the characterization naturally flows through the dialogue) is replaced with massive same-voice wordpiles laying every plot point out with all the subtlety of a Tom Clancy novel. In fact there’s a lot of Clancy (or whichever other trashfic writer you’d care to name) all over this story – supposed threats and conflicts are introduced in a way that might lead you to believe there’s some plan to actually do something with them, only to be swept away in the wake of yet another pile of words and the protagonists’ utter invincibility. And the goblin plot could have been interesting if it weren’t in so many ways a retread of the Orc plot from Unseen.

I’ve actually enjoyed Unseen, Thud and some of the other more recent Pratchett stories but yeah I’m calling this my jumpoff point. This isn’t really a good novel, which is fine (you will never convince me that Maskerade was worth any number of fucks) but more than that, its just not a Terry Pratchett novel in any of the ways which gave those three words so much of their meaning.

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dangermouse said on December 1st, 2011 at 4:23 pm

And per the comments above I too really hate making it about his illness so I’m not going to get into that. I think this was a book that wasn’t good, unlike previous discworld books which were totally hecka good, no real purpose dwelling on why or why not this might be the case.

I’ll just pick up Small Gods and reread it for the thirty or fortieth time, its not a thing.

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I wanna say thanks for not liking RP One. I like Cline, I like the idea, but it’s just not a book. It’s a bunch of vignettes and “spot the Eighties references.”

FYI, Ernie has been writing the script for Warner Bros who plan a major summer blockbuster for 2013. Seriously. And yet we can’t get a mainstream Pratchett film?

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Culture stopping dead is something that happens too much in SF. Like the various Star Trek series where nobody seems to have a hobby that isn’t based later than the early 20th century (Paris’s movie serials, Picard’s detective novels and Shakespeare, Riker’s thirties jazz, Bashir playing Bond, etc.). Or Ghost Rider 2099, where the AIs he deals with take the form of 20th century TV characters (which makes as much sense as a modern AI whose personas are all roles in Dickens).
I’m also reminded of Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad. I really liked the book, but it felt very strange to have a couple of 20something guys whose nostalgia interests are the same as mine, more or less (I’m in my 50s)

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MarvinAndroid said on December 1st, 2011 at 11:08 pm

Just to clarify, I wasn’t “pissing on XKCD” just for being pandering. It is also pretty bad.

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MarvinAndroid– you know what else is bad? Justin Bieber, amirite? And about as relevant to the topic at hand.

I find xkcd to be more hit than miss, but whatever.

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MarvinAndroid said on December 3rd, 2011 at 3:54 pm

Actually I think it’s quite relevant, in that it’s one of the most popular representatives of the “let’s reference a thing in place of good writing” sort of pandering that Ready Player One is a part of. So I think the comparison is apt.

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No.

No, it really isn’t.

Even ignoring all questions of quality for XKCD, the whole review is about literary sins that XKCD is incapable of by its basic format.

It’s like saying, after every negative board game review “So, it’s the Mind of Mencia of board games?”

It makes you look like an idiot, distracts from the actual conversation, and starts stupid, petty fights.

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Count me in among the people who liked Snuff. I thought it was solid enough.

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I liked Ready Player One because I thought the whole thing was ironic. Nobody actually *liked* the 80s while they were actually going on, so the whole premise is obviously a put on. Right?

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